heel of the Sun and their reputation for life-giving and
destruction were adopted from the Great Mother. These well-established
facts should prepare us to recognize that the admission of the truth of
Houssay's suggestion would not necessarily invalidate the more widely
accepted solar significance of the swastika.

Tuempel called attention to the fact that, when they set about
conventionalizing the octopus, the Mycenaean artists often resorted to
the practice of representing pairs of "arms" as units and so making
four-limbed and three-limbed forms (Fig. 23), which Houssay regards as
the prototypes of the swastika and the triskele respectively. That such
a process may have played a part in the development of the symbol is
further suggested by the form of a Transcaucasian swastika found by
Roessler,[319] who assigns it to the Late Bronze or Early Iron Age. Each
of the four limbs is bifurcated at its extremity. Moreover they exhibit
the series of spots, so often found upon or alongside the limbs of the
symbol, which suggest the conventional way of representing the suckers
of the octopus in the Mycenaean designs (Fig. 23).

Another remarkable picture of a swastika-like emblem has been found in
America.[320] The elephant-headed god sits in the centre and four pairs
of arms radiate from him, each of them equipped with definite suckers.

Another possible way in which the design of a four-limbed swastika may
have been derived from an octopus is suggested by the gypsum weight
found in 1901 by Sir Arthur Evans[321] in the West Magazine of the
palace at Knossos (_circa_ 1500 B.C.). Upon the surface of this weight
the form of an octopus has been depicted, four of the arms of which
stand out in much stronger relief than the others.

The number four has a peculiar mystical significance (_vide infra_, p.
206) and is especially associated with the Sun-god Horus. This fact may
have played some part in the process of reduction of the number of limbs
of the octopus to four; or alternatively it may have helped to emphasize
the solar associations of the symbol, which other considerations were
responsible for suggesting. The designs upon the pots from Hissarlik
show that at a relatively early epoch the swastika was confused with the
sun's disc represented as a wheel with four spokes.[322] But the solar
attributes of the swastika are secondary to those of life-giving and
luck-bringing, with which it was originally endowed as a form of the
G