In 1889, Wiligut joined the Schlaraffia, a quasi-masonic lodge. When he left the lodge in 1909, he held the rank of knight and the office of chancellor. His first book,
Seyfrieds Runen, was a collection of poems about the Rabenstein at
Znaim on the Austrian-
Moravian border; it was published in 1903 under his full real, name and an added moniker, "Lobesam." His next book,
Neun Gebote Gots, followed in 1908, in which Wiligut first claimed to be the heir to the ancient tradition of
Irminism. Both List and Wiligut were influenced by
Friedrich Fischbach's 1900
Die Buchstaben Gutenbergs. From 1908, Wiligut was in contact with the occult group
Ordo Novi Templi in Vienna. Wiligut claimed to be in the tradition of a long line of Germanic mystic teachers, reaching back into prehistoric times. He also claimed to have spiritual powers that allowed him direct access to genetic memories of his ancestors thousands of years in the past. Wiligut was influenced by the
"Aryo-Christian" ideas of
Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, which proclaimed a European origin of Christianity. Wiligut claimed that the
Bible had originally been written in a Germanic language, and testified to an "Irminic" religion –
Irminenreligion or
Irminism – that contrasted with
Guido von List's
Wotanism. Wiligut identified Irminism as the true German ancestral religion, claiming that List's Wotanism and
Armanen runes was a schismatic false religion. He claimed to worship a Germanic god "Krist", whom Christianity was supposed later to have appropriated as their own savior
Christ. According to Wiligut, Germanic culture and history reached back to 228,000 BC. He proposed that at this time, there were three suns, and Earth was inhabited by giants, dwarfs and other mythical creatures. Wiligut claimed that his ancestors, the Adler-Wiligoten, ended a long period of war. By 12,500 BC, the Irminic religion of Krist was revealed and from that time became the religion of all Germanic peoples, until the schismatic adherents of
Wotanism gained the upper hand. In 1200 BC, the Wotanists succeeded in destroying the Irminic religious center at
Goslar, following which the Irminists erected a new temple at the
Externsteine, which was in turn appropriated by the Wotanists in AD 460. Wiligut's own ancestors were supposedly protagonists in this setting: the Wiligotis were
Ueiskunings ("Ice kings") descending from a union of
Aesir and
Vanir. They founded the city of
Vilna as the center of their Germanic empire and always remained true to their Irminic faith. Wiligut's convictions assumed a paranoid trait in the 1920s as he became convinced that his family was the victim of a continuing persecution of Irminists, at present conducted by the Roman Catholic Church, the Jews, and the
Freemasons, on which groups he also blamed the defeat of
World War I and the downfall of the
Habsburg Empire. During the 1920s, Wiligut wrote down 38 verses (out of a number purportedly exceeding 1,000), the so-called
Halgarita Sprüche, that he claimed to have memorized as a child, taught by his father. Wiligut had designed his own "
runic alphabet" for this purpose.
Werner von Bülow and Emil Rüdiger of the
Edda-Gesellschaft (Edda Society) translated and annotated these verses. They claimed that numbers 27 and 1818 are connected with the
Black Sun. Verse number 27 according to Willigut is a 20,000-year-old "solar blessing": :
Sunur saga santur toe Syntir peri fuir sprueh Wilugoti haga tharn Halga fuir santur toe Werner von Bülow translates this as follows: Legend tells, that two Suns, two wholesome in change-rule UR and SUN, alike to the hourglass which turned upside down ever gives one of these the victory / The meaning of the divine errant wandering way / dross star in fire's sphere became in fire-tongue revealed to the Earth-I-course of the race of Paradise / godwilling leaders lead to the weal through their care in universal course, what is visible and soon hidden, whence they led the imagination of mankind / polar in change-play, from UR to SUN in sacrificial service of waxing and waning, in holy fire Santur is ambiguously spent in sparks, but turns victorious to blessing.
Santur is interpreted as a burnt-out sun that was still visible at the time of
Homer. Rüdiger speculates that this was the center of the
Solar System hundreds of millennia ago, and he imagines a fight between the new and the old Suns that was decided 330,000 years ago.
Santur is seen as the source of power of the
Hyperboreans. In esoteric currents of
Neo-Nazism,
Neofolk,
National Socialist black metal and
Neopaganism, Wiligut's writings enjoyed renewed interest in the 1990s. ==Runes==