, published in 1917 Guido von List elaborated a racial religion premised on the concept of renouncing the imposed
Semitic creed of
Christianity and returning to the
native religions of the
ancient Indo-Europeans (List preferred the equivalent term
Ario-Germanen, or 'Aryo-Germanics'). He recognised the theoretical distinction between the
Proto-Indo-European language and its daughter
Proto-Germanic language, but frequently obscured it by his tendency to treat them as a single long-lived entity (although this framing is also used in linguistics as the
Germanic parent language). In this, he became strongly influenced by the Theosophical thought of
Helena Blavatsky, which he blended with his own highly original beliefs, founded upon Germanic paganism. Before he turned to occultism, Guido List had written articles for German Nationalist newspapers in Austria, as well as four historical novels and three plays, some of which were "set in tribal Germany" before the advent of Christianity. He also had written an anti-semitic essay in 1895. List adopted the aristocratic
von between 1903 and 1907. List called his doctrine
Armanism after the
Armanen, supposedly a body of priest-kings in the ancient Aryo-Germanic nation. He claimed that this German name had been Latinized into the tribal name
Herminones mentioned in
Tacitus, and that it actually meant the heirs of the sun-king: an estate of intellectuals who were organised into a priesthood called the
Armanenschaft. His conception of the original religion of the
Germanic tribes was a form of
sun worship, with its priest-kings (similar to the Icelandic
goði) as legendary rulers of
ancient Germany, who were immortalized as the gods of the various Aryan faiths. Religious instruction was imparted on two levels. The esoteric doctrine (Armanism) was concerned with the secret mysteries of the
gnosis, reserved for the initiated elite, while the exoteric doctrine (
Wotanism) took the form of popular myths intended for the lower social classes. List believed that the transition from Wotanism to Christianity had proceeded smoothly under the direction of the
skald poets, so that native customs, festivals and names were preserved under a Christian veneer and only needed to be "decoded" back into their heathen forms. This peaceful merging of the two religions had been disrupted by the forcible conversions under "bloody
Charlemagne – the Slaughterer of the
Saxons". 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 Germanic peoples and
Celts. He also believed in the magical powers of the old
runes. From 1891 onwards he claimed that
heraldry was based on a system of encoded runes, so that heraldic devices conveyed a secret heritage in cryptic form. In April 1903, he submitted 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, which became the cornerstone of his ideology. Although the article was rejected by the academy, it would later be expanded by List, and grew into his
final masterpiece, a comprehensive treatment of his linguistic and historical theories, published in 1914 as
Die Ursprache der Ario-Germanen und ihre Mysteriensprache (
The Proto-Language of the Aryo-Germanics and their Mystery Language). List's doctrine has been described as
gnostic,
pantheist, and
deist. At its core is the mystical union of God, man, and nature. Wotanism teaches that God dwells within the individual human spirit as an inner source of magical power, but is also
immanent within nature through the primal laws that govern the cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. List explicitly rejects a
Mind-body dualism of spirit versus matter, or of God over or against nature. Humanity is therefore one with the universe, which entails an obligation to live in accordance with nature. But the individual human ego does not seek to merge with the cosmos. "Man is a separate agent, necessary to the completion or perfection of ‘God's work’". Being immortal, the ego passes through successive
reincarnations until it overcomes all obstacles to its purpose. List foresaw the eventual consequences of this in a future
utopia on Earth, which he identified with the promised
Valhalla, a world of victorious heroes: List was familiar with the cyclical notion of time, which he encountered in
Norse mythology and in the theosophical adaptation of the
Hindu time cycles. He had already made use of cosmic rhythms in his early journalism on natural landscapes. In his later works, List combined the cyclical concept of time with the "dualistic and linear time scheme" of western
apocalypticism, which counterposes a pessimism about the present world with an ultimate optimism regarding the future one. In
Das Geheimnis der Runen, List addresses the seeming contradiction by explaining the final redemption of the linear time frame as an exoteric parable that stands for the esoteric truth of renewal in many future cycles and incarnations. This is counter to the original Norse myths and
Hinduism, where the cycle of destruction and creation is repeated indefinitely, thus offering no possibility of ultimate salvation.
Guido von List Society and High Armanen Order Already in 1893 Guido List together with Fanny Wschiansky, had founded the
Literarische Donaugesellschaft, a
literary society. In 1908 the
Guido von List Society (
Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft) was founded primarily by the Wannieck family (
Friedrich Wannieck and his son
Friedrich Oskar Wannieck being prominent and enthusiastic Armanists) as an
occult völkisch organisation, with the purpose of financing and publishing List's research. The List Society was supported by many leading figures in Austrian and German politics, publishing, and occultism. Although one might suspect a
völkisch organisation to be antisemitic, the society included at least two Jews among its members: Moritz Altschüler, a rabbinical scholar, and
Ernst Wachler. The List Society published List's works under the series
Guido-List-Bücherei (
GLB). List had established exoteric and esoteric circles in his organisation. The High Armanen Order (
Hoher Armanen Orden) was the inner circle of the Guido von List Society. Founded in midsummer 1911, it was set up as a magical order or lodge to support List's deeper and more practical work. The HAO conducted pilgrimages to what its members considered "holy Armanic sites",
Stephansdom in
Vienna,
Carnuntum etc. They also had occasional meetings between 1911 and 1918, but the exact nature of these remains unknown. In his introduction to List's
The Secret of the Runes,
Stephen E. Flowers notes: "The HAO never really crystallized in List's lifetime – although it seems possible that he developed a theoretical body of unpublished documents and rituals relevant to the HAO that have only been put into full practice in more recent years".
Listians under the Third Reich List died on 17 May 1919, a few months before
Adolf Hitler joined a minor Bavarian political party and formed it into the
NSDAP. After the Nazis had come to power, several advocates of Armanism fell victim to the suppression of
esotericism in Nazi Germany. The main reason for the persecution of occultists was the Nazi policy of systematically closing down esoteric organisations (although Germanic paganism was still practised by some Nazis on an individual basis), but the instigator in certain cases was Himmler's personal occultist, Karl Maria Wiligut. Wiligut identified the monotheistic religion of Irminism as the true ancestral belief, claiming that Guido von List's Wotanism and runic row constituted a schismatic false religion. Among the Listians – Kummer and Marby are not mentioned by Goodrick-Clarke among the signatories who endorsed the List Society around 1905 but both men were indebted to "Listian" ideas – who were subjected to censure were the rune occultists
Friedrich Bernhard Marby and Siegfried Adolf Kummer, both of whom were denounced by Wiligut in 1934 in a letter to Himmler. Flowers writes: "The establishment of [an] 'official NS
runology' under Himmler, Wiligut, and others led directly to the need to suppress the rune-magical 'free agents' such as Marby". Despite having openly supported the Nazis, Marby was arrested by the Gestapo in 1936 as an anti-Nazi occultist and was interned in
Welzheim,
Flossenbürg and
Dachau concentration camps. Kummer disappears from History after Wiligut's denunciation in 1934, and his fate is unknown. He may have died in a concentration camp. According to Rudgley, "[u]nsubstantiated rumours" have him fleeing Nazi Germany in exile to South America, but "it is more likely that he perished in one of the camps that Marby was to survive or died during the Allied bombing of
Dresden." Günter Kirchhoff, a List Society member whom Wiligut had recommended to Himmler on the strength of his researches into prehistory, is reported to have written that Wiligut by intrigue had ensured that Ernst Lauterer (a.k.a. "Tarnhari") – another List Society member, who claimed a secret clan tradition that rivalled Wiligut's own – was committed to a concentration camp as an "English agent". Flowers and Moynihan reproduce Kirchhoff's testimony as reported by both Adolf Schleipfer and researcher Manfred Lenz (but doubted by Wiligut's former secretary Gabriele Dechend). ==Theozoology==