Guido von List
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Guido Karl Anton List, better known as Guido von List (October 5, 1848 - May 17, 1919), author of the famous "Secret of the Runes", was an occult and völkisch author who is seen as one of the most important figures in Germanic mysticism and runic revivalism in the late 19th, early 20th Century. He was the foremost revivalist of his time in the mystic/occultic wisdom and its arts within the Germanic tradition and also wrote about the Aryan race
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Biography
He was born in Vienna in the Austrian Empire to Karl Anton List, a prosperous middle class leather goods dealer, and Maria List. He grew up in the Leopoldstadt bezirke of Vienna. Like the majority of his fellow Austrians at that time, his family was Roman Catholic, and he was christened as an infant in St Peter's Church in Vienna.
In 1862 a visit to the catacombs beneath the Cathedral of Saint Stephan made a deep impression, and List regarded the catacombs as a pagan shrine. As an adult he claimed he had then sworn to build a temple to Wotan when he grew up.
On June 24, 1875 he was camping with four friends near the ruins of Carnuntum. As the 1500th anniversary of the Germanic tribes defeat over this Roman garrison in 375, the evening carried a lot of weight for List. Carnuntum became the title of List's first full-length novel, published in two volumes in 1888. After its success, it was followed by two more books set in tribal Germany; Jung Diether's Heimkehr (Young Diether's Homecoming, 1894) and Pipara (1895). These books led to List being celebrated by the pan-German movement. Around the turn of the century, he continued with several plays.
Between 1903 and 1907 he began using the noble title von on occasion, before finally settling on it permanently in 1907. As this was only permitted for members of the aristocracy, he was put before an official enquiry. Here he produced spurious evidence supporting his tenuous claim, which was accepted by the officials heading the inquiry. However, there is no extant evidence demonstrating independently verifiable proof of direct lineal descent from a noble family for the Lists.
During the final stages of World War I the naval blockade of the Central Powers created food shortages in Vienna. This caused poor health in the now seventy year old von List. In the spring of 1919 he set off to recuperate in Brandenburg, Germany, but his health deteriorated quickly, and he died of pneumonia in Berlin on May 17th. He was cremated in Leipzig and his urn then buried in Vienna Central Cemetery, Zentralfriedhof, on the 8th of October 1919 in the gravesite KNLH 413 - Vienna's largest and most famous cemetery (including the graves of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Strauss.) in Vienna's 11th district of Simmering. Philipp Stauff wrote an obituary which appeared in the Münchener Beobachter.
Ideology
He claimed that the Hermionen mentioned in Tacitus was a Latinized version of the German Armanen, and named his religion the Armanenschaft, which he claimed to be the original religion of the Germanic tribes. His conception of that religion was a form of sun worship, with its priest kings as legendary rulers of ancient Germany. List claimed that the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Austria-Hungary constituted a continuing occupation of the Germanic tribes by the Roman empire, albeit now in a religious form, and a continuing persecution of the ancient religion of the Ario-Germans.
This conception bears strong resemblance to many other 19th-century romanticised ideas of ancient polytheistic religions in Europe; a comparatively similar text in the thematic elements and overall textual bias is the famous Oera Linda forgery from the Lowlands region of western Europe.
He also believed in magical powers of the old runes. In 1891 he claimed that heraldry was based on the magic of the runes. In April 1903, he had sent an article concerning the alleged Aryan proto-language to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Its highlight was a mystical and occult interpretation of the Runic alphabet. Although the article was rejected by the academy, the article would later be expanded by List and become the basis for his entire ideology. At that point, it is known from secondary source material than List turned to non-academically based sources of inspiration, which allegedly involved mind-altering substances.
All this was most popular in Western Europe during the 19th century. List's contemporaries included Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Among his ideological followers was Lanz von Liebenfels.
Runic revivalism
The row of 18 so-called "Armanen Runes", also known as the "Armanen Futharkh" came to List while in an 11 month state of temporary blindness after a cataract operation on both eyes in 1902. This vision in 1902 allegedly opened what List referred to as his "inner eye", via which he claimed the "Secret of the Runes" was revealed to him. List stated that his Armanen Futharkh were encrypted in the Hávamál Poetic Edda, specifically in stanzas 138 to 165, with stanzas 146 through 164 reported as being the 'song' of the 18 runes. This claim has no historical basis, however.
Influence
A look at the signatories of the first announcement concerning support for a Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft (Guido von List Society), circa 1905, reveals that List had a following of some very prestigious people and shows that the man, his ideology and his influence had widespread and significant support, including public figures in Austria and Germany. Among some 50 signatories which endorsed the foundation of the List Society were the industrialist Friedrich Wanniek (president of the "Verein Deutsches Haus at Brno and chairman of the "Prague Iron Company" and the "First Brno Engineering Company" - major producers of capital goods in the Habsburg empire) and his son Friedrich Oskar Wanniek, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Karl Lueger (mayor of Vienna), Ludwig von Bernuth (health organisation chairman), Ferdinand Khull (Committee member of the German Language Club), Adolf Harpf (editor of Marburger Zeitung), Hermann Pfister-Schwaighusen (lecturer in linguistics at Darmstadt University), Baron Wilhelm von Pickl-Scharfenstein, Amand Freiherr von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld (editor of the popular magazine "Stein der Weisen" and a distinguished army officer), Aurelius Polzer (newspaper editor at Horn and Graz), Ernst Wachler (author and founder of an open-air Germanic theatre in the Harz Mountains), Wilhelm Rohmeder (educator at Munich), Arthur Schulz (editor of a Berlin periodical for educational reform), Friedrich Wiegerhaus (chairman of the Elberfeld branch of the powerful "Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband" DVH (German Nationalist Commercial Employee's Association) and Franz Winterstein (committee member of the "German Social Party" DSP at Kassel). Among these men included occultists such as Hugo Goring (editor of theosophical literature at Weimar), Harald Arjuna Gravell van Jostenoode (theosophical author at Heidelberg), Max Seling (esoteric pamphleteer and popular philosopher in Munich), and Paul Zillmann (editor of the Metaphysische Rundschau and master of an occult lodge in Berlin.)
List's influence continued to grow after the official founding of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft on March 2nd, 1908. From 1908 through to 1912, new members included the deputy Beranek (a co-founder of the "Bund der Germanen" in 1894), Rudolf Berger (committee member of the "German Nationalist Workers League" in Vienna), Hermann Brass (chairman of the defence League of Germans in North Moravia [est. 1886]), Dankwart Gerlach (an ardent supporter of nationalist and romantic Youth Movements), Conrad Glasenapp (biographer of Richard Wagner), Colonel Karl Hellwig (volkish organiser in Kassel), Bernard Koerner (the heraldic expert and polulariser of middle-class geneology), Josef Ludwig Reimer (an author in Vienna), Philipp Stauff (a Berlin journalist), Kark Herzog (DHV Manheim branch chairman), Franz Hartmann (a leading German theosophist), Arthur Weber (a theosophical editor), Karl Hilm (occult novelist), General Blasius von Schemua, the collective membership of the "Vienna Theosophical Society" and Karl Heise (a leading figure in the vegetarian and mystical mazdaznan cult of Zürich).
As the list demonstrates, the growth of nationalism within Germany during the late 19th-early 20th century, culminating in the Third Reich of Nazi Germany, provided an ideal audience of people who were already predisposed to accept List's ideas and unidentifiable personal gnosis of the Armanen way.
The register shows that List's ideas were acceptable to many intelligent persons drawn from the upper and middle classes of Austria and Germany. So impressed were they that these men were prepared to contribute ten crowns as an annual society subscription. The main part of the Society's assets derived from the Wannieck family, which put up more than three thousand crowns at the Society's inauguration.
A list of the signatories is printed in GLB (Guido-List-Bücherei) 3 (1908), [p.197f]. GLB is a series of "Ario-Germanic research reports" which were based upon his occult interpretations of ancient national Germanic culture.