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Ariosophy and the Runes





"To me, only that which makes me wise is worth knowing." 

Rudolf John Gorsleben

“Rune-magic is the great knowledge of cosmic energies, the recognition of hidden
energies of nature, of the subtle heavenly, as well as earthly streams, waves,
entities, and powers.
All forms of higher wisdom, all secret knowledge of the
world, are but fragments, and through the course of time have been for the
most part distorted and corrupted; but at one time it had its origin in the
divine, Aryan magic of the Runes.
The Germanic Runic script is the script of all scripts.
Runes are not just letters or verbal symbols,
but primal symbols of a living magical nature which whisper to us.”

-       Siegfried Adolf Kummer


Armanism and Ariosophy are the names of ideological systems of an esoteric nature, pioneered by two völkisch occultists & scholars, Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels respectively, in Austria between 1890 and 1930.
List also used the name Wotanism for his studies and ideology, whereas Lanz also used the names Theozoology and Ario-Christianity.
The two authors inspired numerous others and a variety of organizations in Germany and Austria of that time.
They were part of a general occult revival in Austria and Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, (see Introduction - the Occult), loosely inspired by historical Germanic paganism and traditional concepts of occultism, and related to German romanticism.
The connection of this Germanic mysticism with historical Germanic culture, though tenuous, is evident in the mystics' fascination with runes, in the form of List's Armanen runes and Nordic Mythology.






The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter.
Runes are equivalent to the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, or Hebrew alphabets. But they are much more than an alphabet. “Rune” means “secret”, “mystery”, or “hidden”, and is related to the German raunen, meaning “to whisper”, and the Irish run, meaning “a secret.”

To a certain extent, even the Chinese hieroglyphs resemble the runic variations. The same applies to some characters of Turk written languages which were believed to have developed independently from European languages.
 According to a theory, even the Cyrillic alphabet in its earlier form is a runic system. The art of the runes was in use up till the end of 19th century.
Germany was the first European country that started to restore the knowledge of the runes back in the 19th century. A number of secret societies emerged.
For example, Hitler and Himmler were the members of the Thule Gesellschaft.
The Swastika, a runic symbol of the Sun, became the official emblem of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich.
Up until 1940, every SS commissioned officer was to take a special course in the runic magic. The emblem “SS” is a double rune Sigel which is well known as a victory symbol.
The mystics say that it was the runic magic that paved the way for Nazism.
But all the magi were prevented from practising in 1940, and Hitler was doomed from that time onward.



THE FUTHARK


The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark (or fuþark, derived from their first six letters of the alphabet: F, U, Þ, A, R, and K); the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc (due to sound changes undergone in Old English by the same six letters).
Runology is the study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions, runestones, and their history. Runology forms a specialized branch of Germanic linguistics.
The earliest runic inscriptions date from around AD 150.
The characters were generally replaced by the Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes underwent Christianization by around AD 700 in central Europe and by around AD 1100 in Northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for specialized purposes in Northern Europe.
Until the early 20th century runes were used in rural Sweden for decoration purposes in Dalarna and on Runic calendars.
The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark (around 150 to 800 AD), the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc (400 to 1100 AD), and the Younger Futhark (800–1100).
The Younger Futhark is further divided into the long-branch runes (also called Danish, although they were also used in Norway and Sweden), short-branch or Rök runes (also called Swedish-Norwegian, although they were also used in Denmark), and the stavesyle or Hälsinge runes (staveless runes).
The Younger Futhark developed further into the Marcomannic runes, the Medieval runes (1100 AD to 1500 AD), and the Dalecarlian runes (around 1500 to 1800 AD).
The origins of the runic alphabet are uncertain.
Many characters of the Elder Futhark bear a close resemblance to characters from the Latin alphabet. Other candidates are the 5th to 1st century BC Northern Italic alphabets: Lepontic, Rhaetic and Venetic, all of which are closely related to each other and descend from the Old Italic alphabet.
In Norse mythology, the runic alphabet is attested to a divine origin (Old Norse: reginkunnr). This is attested as early as on the Noleby Runestone from around 600 AD that reads "I prepare the suitable divine rune ..." and in an attestation from the 9th century on the Sparlösa Runestone which reads "And interpret the runes of divine origin".
More notably, in the Poetic Edda poem Hávamál, Stanza 80, the runes are also described as reginkunnr:
'That is now proved,
what you asked of the runes,
of the potent famous ones,
which the great gods made,
and the mighty sage stained,
that it is best for him if he stays silent.'


The poem Hávamál explains that the originator of the runes was the major god Odin. Stanza 138 describes how Odin received the runes through self-sacrifice:


'I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run.'




    
In stanza 139, Odin continues:




'No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes,
screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.'


This passage has been interpreted as a mythical representation of shamanic initial ritual in which the initiate must undergo a physical trial in order to receive mystic widsom.
In the Poetic Edda poem Rígsþula another origin is related of how the runic alphabet became known to man. The poem relates how Ríg, identified as Heimdall in the introduction, sired three sons (Thrall (slave), Churl (freeman) and Jarl (noble)) on human women. These sons became the ancestors of the three classes of men indicated by their names.
When Jarl reached an age when he began to handle weapons and show other signs of nobility, Rig returned and, having claimed him as a son, taught him the runes.
In 1555, the exiled Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus recorded a tradition that a man named Kettil Runske had stolen three rune staffs from Odin and learned the runes and their magic.

The pioneer of the Armanist branch of Ariosophy and one of the more important figures in esotericism in Germany and Austria in the late 19th and early 20th century was the Austrian occultist, mysticist and völkisch author Guido von List.

In 1908, he published in 'Das Geheimnis der Runen' ("The Secret of the Runes") a set of 18 so-called "Armanen runes", based on the Younger Futhark and runes of List's own introduction, which were allegedly revealed to him in a state of temporary blindness after a cataract operation on both eyes in 1902.



In November of 1902, List wrote to his dear friend, the respected industrialist and publisher, Friedrich Wannieck, stating that, due to his operation, it would have been “impossible to begin to work mentally on my intended unravelling of the secret of the runes, but at that time previously unperceived 'Laws of Generation and Evolution'” came to him.
Friedrich Wannieck
And on April 29th 1907 List again wrote to Wannieck, thanking him for his “encouraging interest” saying that he can now give himself “over to research and am able to dedicate myself to these almost unlimited areas of interest.”
List must be accredited as being the pioneer of völkisch runic mysticism and Armanenschaft occultism.
List must also be noted as the very first to have ever linked a runic scriptural series, and actually associating a specific individual rune of his eighteen rune Armanen Futharkh, to each of the eighteen runic stanzas which were revealed to Odin in the ‘Hávamál’ (Words of the High One) in the section known as 'Rúnatáls-tháttr-Odhins' (Odin's Rune Wisdom) of the Edda.
List was indeed a pioneer and a visionary.
The runes are a powerful magickal system and one that should never be abused, especially by those that don’t truly understand what they are getting involved in.
The path of the runes is a spiritual esoteric journey in which the final destination is a gradually elevating, multi-layered, realisation of enlightenment and spiritual consciousness, similar to the 'mystic vision of the universe' referred to by Hitler.
Rudolf John Gorsleben

 'With the introduction of Runic knowledge the generation of our days can achieve the control of secret powers within the life of their soul and reach the Spring-Root, which is the Whole of the Runes, the All-Raune, which opens all spiritual treasures to us.
The Runes have their own lives, they are true magical signs.'
Rudolf John Gorsleben 

Friedrich Wannieck (1838 Brno, Austrian Empire –1919) was a prominent and wealthy Austrian/German industrialist most notable for his successful business ventures, and his enthusiastic support for the völkisch author, pioneer of Germanic mysticism and runic revivalist, Guido von List.
He was an Armanist and supporter of List's Armanen runes system.
He was also an ardent spiritualist and a firm believer in Theosophy.

 He was also president of the organisation and publishing house Verein "Deutsches Haus" ("German House" Association) in Brno.
This was a nationalist association for German inhabitants of the city.
In 1888 the Verein "Deutsches Haus" published an historical work entitled 'Der altdeutsche Volksstamm der Quaden' [The Ancient German Quadi Tribe] by Heinrich Kirchmayr.
Wannieck was impressed by the parallels between List's clairvoyant account of the Quadi and the academic study of Kirchmayr.
Between Wannieck and List there developed a regular correspondence that laid the basis of a lasting friendship. The Verein "Deutsches Haus" later published three of List's works in its own book-series of nationalist studies of history and literature.
Wannieck's munificence eventually led to the foundation of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft (Guido von List Society) twenty years later.

Rudolf John Gorsleben (16 March 1883 – 23 August 1930) was a German Ariosophist, Armanist (practitioner of the Armanen runes), journal editor and playwright.
Gorsleben was born in Metz. During World War I, he fought in a German unit stationed in the Ottoman Empire.
He formed the 'Edda Society' (Edda-Gesellschaft) and wrote the book 'Hoch-Zeit der Menschheit' (The Zenith of Humanity), first published in 1930.
It is known as "The Bible of Armanism" and has been translated into English by Karl Hans Welz.
Gorsleben died in Bad Homburg of a chronic heart complaint.
Gorslebe Quote 

 "The healing power of medical drugs is the Ur-power of their original essence in conjunction with the power of Ur-vibrations of the human-Divine combination that is composed of body, soul and spirit." - 'Hoch-Zeit der Menschheit' (English edition)





It should be observed that the interest towards runeology so characteristic of early 20th century occult circles was introduced by the works of Guido von List (see above), occult runic revivalist.
Von List created his own version of the Futhark known as Armanen runes, allegedly revealed to his “inner eye”.
Later Karl Maria Willigut was responsible for their use during the Third Reich.
Armanen Futhark derives from historic runes but does not belong to the Norse runelore.


THE RUNE SYMBOLS

t Tyr (Tiwaz, Teiwaz) Rune

Týr is the Norse god of war, portrayed as one-handed warrior. Týr’s symbol is sword. Once he played a very important role in the Germanic pantheon. Tuesday is actually Týr’s day (Anglo-Saxons called him Tiw). By the Viking Age Týr was somewhat overshadowed by Thor and Odin. The Icelandic rune poem associates the rune with the god of the same name:
God with one hand
and leavings of the wolf
and prince of temples.
The Anglo-Saxon rune poem explains the meaning of the rune tir using the imagery of a star that had the same name (probably the North Star):
Tiw is a guiding star; well does it keep faith with princes;
it is ever on its course over the mists of night and never fails.

In Nazi Germany the Tyr rune was also known as Kampf-Rune (Battle rune) or Pfeil-Rune (Arrow rune) and was symbolic of leadership in battle. It was widely used by various youth organizations after World War I, and later by Hitlerjugend and SA.
Worn on the upper left arm, it indicated the graduation from the SA-Reichsführerschule.
It was also used as the badge of the SS Recruiting and Training Department, as well as the emblem of the Waffen-SS division “30 Januar”.
The Tyr rune also marked the graves of SS men, thus replacing the Christian cross.

S Sig Rune

Sig is the Armanen name of that rune.
In the ancient Norse and Germanic runelore that rune always designated sun: its Elder Futhark reconstructed name is *sowilo, ’sun’, Younger Futhark name is sól, ’sun’, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc name is sigel, ’sun’.
Guido von List changed the name to mean ‘victory’ (Sieg in German).
The sequence of runes Sig and Tyr in his version of the Futhark together constitute Sigtýr, one of Odin’s names. 
In Nazi Germany Sig or Siegesrune (Rune of victory) was the most recognizable and popular symbol after Hakenkreuz (swastika).
SS-runes insignia with two oblique Sig runes were created in 1933 by graphic designer Walter Heck. 
It is a series of sig runes that make up the circular, swirling symbol of the Schwarze Sonne or Sonnenrad to be found at the Wewelsburg.


Hagall Rune

The star form of this rune is characteristic for the Younger Futhark, whereas its Elder Futhark form looks altogether different. Hagall means ‘hail’. The Icelandic rune poem describes it as follows:
Cold grain
and shower of sleet
and sickness of serpents.

In the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc this sign is called iar with the following explanation:
Iar is a river fish and yet it always feeds on land;
it has a fair abode encompassed by water, where it lives in happiness.
The meaning of the word iar is obscure. It is usually interpreted as ‘eel’ or ‘newt’. Note that the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc also has the rune hægl, ‘hail’ corresponding to the Elder Futhark *hagall and used for the same sound, but unlike the Younger Futhark and Armanen runes it does not have the star form.
The use of the Hagall rune in the design of the SS-Ehrenring (SS honor ring, also called deaths head ring) was explained by Himmler as follows: “The swastika and the Hagall-Rune represent our unshakable faith in the ultimate victory of our philosophy.”
In Nazi Germany it was also used as an element of the SS wedding ceremony. In the Armanen rune row the name of this rune is Hagal.

O Odal Rune

The Elder Futhark reconstructed name for this rune is *oþila, ‘inherited possession’. The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc name is eþel, ‘land, landed property’. It is not present either in the Younger Futhark or the Armanen rune row. The Anglo-Saxon rune poems explains its meaning as follows:
An estate is very dear to every man,
if he can enjoy there in his house
whatever is right and proper in constant prosperity.

In Nazi Germany Odal rune was symbolic of the Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”) ideology, focusing on a concept of ethnicity based on descent and homeland.
It was also the emblem of the Waffen-SS division “Prinz Eugen”, recruited from the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) community in Croatia. It was also used by Reichsbauernschaft and Hitlerjugend.

Z Leben Rune (Life Rune)

The Elder Futhark reconstructed name for this rune is *algiz, ‘protection’.
It denoted the common Germanic sound *z, which corresponds to ON *-R in final position. In the Younger Futhark the same sign designated the sound m and was called maðr, ‘man’:
Delight of man
and augmentation of the earth
and adorner of ships.

In the Armanen rune row it is the 15th rune, which bears the name Man.
This symbol was adopted by the SS Lebensborn Society and Ahnenerbe.
In the SS documents and grave markers it showed the date of birth.



Toten Rune (Death Rune)

In the Younger Futhark this rune had the name ýr, ‘yew’:
Bent bow
and brittle iron
and giant of the arrow.

In the Third Reich it was understood as the turned over Life rune thus designating death.
It showed the date of death in documents and on grave markers.



I Eif Rune (Zeal Rune)

In the Third Reich it represented enthusiasm.
The Eif rune was the early emblem of the SS adjutants assigned personally to Hitler.
Origin unclear. Possibly a variation of the Elder Futhark *eihwaz rune.



 Opfer Rune (Offering Rune)

In the Third Reich it represented self-sacrifice.
Used by Stahlhelm war veterans’ association, as well as a badge commemorating the Nazis who perished during the 1923 Munich Putsch. Origin unclear. Possibly a variation of the Elder Futhark *eihwaz rune.

NGer Rune

In Nazi Germany it was a symbol of communal spirit and a variant sign of the Waffen-SS division “Nordland”. This symbol’s origin and its relation to the Anglo-Saxon ger rune remain unclear to me.




Wolfsangel was a device to trap wolves.
The symbol representing it was believed to have the magical power to ward off werewolves.
The Wolfsangel sign does not belong to any runic tradition.
In the 15th century it was adopted as an emblem of the German peasants’ revolt. Ever since it was regarded as symbolic of liberty and independence.
In Nazi Germany it was an early emblem of NSDAP and later the emblem of the Waffen-SS division “Das Reich”.
A squat version of the Wolfsangel was used as a badge of the Weer Afdeelingen, Dutch equivalent of the German SA.



A R I O S O P H Y


Ideology regarding the Aryan race (in the sense of Indo-Europeans, though with Germanic peoples being viewed as their purest representatives), runic symbols, the swastika, and occultism are important elements in Ariosophy.
From around 1900 onwards, these ariosophic ideas (together with, and influenced by, Theosophy) contributed significantly to an occult counterculture in Germany and Austria.
   




Guido Karl Anton List, better known as Guido von List (October 5, 1848 – May 17, 1919) was an Austrian/German (Viennese) poet, journalist, writer, businessman and dealer of leather goods, mountaineer, hiker, dramatist, playwright, and rower, but was most notable as an occultist and völkisch author who is seen as one of the most important figures in Germanic revivalism, Germanic mysticism, Runic Revivalism and Runosophy in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and continues to be so today.
He is the author of Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes), which is a detailed study of the Armanen Futharkh, his intellectual world-view (as realised in the years between 1902 and 1908), an introduction to the rest of his work and is widely regarded as the pioneering work of Runology in modern occultism.

Guido Karl Anton List was born in Vienna in the Austrian Empire to Karl Anton List, a prosperous middle class leather goods dealer, and Maria List (née Killian).
His father was a prosperous dealer in leather goods.
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 Stephansdom (St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna) 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. This he recounted in volume 2 (page 592-593) of his book Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder:
'
'It was in the year 1862 - I was then in my fourteenth year of life - when I, after much asking, received permission from my father to accompany him and his party who were planning to visit the catacombs [under St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna] which were at that time still in their original condition. We climbed down, and everything I saw and felt excited me with a kind of power that today I am no longer able to experience.
Then we came - it was, if I remember correctly, in the third or fourth level - to a ruined altar.
The guide said that we were now situated beneath the old post office (today the Wohlzeile House No. 8). 
At that point my excitement was raised to fever pitch, and before this altar I proclaimed out loud this ceremonial vow: "Whenever I get big, I will build a Temple to Wotan!" I was, of course, laughed at, as a few members of the party said that a child did not belong in such a place… I knew nothing more about Wuotan than that which I had read about him in Vollmer's Wörterbuch der Mythologie.'


Despite these artistic and mystical leanings, Guido was expected, as the eldest child, to follow in his father's footsteps as a businessman. He appears to have fulfilled his responsibilities in a dutiful manner, but he took any and all opportunities to develop his more intense mystical and naturesque interests.
The trips that List had to make for business purposes gave him the opportunity to indulge his passion for hiking and mountaineering.
This activity seems to have provided a matrix for his early mysticism.

 His father died in 1877 when List was 29 years old.
It appears that neither he nor his mother had his father's keen sense of business, and as economic times became difficult List quit the family business to devote himself full time to his writing, at this time still of a journalistic kind.
During this time List wrote articles for newspapers, such as the 'Neue Welt' (New World), 'Neue deutsche Alpenzeitung (New German Alpine Newspaper), Heimat (Homeland), and the Deutsche Zeitung' (German Newspaper), which dealt with his earlier travels and mystical reflections on the Loci (land spirits).
Many of these written newspaper articles were anthologised in 1891 in his famous 'Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder'.
He also had articles appear in the 'Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung' and on a regular basis in the newspaper 'Ostdeutsche Rundschau' (East German Review), owned by the powerful publicist and parliamentary deputy Karl Heinrich Wolf.
At this time he also came to know well Georg von Schönerer, a leading political figure and Pan-German member of the Imperial Parliament.

In 1871, List's writing talents were given full rein as he became a correspondent of the 'Neue deutsche Alpenzeitung' ("New German Alpine Newspaper"), later called the 'Salonblatt'.
He also began to edit the yearbook of the 'Österreichischer Alpenverein' (Austrian Alpine Association), of which he became secretary in that year.
List was an ardent, enthusiastic mountaineer and hiker.
On one of these adventures List came very close to losing his life.
While climbing a mountain on May 8, 1871 in the Großes Höllental (Larger Valley of Hell) leading up to the Rax mountain in Lower Austria, a mass of ice gave way under his feet and he fell some distance.
He was apparently saved only by the fact that he had landed on a soft surface covered by a recent snowfall.
In memory of his good luck and to help others, at his own expense List had the track equipped with a chain put up and officially opened by him on June 21, 1871.
It was also named after him the "Guido-List-Steig"

On June 24, 1875 he was camping with four friends near the ruins of Carnuntum (see left & right).
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.

 In 1878 List married his first wife, Helene Föster-Peters. However, the marriage was not to last through this difficult period.
Through the years 1877–1887 List was also working on his first book-length (two-volume) effort, Carnuntum, an historical novel based on his vision of the Kulturkampf between the Germanic and Roman worlds centred at Carnuntum around the year 375 CE that was published in 1888 by the Wannieck family's organisation and publishing house Verein "Deutsche Haus" ("German House" Association) in Brno, where List made the acquaintance of the industrialist Friedrich Wannieck. This association was to prove essential to List's future development.
Throughout this period in List's life he devoted himself to writing more neo-romantic prose, such as Jung Diethers Heimkehr ("Young Diether's Homecoming") in 1894 and Pipara in 1895. An anthology of his earlier journalism Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder was published in 1891, and List developed his writing skills in poetic and dramatic genres as well.

In 1892 he delivered a lecture on the ancient Germanic cult of Wotan to the Verein Deutsche Geschichte (German History Association), and it is said that numerous other associations allied with this one proliferated in Austria at this time.
Another group, the Bund der Germanen (Germanic League), sponsored a performance of List's mythological dramatic poem, 'Der Wala Erweckung' ("The Wala's Awakening") in 1894.
In another performance of this drama in 1895, which was attended by over three thousand people, the part of Wala was read by Anna Wittek von Stecky, a young actress who in August 1899 became List's second wife.
During the years 1888–1899 List was involved with two important literary associations.
In May 1891 Iduna, which had the descriptive subtitle of "Free German Society for Literature", was founded by a circle of writers around Fritz Lemmermayer. Lemmermayer acted as a sort of "middle man" between an older generation of authors (which included Fercher von Steinwand, Joseph Tandler, Auguste Hyrtl, Ludwig von Mertens, and Josephone von Knorr) and a group of younger writers and thinkers (which included Rudolf Steiner, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, and Karl Maria Heidt).
The name Iduna was provided by List himself and is that of a North Germanic goddess of eternal youth and renewal.
Richard von Kralik and Joseph Kalasanz Poestion, authors with specifically neo-Germanic leanings, were also involved in the circle.
The other organisation List was involved with was the Literarische Donaugesellschaft (Danubian Literary Society), which was founded by List and Fanny Wschiansky the year the Iduna was dissolved in 1893.
At this time List met Rudolf Steiner and Lanz von Liebenfels but his association with Liebenfels did not develop until Lanz had left the Heiligenkreuz monastery in 1899.

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 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 within a few months after the end of WW1 whilst on a visit to his followers in Berlin.
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.

Guido von List was strongly influenced by the Theosophical thought of Madame Blavatsky, which he blended with his own racial religious beliefs, founded upon Germanic paganism.
List called his doctrine “Armanism” (after the Armanen, supposedly the heirs of the sun-king, a body of priest-kings in the ancient Ario-Germanic nation).
Armanism was concerned with the esoteric doctrines of the gnosis (distinct from the exoteric doctrine intended for the lower social classes, Wotanism).
List claimed that the tribal name Herminones 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 (similar to the Icelandic goði) as legendary rulers of ancient Germany.

GUIDO VON LIST


DAS GEHEIMNIS DER RUNEN - see below for full text



'Das Geheimnis der Runen' was originally first published in 1908 and the Guido von list society was founded chiefly by the Wannieck family.

'The Secret of the Runes' is a unique work which borrowed from the Theosophy of Madame H. P. Blavatsky as well as ancient Aryan (Teutonic and Indian) legend to create a unique system of rune magic.

Taking his inspiration from early Germanic religion (Wotanism, or Wuotanism) including references from Tacitus and the Eddas, neoromanticism, and later incorporating elements from Theosophy, Guido List developed a system of Armanenism which was supposedly the earliest belief system of the Germanic (Aryan) tribes.
In 'Das Geheimnis der Runen' Guido List explains the role of the runes in uncovering early Germanic belief.
An important substructure underlying von List's conceptions is his baptism into Roman Catholicism, which he believes serves as a cover for more ancient pagan beliefs which have been subsumed by Christianity.
List shows the importance of the runes and the unique meaning of each of the runic elements. Subsequently he shows how the runes were incorporated into such systems as heraldry, freemasonry, folk tradition and belief, and even into baked goods and pastries, as well as holidays. List notes that early Germanic (Aryan) society consisted of individuals who served as farmers with three principal classes (castes), that of the peasantry, the military, and the nobility/intellegentsia (Armanen).
List defines an occult doctrine in which he outlines the "biune-bifidic-dyad", the "triune-trifidic-triad", and the "multifidic multiune-multiplicity".
List shows how each of these relates to God and the need for man to conform his will (his ego) to that of God.
List also presents a system of reincarnation in which Aryan individuals fallen in battle are taken up into Walhalla.
In fact, List himself was to write another important novel named 'Carnuntum' dealing with the Germans under the Roman empire as well as encounter an individual named Tarnhari who was a supposed reincarnation of an Aryan chieftain.
List incorporated racial notions of Aryan supremacy into his writings and of course was politically aligned with Pan German nationalists who wanted to see Austria united with the other Germanies. List's ideas were used to found a Masonic society, which later was to embrace National Socialism. Subsequently, many indidividuals associated with National Socialism and the NSDAP were to examine List's ideas and writings and find them interesting in furthering their own political agendas.





ARMANEN RUNES

Guido's Armanen Futharkh

Guido’s self created row of 18 so-called "Armanen Runes" then became what we know today as the "Armanen Futharkh".
His followers claim that a secret vision came to List during an 11 month state of temporary blindness after a cataract operation on both eyes in 1902.
This miraculous 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 claimed that his Armanen Futharkh were encrypted in the Hávamál Poetic Edda, specifically in stanzas 147 through 165 reported as being the 'song' of the 18 runes.

Hexagonal Crystal and the Armanen Runes


List's system was allegedly based on the structure of a Hexagonal Crystal.
You can shine light through a crystal at different angles and project all 18 of the Armanen runes.
List's rune row was rather rigid; while the runes of the past had had sharp angles for easy carving, his were to be carefully and perfectly made so that their shape would be a reflection of the 'frozen light', a pattern that he had found in his runes.
All of his runes could be projected by shining the light through a hexagonal crystal under certain angles.
The Hagal Rune is the 'mother-rune' because its shape represents that hexagonal crystal.
Karl Hans Welz states that the "crystalline structure of quartz is the "hexagonal system" which is also one of the bases of the Runic symbolism (the hexagon with the three inscribed diameters)." and that "The hexagonal cross section of quartz and the fact that all of the 18 Sacred Futhork Runes are derived from the geometry of the hexagon is the basis of an enormous increase in crystal power when it is associated with Rune images."

ARIOSOPHY

As a follow-up to the classic and seminal work 'Das Geheimnis der Runen' Guido von List published: 'Die Religion der Ario-Germenen in ihrer Esoterik und Exoterik', first published in 1910.
This text, next to that of 'The Secret of the Runes' provides an in-depth look at the ideological world of the turn of the century Viennese master.
Perhaps no other text so precisely sums up List’s religious world-view.
In these pages he describes an esoteric, theosophical, cosmology in terms of Germanic mythology and addresses questions of astrology and the purpose and destiny of the human soul.
Guido von List elaborated a racial religion premised on the concept of renouncing the imposed foreign creed of Christianity and returning to the pagan religions of the ancient Indo-Europeans (List preferred the equivalent term Ario-Germanen, or 'Aryo-Germans').
List recognised the theoretical distinction between the Indo-European ('Aryan') protolanguage and the derivative Germanic protolanguage but frequently obscured it by his tendency to treat them as a single long-lived entity.
In this, he became strongly influenced by the Theosophical thought of Madame Blavatsky, which he blended however 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 called his doctrine Armanism after the Armanen, supposedly a body of priest-kings in the ancient Ario-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.
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 skalds, 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-Germans 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 which govern the cycles of growth, decay and renewal.
List explicitly rejects a dualism of spirit versus matter or of God over 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:


'Thus in the course of uncounted generations all men will become Einherjar, and that state — willed and preordained by the godhead — of general liberty, equality, and fraternity will be reached. This is that state which sociologists long for and which socialists want to bring about by false means, for they are not able to comprehend the esoteric concept that lies hidden in the triad: liberty, equality, fraternity, a concept which must first ripen and mature in order that someday it can be picked like a fruit from the World Tree.'


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 apocalyptic 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 which stands for the esoteric truth of renewal in many future cycles and incarnations.

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 (Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 99), and Ernst Wachler.
The List Society published List's works under the series 'Guido-List-Büchere'.
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.


List died on 17 May 1919, a few months before Adolf Hitler joined a minor Bavarian political party - the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (part of the Thule Gesellschaft) - and formed it into the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - NSDAP (see left).
After the Nazis had come to power, several advocates of Armanism fell victim to the suppression of esotericism in Nazi Germany.


The fascination that runes exerted on many members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and the SS can be traced to Guido von List.
His rune row, however, was subsequently rejected by the Nazis in favor of the Wiligut runes created by the official Nazi Runologist Karl Maria Wiligut.




QUOTES BY GUIDO VON LIST

"One must flee those places where life throbs and seek out lonely spots untouched by human hand in order to lift the magic veil of nature" ('Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder', 1st volume, p. 125.)


"Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us." ('Das Geheimnis der Runen')


"A star is extinguished, another will begin to shine - thus it is written in the Book of Nature" ('Der Unbesiegbare')






I R M I N I S M


Irminenschaft (or, Irminism, Irminenreligion) is a current of Ariosophy based on a hypothetical Germanic deity Irmin (a backformation from Irminsul "great pillar" and informed by Tacitus' Hermiones; The Old Saxon adjective irmin "great, strong" may also have been an epithet of Ziu (Týr) or Wodan (Odin)).
Stronger scientific evidence stems from the occurrence of the word "Irmingot", as found in the Old High German "Hildebrandslied".
Notably the Nazi occultist Karl Maria Wiligut claimed a historical Irminism, established in 12,500 BC, later ousted by Wotanism.



Karl Maria Wiligut was baptised as a Roman Catholic in Vienna.
At the age of 14, he joined the Kadettenschule there.
Aged 17, he was conscripted to the k.u.k. infantry regiment of Milan I king of Serbia.
On 17 December 1883 he was appointed as an infantry man, four days later he became a gefreiter.
In 1888, he was promoted to lieutenant.
In 1906 he married Malwine Leuts von Teuringen of Bozen, with whom he had two daughters, Gertrud and Lotte.
A twin brother of one of the girls died as an infant, a devastating tragedy for Wiligut, who was desperate for a male heir to which he could pass on his "secret knowledge", which estranged him from his wife.
In 1889, he joined the quasi-masonic "Schlaraffia-Loge".
He published his first book, 'Seyfrieds Runen', in 1903, under the pseudonym of "Lobesam". 1908 followed the Neun Gebote Gots, where Wiligut first claimed to be heir to an ancient tradition of Irminism. Both List and Wiligut were influenced by Friedrich Fischbach's 1900 Die Buchstaben Gutenbergs.
During World War I, Wiligut served at the southern and eastern fronts. On 1 August 1917, he was promoted to colonel. In May 1918, he was retired from the front and commanded a convalescents' camp near Lviv.
After almost forty years in military service, he retired on 1 January 1919 with an impeccable record, and moved to Morzg near Salzburg and dedicated his time to occult studies.
He renewed his acquaintance with Theodor Czepl of the Ordo Novi Templi, who in winter 1920/21 spent seven weeks in Wiligut's house.
Czepl compiled a report for the archive of the O.N.T., where he describes Wiligut as "a man martial in aspect, who revealed himself as bearer of a secret line of German kingship".
Wiligut founded the postwar newspaper 'Der Eiserne Besen', where he disseminated anti-Judaistic, anti-Masonic and anti-Christian pamphlets, expressing his conviction of a worldwide conspiracy of these "dark forces".

Shortly after being introduced to Reichsführer-SS Himmler in September 1933 at a conference of the Nordische Gesellschaft, Wiligut was inducted into the SS (under the pseudonym "Karl Maria Weisthor") to head a Department for Pre- and Early History which was created for him within the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA).


In April 1934 he was promoted to the rank of Standartenführer (colonel), and then made head of Section VIII (Archives) for RuSHA in October 1934. In November 1934 a promotion followed to the rank of Oberführer (lieutenant-brigadier), and then in Spring 1935 Wiligut was transferred to Berlin to serve on Himmler's personal staff.





He was promoted to the rank of Brigadeführer in September 1936.
In Berlin, where he worked in the office of Karl Wolff, chief adjutant of the SS, Wiligut developed his plans for the rebuilding of the Wewelsburg into an allegorical "center of the world".
Most significantly the Great Hall of the Wewelsburg had a marble inlaid floor representing the most secret and occult occult symbol of the Thule Gesellschaft - the 'Schwartze Sonne' (the Black Sun - see left & right).
Wiligut's friend Manfred von Knobelsdorff attempted to practise Wiligut's Irminism by performing various rituals on the Wewelsburg.
These included a baptismal ceremony for Karl Wolff's eldest son on 4 January 1937, attended by SS dignitaries Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Diebitsch.
In summer 1936, Gunther Kirchhoff and Wiligut, on behalf of the Ahnenerbe, undertook a 22 day expedition to the Murg Valley in the Black Forest where there was a settlement described as consisting of old half-timbered houses, architectural ornament, crosses, inscriptions, and natural and man-made rock formations in the forest, which, they claimed, showed it to be an ancient Krist settlement.
Wiligut identified Schloss Eberstein as a center of Irminism.
In Saxony, he discovered another "Irminist complex", identifying Einum as "spirit point", Bodenburg as "will point", Gandersheim as "central awareness point", Engelade as "force hand point", Calefeld as "heart point" of the crucified Balder, Brunstein as "generative point", Naensen as "material hand point" and Ebergötzen as "skould point".
Wiligut identified Irminism as the true German ancestral religion, claiming that Guido von List's Wotanism and Armanen runic row was a schismatic false religion.
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017
Himmler, on Wiligut's recommendation, had many of List's followers and non-official Nazi occultists imprisoned in concentration camps.
Wiligut contributed significantly to the development of Wewelsburg as the order-castle and ceremonial center of SS pseudo-religious practice.

He officiated in the role of priest at weddings of SS men and their brides.

 He designed the Totenkopfring, which Himmler personally awarded to prestigious SS officers.



© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017
Herman Wirth, first president of the Ahnenerbe, was less than impressed with Wiligut, and in a letter to Rudolf J. Mund describes him as a senile alcoholic plagiarizing Guido List.
But Wirth himself was dropped by Himmler after his forgery of a "Fossum calendar disk" he had alleged to have found in a 1937 Ahnenerbe expedition to Sweden was uncovered.

 Karl Maria Wiligut died on 3 January 1946.His gravestone is inscribed with "UNSER LEBEN GEHT DAHIN WIE EIN GESCHWÄTZ" ("Our Life Passes Away Like Idle Chatter").





© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017
Occult involvement

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 published in 1903 under the pseudomym of Lobesam. "Seyfrieds Runen" was a collection of poems about the Rabenstein at Znaim on the Austrian-Moravian border.
In 1908 followed the 'Neun Gebote Gots', where Wiligut first claimed to be heir to an ancient tradition of Irminism.
Both List and Wiligut were influenced by Friedrich Fischbach's 1900 'Die Buchstaben Gutenbergs'.
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 previously.
From 1908, Wiligut was in contact with the occultist Ordo Novi Templi in Vienna. Wiligut claimed that the Bible had originally been written in Germanic, and testified to an "Irminic" religion - Irminenreligion or Irminism - that contrasted with Wotanism. He claimed to worship a Germanic god whom Christianity was supposed later to have appropriated as their own saviour Christ.
Germanic culture and history, according to Wiligut, reached back to 228,000 BC.
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.



The Externsteine is a distinctive rock formation is situated in the Teutoburger Wald, not far from Detmold.
This series of tall, narrow rock columns rise from the wooded hills and appear to be the only such stone formations in the entire area, though on the hills on either side of the formation, the Knickenhagen and Bärenstein, similar rocks are hidden, only visible as perpendicular ribs along their northern flanks.
But it’s what is visible that counts, and hence, the Externsteine are a unique series of four sandstone columns up to forty meters tall, forming a wall several hundreds of meters long.
The Ahnernebe, following the theories of Wilhelm Teudt, found ancient Germanic "star temples" where sightlines supposedly radiated out towards important positions of sun, moon, and stars.
Wilhelm Teudt (7 December 1860, Bergkirchen – 5 January 1942) was a völkisch lay archaeologist searching for an ancient Germanic civilization.
His 1929 work Germanische Heiligtümer continues to have currency in esoteric and neopagan communities to this day.
He trusted in his paranormal faculty of picking up the "vibrations" of his ancestors helping him visualize ancient sceneries of the sites he was researching.
Teudt was particularly interested in the Externsteine.
According to Teudt this was where the sacred pillar of the Saxons, Irminsul, stood until toppled by Charlemagne and a carving of a "weeping Irminsul" is supposed to be on one of the pillars of rock.
The Externsteine was at the centre of alignments and was supposed to have been a sacred centre before Stonehenge.
In 1933 Teudt joined the Nazi Party and proposed to turn the Externsteine into a “sacred grove” for the commemoration of the ancestors.
Hence, it should be he, not Wiligut, who was responsible for making the Externsteine part of the Nazi doctrine. 
Heinrich Himmler was open to the idea, and in 1933 initiated and then presided over the “Externstein Foundation”, though it was actively run by SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers.
He led the German excavations at the site until 1940 when it was turned over to the Ahnenerbe's control.

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.
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 (see right).
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 (see right).
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 sacrifical 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.


The Edda Society


Werner von Bülow (1870–1947), the translator of these verses, was the Grrand Master of the Edda Society.
On 29 November 1925, Gorsleben founded the Edda Society (Edda-Gesellschaft), a mystic study group, at Dinkelsbühl in Franconia.
He himself was Chancellor of the Society and published its periodical Deutsche Freiheit (German Freedom), later renamed Arische Freiheit (Aryan Freedom).
Assisted by learned contributors to his study-group, Gorsleben developed an original and eclectic mystery religion founded in part upon the Armanism of List, whom he quoted with approval.
Rudolf John Gorsleben was associated with the Thule Society during the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and, along with Dietrich Eckart, he was taken prisoner by the Communists, narrowly escaping execution.
He threw himself into the ferment of Bavaria's völkisch politics and formed a close working relationship with the local Germanenorden before devoting himself to literary pursuits.
The treasurer of the Edda Society was Friedrich Schaefer from Mühlhausen, whose wife, Käthe, kept open house for another occult-völkisch circle (the 'Free Sons of the North and Baltic Seas') which gathered around Karl Maria Wiligut in the early 1930s.

Mathilde von Kemnitz (see left), a prolific völkisch writer who married General Erich Ludendorff (see right) in 1926, was an active member of the Edda Society.

Feldherr Erich Ludendorff also held Adolf Hitler in the highest regard, although  he later broke with Hitler because he regarded the Nazi leader as too moderate !
At Hitler's urging, Ludendorff took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
The plot failed and in the trial that followed Ludendorff was acquitted.
In 1924, he was elected to the Reichstag (see below left) as a representative of the NSFB (a coalition of the German Völkisch Freedom Party and members of the Nazi Party), serving until 1928.

He ran in the 1925 presidential election against former commander Paul von Hindenburg (see right).
Ludendorff's reputation may have been damaged by the Putsch, but he conducted very little campaigning of his own and remained aloof, relying almost entirely on his lasting image as a war hero, an attribute which Hindenburg also possessed.
Ludendorff, like Hitler and Eckart, was a Social Darwinist who believed that war was the "foundation of human society", and that military dictatorship was the "normal" form of government in a society in which every resource must be mobilized.
After the Great War (1914-1918), Ludendorff wanted Germany to go to war against all of Europe.

He also became a pagan worshipper of the Nordic god Wotan (see left), and he detested not only Jews but also Christianity, which he regarded as a weakening force.
After 1928, Ludendorff went into retirement.
In his later years, Ludendorff went into a relative seclusion with his second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz (1874–1966), writing several books and leading the 'Tannenbergbund' (see right - note the Thule swastika).
He concluded that the world's problems were the result of Christians (especially of the Jesuits and Catholicism), Jews, and Freemasons.
Together with Mathilde, he founded the 'Bund für Gotteserkenntnis' (German Society for the Knowledge of God), a small and rather obscure esoterical society of Theists that survives to this day.


Ludendorff died in Tutzing on December 20, 1937 at age 72.
He was given a state funeral (see above) attended by Hitler.
He was buried in the Neuer Friedhof in Tutzing.

 Returning to the Edda Gesselschaft, when Rudolf John Gorsleben died from heart disease in August 1930, the Edda Society was taken over by Bülow who had designed a 'world-rune-clock' which illustrated the correspondences between the runes, the gods and the zodiac, as well as colours and numbers.
Bülow also took over the running of Gorsleben's periodical and changed its name from 'Arische Freiheit' to 'Hag All All Hag', and then 'Hagal'.

The Hagal Rune

The symbolic representation of this rune is a shelter from the destructive force of natures hailstorm.
It is fairly easy to envision the cross-bar stave between the two upright staves providing the shelter under which safety from the storm could be found
Phonetically there are Anglo-Saxon rune poem references to "hail" as being "grain" which falls and turns into water after being tossed about by wind.
The layered nature of a hailstone is recognized in the meaning of this rune by incorporating the potential for destruction with the transformative qualities wrought in that destruction.
Indeed, it seems as though "hail" and "Hagal" have remained closely linked in meaning despite the many changes in the evolution of human language over the years and there is no reason not to incorporate the image of shelter from a hailstorm into our present day understanding of this rune.
The concepts that surround Hagalaz recognize that the destructive potential for hail out of season is balanced by the potential for transformation that will bring new fertility and growth.
It can be seen as representative of the cosmic "egg", the primal layered egg of ice that was transformed in combination with fire.
Out of the primal chaos (which we think of as destructive) comes a tangible force that carries the potential for transformation.
The transformation from destruction to fertility comes after "being tossed by the winds".
Hagal represents a dramatic event or trauma which comes from outside your own immediate perceptions.
It represents a deep reshaping.
The rune is deeply integrated into the mysteries of renewal through destruction, the shaman who, like Odin, loses all in order to find his or her own personal power.
It is the rune of winter, the grain of that season.
It is a crystalline form, one that is sharp and hard, yet clear and possibly deadly.
It is one of the runes that can not be reversed nor turned upside down.
Magically, Hagal is the rune of the bridge of the cosmos, the dangerous path between worlds or experiences which can bring transformation or destruction.

The hagal rune also appears on the SS Totenkopf Ring

_________________________________



'DAS GEHEIMNIS DER RUNEN'

(The Secret of the Runes - Full Text)

by

Guido von List

1914

Up until now, much too little attention has been paid to the script of our Germanic ancestors - the runes.
This is because everyone has begun from the false and baseless assumption that the Germanic peoples had no script of any kind, and that even their writing signs, the runes, had been imperfectly patterned after the Latin uncial script.
All this is spite of the fact that Iulius Caesar clearly reported on the account books of the Helfetsen (not Helvetier) and their writing, which was supposed to be comparable to the Greek script.
Without attempting to give evidence here of the great antiquity of the runes, which have doubtlessly been found on bronze artefacts and pottery shards, it must be mentioned at this time that the runic futharkh (= runic ABC) (the designation futharkh is based on the first seven runes, namely, or ; it is for this reason that the proper name is not futhark - as it is generally and incorrectly written - but futharkh, with the h at the end.
The primal language of the Aryan Germanic people and their mystery language) consisted of sixteen symbols in ancient times.
According to the Edda, in the Wotan's Runic Wisdom, it consisted of eighteen such signs.
With these symbols anything could be written, because the Teuton did not know v or w or x, nor z, nor qu.
And neither did he know c, d, nor p. V was rendered by f (Fator = father); v and w originated from u, uu, uo, or ou; x from ks or gs; z was probably pronounced, but it was written with s. Wu originated from kui or gui, c from ts, d from th (thorn). P developed from b, until later it obtained its own rune, as did other sounds which gradually received their special runes, so that soon they numbered over thirty.
If you wish to trace the linguistic stems back to the root words of the primal German language, and then follow these back into the seed words and primal words of the original Aryan language, you must always write the stem words in runes - or at least have this means of writing in front of you.
In this way you may find the correct root, and in this endeavour the name of the rune itself will be an important aid.
Actually each rune has, similar to the Greek alphabet, a certain special name, which is at the same time the bearer of the root word as well as the bud word and primal word.
Here it should be noted that the runic names are unisyllabic words, and are therefore root words, bud words and primal words.
To this rule only the runes hagal , gibor and othil make - seeming - exceptions.
Because the runes have particular names and these names are unisyllabic words, it is self evident that the runes - in distant days of yore-- had the function of a syllabic script, actually a hieroglyphic system.
This is because primal Aryan, like every primal language, was unisyllabic, and only in later times was it contracted to an alphabetic script, when the structure of the language proved the hieroglyphic or syllabic script to be too cumbersome.
Now that the runes have been recognised as word symbols of the prehistoric age, the question as to the abode of the other word symbols not contained in the runic futharkh becomes quite consequential.
Even if a symbolic word script were extremely poor, which the script of the Aryan language was not, it would need to make use of many more signs than the mere thirty script glyphs.
In fact, the Aryan script prescribed many hundreds of symbols, and an exceeding number of written signs, as the basis of a highly elaborate, wonderfully systematic and organically constructed hieroglyphic structure, whose existence no one before today has considered.
As unbelievable as it may sound, these ancient hieroglyphs, rooted far back in the pre Christian primeval age of Teutondom and even Aryandom, stand in full bloom today.
They pursue their own science, which is still practised today, and their own art, both of which have their own particular laws and stylistic tendencies. This system has a rich literature as well, but without - and this is the tragicomic aspect - without the guardians and conservators of this art and science having any idea what it is they are cultivating and developing ! 
Because there were, and still are, many hundreds of runic symbols, their exact number has still not been finally determined.
However, out of this mass only about thirty came into use as letters in the sense of our modern writing symbols.
So at this time, two main groups result from these script symbols, the letter runes and the hieroglyph runes, both of which were preserved in their unique ways, and both of which went along their own special paths of development after the separation had been completed.
All of these symbols were runes, but today only the letter runes carry that designation, while the hieroglyph runes from this point forward were not recognised as actual script symbols.
Because of this differentiation they will be referred to as holy signs or hieroglyphs from now on.
It may be noted that the word hieroglyph was already important in early Aryan as hiroglif (concerning the primitive Aryan word hiroglif, see further details below) and it already had its meaning before the Greek language ever existed.
The letter runes, which, for the sake of brevity, shall henceforth be referred to simply as runes, halted their development and retained not only their simple linear forms, but also their unisyllabic names.
On the other hand, the holy signs were continuously developed on the basis of their old linear forms and were eventually formed into refined and richly constructed ornamentation.
They also underwent many alterations in their nomenclature as the concepts which they symbolised, and still symbolise today, were expanded and perfected along with the language.
The mythic lay Wotan's runic wisdom of the Edda knows the eighteen runes as script symbols; however, they still preserve their heritage as holy signs in the same sense as the later magical characters or spirit sigils.
Here, the interpretation of that magical song is offered, that on its basis the true runic secret can be further unravelled.
No other lay of the Edda gives such clear insight into the original Aryan philosophy concerning the relationship of spirit to body, of the Nordic God to the All - and through Aryandom brings forth so meaningfully into consciousness the recognition of the bifidic biune dyad in the microcosm and the macrocosm - as does the Lay of the High One and Wotan's runic wisdom included in it, verses 139-165.
The perpetually and progressively evolving ego always remains through the eternal alteration, from arising, to being, and through this to passing into nonbeing, which leads to a new arising into future being; and it is in such an eternal evolutionary alteration that Wotan, like the All, and also every individual, eternally remains.
This ego is indivisibly bound to the spiritual and physical, to the bifidic biune dyad, and is constant and immutable. In this way, the Lay of the High One portrays Wotan in an exalted mysticism, as the mirror image of the All, as well as of the individual.
Wotan lives in the human body in order to go under; he consecrated himself to himself, and he consecrates himself to passing away in order to rise anew.
The nearer he feels himself coming to the moment of his passing away towards new arising - his death - the clearer the knowledge grows in him that the secret of life is an eternal arising and passing away, an eternal return, a life of continuous birth and death.
This knowledge only completely comes to him at the moment of the twilight, when he sinks into the Primeval out of which he will arise again.
In the moment of twilight (death) he gives one of his eyes as a pledge for higher knowledge.
However, this one eye remains his property even though it has been pawned.
It is recovered after his return out of the Primeval, at his rebirth, for it is actually his body, while his other eye, which he has retained, is his spirit.
The physical eye (actually the body itself) that he had only temporarily given up - but which remained his own property - reunifies itself in the moment of its return out of the Primeval - upon rebirth - with his other spiritual eye (his spirit).
However, the primal knowledge created out of Mime's Well remains his property, the property of the All; it is the sum of the experience of thousands of generations, which is preserved and transmitted by means of writing.
Thus Wotan's knowledge is exalted in death; he enriches it with the draught from Mime's primal well, as well as with the Volva of the dead and Mime's head (Mime = memory, knowledge; primal well = the mystery of the All Arising, All Being and All Passing away toward new arising; the Volva of the dead = the Earth Goddess, Death Goddess, who preserves the soulless bodies in the cemeteries, while the disembodied spirits go to Valhalla or to Hel; Mime's head = the head knowledge, that is, the primal knowledge of arising, being, and passing away to new arising of all things; these are the three levels through which Wotan became wise, that is, attained All Knowledge, and went through the mystery to true knowledge); he only appears to divide himself from the physical world - to which he also belongs in apparent physical nonbeing - for he truly forms the biune dyad as that which is spiritual and that which is physical, the indivisible biunity.
He cannot divide his own day life from his night life (death).
However, in the night life - in apparent nonbeing - he wins the knowledge of his eternal life.
This guides him in eternal change through the transformations from arising through being toward passing away for a new arising throughout all eternity. By recognising that he becomes wise, and by means of his own life, which was consecrated to death, he found the knowledge of the world's fate, the solution of the riddle of the world, which he, eternally, will never make known to a woman or girl.
And so he is himself, Wotan, and simultaneously the All, as certainly as every ego is also a nonego, or All.
Thus each individual ego, each person, makes the same transformations for itself through the same levels of perception by which the understanding and deliverance of every individual is assessed as the spiritual treasure (and not as dead cognitive memories).
He does not lose it even in death, and he brings it back again when he returns to the world of men in his next incarnation. (We call this spiritual treasure, which the reborn person brings into the world, natural gifts, talents or born genius; he has a more agile spirit, which comprehends everything faster and easier than others, others who are animated by a less agile spirit, and this heightened agility is just that spiritual treasure).
For these reasons each individual ego has (for itself!) its own conception of the spiritual circumference of the idea behind these terms, according to its own spiritual treasure.
Therefore, among millions of living persons, no two individuals can be found whose conceptions of divinity are exactly the same - in spite of all dogmatic doctrines - and so too, no two individuals are found who have the same conceptual understanding of the spiritual essence of a language and its words - both in its details and collectively.
If such is still the case today, in spite of the fact that other languages have not attained the richness of our language, how much more must this have been true in primeval days when the vocabulary was still a small and insufficient one, and when the seers and wise men had to wring ideas symbolising expressions out of the still limited language in order to set similar conceptions free, as they themselves conceived them in their spiritual vision?
They were forced to support their speech with physical motions - the later magical gestures - and to enforce it with certain symbolic signs, which were thought of as whispering, (raunend), that is, conveyors of meaning, and so they were called runes (Runen).
The mysticism of Wotan's runic science says all this in the Eddic Lay of the High One, which portrays Wotan's sacrificial death, and which reminds us of the mystery of Golgotha in more than one respect.
At first, the lay introduces Wotan himself speaking, after which the skald, who conceived the lay, becomes the speaker and the song is ended. However, the lay begins thus: I know how I hung on the windcold tree nine eternal nights, wounded by the spear consecrated to Wotan I consecrated myself to myself - on that tree, which hides from every one the stead from which its roots grow.
They offered me neither bread nor mead; then I bent myself down peering; with a lamenting shout the runes became known to me, until I sank down from the tree.
After further explanatory strophes: Nine mighty songs I learned from the great son of Bale Thorn, Bestla's sire; I drank a measure of the wondrous mead, with the Soul Stirrer's drops I was showered. Before long I bare fruit, and throve full well, I grew and waxed in wisdom; word following word, I found me words, deed following deed, I wrought deeds.
You will seek hidden Runes and interpreted signs, many symbols of might and power, by the great Singer painted, by the high Powers fashioned, engraved by the Utterer of the Gods.
Odin engraved for the Gods, Daïn engraved for Elves, Dvalin the Dallier for dwarfs, All Wise for the Giants, and I, of myself, engraved some for the sons of men. Do you know how to write? Do you know how to read? Do you know how to paint? Do you know how to prove? Do you know how to ask? Do you know how to offer? Do you know how to send? Do you know how to spend? Better ask for too little than offer too much, like the gift should be the boon; better not to send than to overspend.
Thus Odin engraved before the world began.
Then he rose from the deep, and came again. the song presents characterisations of the eighteen runes with mystical interpretations.
When these strophes are paired with the names of the runes, they enlighten us in a very special way, and essentially provide the solution of the secret of the runes.
The following verses precede that characterisation of the runes, after which the skald goes immediately to the actual runic songs: Before the creation of the world was Wotan's knowledge; whither he came, thither he returns; now I know the songs as no other man, and as no princely woman. fa = fire generation, fire borer, livestock, property, to grow, to wander, to destroy, to shred.
The first promises to help helpfully in the struggle and in misery and in every difficulty.
The root word fa, which is symbolised as the primordial word in this rune, is the conceptual foundation of arising, being (doing, working, ruling), and of passing away to new arising - and so of the transitoriness of all existence and therefore of the stability of the ego in constant transformation.
This rune conceals, therefore, the skaldic solace that true wisdom only lives for the evolution of the future, while only the fool mourns over decay: Generate your luck and you will have it! ur = the primordial, eternity, primal fire, primal light, primal bull, primal generation, aurochs, resurrection, life after death. I learned another, which people use who want to be doctors.
The basis of all manifestation is the Primeval.
Whoever is able to recognise the cause of an event, to him the phenomenon itself does not seem to be an insoluble puzzle - be this fortunate or unfortunate - and therefore he is able to banish misfortune or increase luck, but also to recognise false evil and false luck as such. Therefore: Know yourself, then you will know all! thurs = thunder, thunderbolt, lightning flash, thorn.
A third I know, which is good to me, as a fetter for my enemies. I dull the swords of my opponents; neither weapon nor defence will help him.
The thorn of death is that which Wotan put the disobedient Valkyrie, Brünnhilde, into a death sleep (compare Sleeping Beauty, and so on), but in contrast to this it is also the thorn of life (phallus), with which death is conquered by rebirth.
This threatening sign surely dulls the opposing weapon of the one going to his death, as well as the force of the powers of death, through a constant renewal of life in rebirth.
Therefore: Preserve your ego! os = Gods, mouth, arising, ash, ashes.
A fourth still I know, when someone throws my arms and legs into fetters: as soon as I sing it, I can go forth, from my feet fall the fetters, the hasp falls from my hands.
The mouth, the power of speech! Spiritual power working through speech (power of suggestion) bursts physical fetters and gives freedom, it itself conquers all conquerors, who only gain advantages through physical force, and it destroys all tyranny. (In the struggle for existence, the folk who always remain lasting winners are those who develop themselves with the preservation of their moral force.
With the disappearance of morality, higher spiritual and intellectual rank is also lost, as history - the final judgement - will prove.)
Therefore: Your spiritual force makes you free! rit = cosmic law, rat, red, wheel, rod, right, and so on.
A fifth I heard, if from a happy flight a shot flies into the host; however swiftly it flies, I will force it to stop if I can only catch it with my gaze.
The thrice hallowed Cosmic Law, the solar wheel, the primal fire itself!
The exalted introspective awareness or subjectivity of the Aryans was their consciousness of their own godliness, for internity is just being with one's self, and to be with one's self is to be with the Nordic God.
As long as a people possesses unspoiled their entire original internity as a natural people (the people as a natural people is not being in a savage condition, for uncivilised savages live in the bondage of the most horrible shamanism; the people as a natural people, on the contrary, stipulates a high level of culture, yet free from any kind of false sophistication), it also has no cause to worship an external divinity, for an external divine service bound by ceremony is only made obvious when one is not able to find the Nordic God in one's own innermost being, and begins to see this outside his ego and outside the world - up there in the starry heaven.
The less internal the person is, the more outward his life becomes.
The more a people loses its internity, the more pompous and ceremonialised its outward manifestations become - in the character of its government, law, and cult (all of which will begin to emerge as separate ideas).
But they should remain one in the knowledge: What I believe is what I know, and so I also live it out. For this reason, the Aryan divine internity is also the basis for a proud disdain for death among the Aryans and for their limitless trust in the Nordic God and in the self, which expresses itself gloriously in the primal law of the Aryans and which has the fifth rune as its symbolic word sign.
Therefore, this rune says: I am my right (rod), this right is indestructible, therefore I am myself indestructible, because I am my right. ka = bold, none, and so on.
A sixth is mine, if a man hurts me with the root of a strange tree; the ruin he threatened me with does not hurt me but consumes him.
The world tree Yggdrasill (for the interpretation of the concept of Yggdrasill, see below) serves in the narrower sense as the Aryan tribal tree, beside which the tribal trees of foreign races are seen as foreign trees.
The runic concept haun, kunna (maid, for example, in the name Adelgunde) demonstrates the feminine principle in the All in a purely sexual sense. The tribe, the race, is to be purely preserved; it may not be defiled by the roots of the foreign tree.
If it were nevertheless to happen, however, such would be of little use to the foreign trees, because its foreign scion would grow to become its raging foe.
Therefore: Your blood, your highest possession. hagal = the All Hedge, to enclose; hail, to destroy.
A seventh I know, if I see a fire high around the housing of men; however wildly it may burn, I will bring it to rest with taming magical songs. (Fire magic, still practised today as fire evocations.)
Hagal -- introspective awareness, the consciousness to bear his Nordic God with all his qualities within himself, produces a high self confidence in the power of the personal spirit which bestows magical power, a magical power which dwells within all persons, and a power which can persuade a strong spirit to believe in it without any doubt.
Borne by this consciousness which has no doubt inherent, the chosen one controls the physical and spiritual realms, which he contains comprehensively, and thereby he feels himself to be All Powerful.
Therefore: Harbour the All in yourself, and you will control the All! not = need, Norn, compulsion of fate. An eighth I have, surely for all most needful to use: wherever discord grows among heroes, since I know how to settle it quickly.
The need rune blooms on the nail of the Norn!
This is not need (distress) in the modern sense of the word, but rather the compulsion of fate - that the Norns fix according to primal laws.
With this, the organic causality of all phenomena is to be understood.
Whoever is able to grasp the primal cause of a phenomenon, and whoever gains knowledge of organically lawful evolution and the phenomena arising from it, is also able to judge their consequences just as they are beginning to ferment.
Therefore, he commands knowledge of the future and also understands how to settle all strife through the constraint of the clearly recognised way of fate.
Therefore: Use you your fate, do not strive against it! is = ice, iron.
A ninth I grasp, when for me need arises to protect my ship on the ocean: then I will still the storm on the rising sea and calm the swell of the waves. Through the consciousness, which has no doubt inherent, of personal spiritual power the waves are bound - made to freeze - they stiffen as if ice.
But not only the waves, all of life is obedient to the compelling will.
Countless examples of the Agis shield (related to the Aegis hjálmer, the helm of awe or terror, part of the Nibelungen treasure won by Sigurdhr) of Wotan, such as the Gorgon's head of the Athenians, the Agis helm, all the way down to the hunting lore and practise of causing an animal to freeze (the magic of making something freeze in hunting lore and practise is substantiated as hypnosis), and modern hypnosis, are all based on the hypnotic power of forceful will of the spirit symbolised by this ninth rune.
Therefore: Win power over yourself and you will have power over everything in the spiritual and physical worlds that strives against you. ar = sun, primal fire, Aryans, nobles, and so on. I use the tenth, when through the air ghostly riding women fly: when I begin that magic, they will fare confused in form and effort.
The Ar, the primal fire, the sun, the light, will destroy spiritual as well as physical darkness, doubt, and uncertainty.
In the sign of the Ar the Aryans - the sons of the sun - founded their law, the primal law of the Aryans, of which the eagle (Aar) is the hieroglyph.
It sacrifices itself, as it consecrates itself in a flaming death, in order to be reborn.
For this reason it was called the fanisk (fan = generation, ask = arising, beginning; therefore: fanisk = the beginning of generation through rebirth; fanisk later became the phoenix, and thus is the phoenix explained; compare Wotan's rune song: I know that I hung on a wind cold tree) and later phoenix.
Therefore it is read as a symbolic hieroglyph when an eagle is laid on the funeral pyre of a celebrated hero to indicate that the dead hero rejuvenatingly prepares himself in death for rebirth in order to strive for a still more glorious future life in human form in spite of all the restrictions of the powers of darkness - all of which crumble before the Ar: Respect the primal fire! sol = sun, salvation, victory, column, school, and so on.
An eleventh still I also know in the fight, when I lead the dear one: I sing it into the shield and he is victorious in battle, he fares hale hither and hale home again, he remains hale everywhere.
Sal and sig! -- salvation and victory (Heil und Sieg).
This millenia old Aryan greeting and battlecry is also again found in a variant form in the widespread call of inspiration: alaf sal fena! (All solar salvation to him who is conscious of power, that is, able to reproduce!)
This has become symbolised by the eleventh sign of the futharkh as the sig rune (victory rune): The creative spirit must conquer! tyr = animal, and so on; Týr, the Sun God and Sword God; Tiu, Zio, Ziu, Zeus; to generate, to turn, to conceal; thus Tarnkappe, the cap of concealment, and so on.
A twelfth I have: if on a tree there hangs a man throttled up on high, then I write some runes and the man climbs down and talks to me.
The reborn Wotan, that is, the renewed Wotan who has climbed down from the world tree after his self sacrifice, as well as the renewed fanisk (phoenix), which flies up out of the ashes, is personified in the young Sun God and Sword God, Týr.
According to the rule of mysticism, every magical belief moves parallel to mythology, in that the mythic pattern is adopted in analogies to human earthly processes, in order to reach results similar to those given in the myths.
While esotericism on the basis of the well-known bifidic biune dyad recognises the mystic one in the mystic many - and therein it sees the fate of the All and hence of every individual - in eternal change from passing away to rebirth.
As Wotan returned after his self sacrifice - which is to be understood not merely as his death, but rather as his whole life - in a renewed body, so also does every single person return after every life in human form with a renewed body through a rebirth - which is equally a self sacrifice.
For this reason, tar means to generate, to live, and to pass away - and therefore Týr is the reborn young sun.
So too is the twelfth rune at the same time a victory rune, and hence it is carved into sword blades and spearheads as a sign to give victory.
It shall be said: Fear not death - it cannot kill you! bar = birth, song folk song, folk, German, bier, and so on.
A thirteenth I name, I sprinkle the son of a noble in the water of life; when he goes into battle, he cannot fall, no sword may strike him to the ground. In the bar rune the spiritual life in the All, the eternal life in which human life between birth and death means but one day, stands in contrast to this day in the life in human form, which goes from bar (birth) through bar (life as a song) to bar (bier, death), and which is sanctified and charmed by the water of life in the baptism.
This (day in the) life is bounded by birth and death, and even if destiny has not at once appointed a sword death for the bairn - he is still exposed to this and many another danger.
For in spite of the determination and dispensation of destiny, dark chance (chance! - actually there is no such thing as chance, for all events without exception are in the great web of fate - as warp and woof - all well ordered, but what concerns woof, the cross weave, is even for clairvoyants only visible with difficulty; the recognisable straight warp of the effects of earlier causes, effects that are always in turn other causes that trigger coming effects - which again form causes that trigger effects, in an unending genetic series - is visible and calculable to seers and initiates; however, it is difficult to tell ahead of time the effects of the woof of the fate of other egos or whole groups of them, and to tell when they will touch, cross, or otherwise influence our woof of fate; these work on our woof of fate - which is comparable to the woof in a fabric, like the woof or cross weave in such a fabric, and because these incalculable influences often suddenly and unexpectedly disturb our own woof of fate, these are called chance, without, however, having considered a chance occurrence as something irregular or lawless - that cannot be! - but perhaps as something incalculable; the oldest Aryan mystics already recognised this, and therefore portrayed the rulers of fate, the three Norns, as weavers of fate, who out of the warp and woof weave the raiment of time, that is, fate) rules, based on the free will of men, and it is against such a maleficent degree of chance that the sacred blessing is supposed to work.
The Germanic people did not recognise any blind faith.
They did believe in a predestination in the greatest sense, but they intuitively saw that many restrictions (chance accidents!) stand in the way of the completion and fulfilment of predestination in order to fulfil and steel personal power.
Without these accidents, for example, every pine tree would have to be strictly symmetrical in all its parts; one would have to be the same as the next, while in fact no two can be found that are exactly alike, and so too it would have to be in human life; all without difference, uniform and equal. For this reason the newborn should be consecrated with the water of life (for this reason also the church, in a clear reference to the water of life, is supposed to use as baptismal water so called living water, that is, spring or flowing water, and rejects standing water from ponds or lakes) against impending accidents.
Therefore: Your life stands in the hand of the Nordic God; trust it in you! laf = primal law, sea, life, downfall, defeat.
A fourteenth I sing to the gathered folk by naming the divine names; of all the Gods and Elven kind I know as well as any.
The intuitive knowledge of the organic essence of the All, and therefore of the laws of nature, forms the unshakeable foundation of Aryan sacred teachings or exoteric Aryan religion, which was able to encompass and comprehend the All, and therefore also the individual in its arising, working, and passing away to new arising.
Such esoteric knowledge was communicated to the folk in symbolically formulated myths, for the naïve popular eye, unaccustomed to such deep vision and clairvoyance, could no more see the primal law than the physical eye can see the whole ocean, or the unschooled inner, spiritual eye the endlessness of life in the All.
Therefore the fourteenth rune says: First learn to steer, than dare the sea journey! man = moon, to mother, to increase; empty or dead.
A fifteenth I tell, which Folk Stirrer the dwarf sang before the doors of day to the Gods for strength, to the Elves for might, to myself to clear my mind. In another sense, as in that of the well known folk tale,
The man in the moon reveals himself in the fifteenth rune as a sanctified sign of the propagation of the human race.
The primal word ma is the hallmark of feminine generation - mothering - just as the primal word fa is that of the masculine.
Therefore, we have here Mater, mother, just as there we have Fater, father.
The moon mythically mystically serves as the magical ring Draupnir, Dripper, from which every ninth night an equally heavy ring drips (separates itself), and which was burned with Baldr; that is, Nanna, the mother of his children, was burned at the same time as Baldr.
According to mythicomystical rules, however, nights always mean months, and so the nine nights mentioned above indicate the time of pregnancy. While the concepts of man, maiden, mother, husband, wife, marriage, menstruation, and so on, and so forth, are rooted in the primal word ma (just like the concept moon, with which they are all internally connected conceptually), they nevertheless symbolise individual concepts reconnected into an apparent unity according to the principle of the multiune multifidic multiplicity.
So too is the conceptual word for this unity rooted in the primal word ma and expressed manask or menisk, that is: man (der Mensch).
Therefore - as a concept of unification - the word der Mensch, man, is only of one gender (masculine), while the derogatory concept belongs to the third stage as a neuter, das Mensch, slut, to which we will return later.
The fifteenth rune encompasses both the exoteric and esoteric concept of the high mystery of humanity and reaches its zenith in the warning: Be a man! yr = iris, bow, rainbow, yew wood bow, error, anger, and so on.
A sixteenth I speak to a coy maiden to get me goodness and luck: that changes and turns the wishes and mind of the swan white armed beauty.
The yr rune is the inverted man rune, and as it designates the bow, so too does it present the waxing and waning moon in contrast to the full moon of the man rune, and so in the first instance it refers to the mutability of the moon, in the second instance as the error rune - referring to the lunarlike mutability of the feminine essence, portrayed in later verses of the Lay of the High One in the following way: Do not trust the true words of a maid, do not trust the woman's true words, her heart was shaped on a spinning wheel: the feminine heart is the home of fickleness.
The yr rune or error rune, which causes confusion, whether through the excitement of the passions in love, in play, in drink (intoxication), or through pretexts of speech (sophistry) or by whatever other means will perhaps conquer resistance through confusion.
But the success of a victory gained by such means is just as illusory as the victory itself - for it brings anger, wild rage, and ultimately madness.
The yr rune or error rune therefore also contrasts with the os rune (see above), since it tries to force the conquest of an opponent with mere pretext instead of with real reasons.
Therefore it teaches: Think about the end! eh = marriage, law, horse, court, and so on.
A seventeenth helps me with a lovely maid, so that she will never be able to leave me.
The seventeenth, or eh rune, plays off against the sixteenth.
While that one warns against frivolous transitory love affairs, the marriage rune confirms the concept of lasting love on the basis of marriage as the legal bond between man and woman.
This is symbolically indicated by a later eh rune in that the laf rune (see above) is doubled in it (: + = :), therefore symbolically saying: two bound together by the primal law of life!
Marriage is the basis of the folk, and therefore eh is again the concept of law, for, according to an ancient legal formula, marriage is the raw root, that is, the raw root of the continuance of Teutondom.
Therefore: Marriage is the raw root of the Aryans! Between the seventeenth and eighteenth rune the skald included the following verse: These songs will be, to you, Stray Singer, for a long time well nigh unlearnable: rejoice, if you experience them; take note, if you learn them, use them, if you understand them.
After this interlude strophe, he begins with the mysterious eighteenth rune which follows as he again lets Wotan himself speak: or or fyrfos = swastika.
The eighteenth I will eternally never tell to a woman or maid: it forms the best end to the lays - which only one of all knows, except for the lady who embraces me in marriage or who is also a sister to me. (Wotan's wife Frigga is at the same time his sister, a proof that in antiquity incestuous marriages, of which there are numerous examples in mythology and history, were common.)
In this eighteenth song, the skald again recedes from view; he lets Wotan sing and speak in order to indicate that this highest knowledge of the primal generation of the All can be known and comprehended uniquely and alone by the nuptually bound divinities of the biune bifidic dyad of united spiritual and physical power, and that only these, uniquely and alone, understand the thrice high holy secret of constant generation, constant life, and uninterrupted recurrence, and are able to perceive the mysterious (eighteenth) rune of these.
However, certainly worthy of note is the fact that the eighteenth rune which is actually present is a - doubtlessly intentionally incomplete - fyrfos, and that it harkens back to this sign in both name and meaning - without, nevertheless, exhausting it.
In this the intention of the skalds to guard vigilantly the fyrfos as their exclusive innermost secret, and as the sigil of that secret, can be seen.
Only after yielding to certain pressures did they reveal another sign which partially replaced the fyrfos.
This sign, which can to a certain extent be seen as a substitute eighteenth rune, is: ge = gift, giver, the Nordic God, earth; death, and so on.
Gibor altar is still contained in the place name Gibraltar, a name for which the derivation from Arabic gibil tarik is as impossible as it can be; Gib(o)raltar was a temple site consecrated to the Nordic God, the All Begetter by the Vandals at the southern extreme of Spain) - the Nordic God, the All Begetter! - the Nordic God is the giver, and the earth receives his gifts.
But the earth is not only the receiver, she is also in turn a giver.
The primal word is gi, or ge; in it lies the idea of arising (to give), but it also indicates being, in the idea of the gift, and passing away to new arising, in the idea of going.
This primal word gi or ge can now be connected to other primal and root words, a few examples of which follow.
In connection with the primal word fa as: gifa, gefa, gea, geo, it indicates the gift begetting earth, and with bar or bor, burn, spring, the gift burn the Nordic God.
As gigeur (the gift goes back to the Primeval), in Gigur, the gift destroying frost giant, who becomes a personification of death and later of the devil, appears to be named.
By the idea word gigas (gigeas: the gift goes out of the mouth, out of the source) the fiddle (Geige) is understood.
This is the old skaldic magical instrument of awakening which introduced the song, and since song (bar) also means life, the fiddle was one of the many ideographs (hieroglyphs, symbols) of rebirth, and it is for this reason that it is often found in graves as a sacred gift.
Therefore it is not necessarily so that the dead man in whose grave a fiddle is found was a fiddle player.
Flutes and fiddles enticed people to dance, to the excitement of love, and were therefore banned by the church - with its ascetic temperament - because they served as magical instruments to arouse the human fyr, fire, of love.
The personal names Gereon and Gertrut are rooted in the primal word ge, meaning rebirth, and the hieroglyph of this, the Head of Gereon, appears as an equilateral triangle made of three human profiles.
But this Gereon is, in turn, the Nordic God incarnate in the All as the All Spirit, World Spirit or Human Spirit.
And for this reason the meaning of the ge rune is closest to that of the fyrfos.
The difference between the two interpretations lies in the fact that the idea of the ge rune or gibor rune seeks exoterically to approach the comprehension of the idea of the divine from below upward - in a certain sense from the level of humanity outward - while the explanation of the fyrfos seeks knowledge of the Nordic God esoterically in the innermost level of man himself -- and finds it.
Thus it is known, as the spirit of humanity, to be unified with the Nordic God from the standpoint of the concept of the bifidic biune dyad, and it will attain certain knowledge from inside out, as well as toward the inside from the outside.
Here again the exoteric and the esoteric are clearly distinguished, and the fyrfos is recognised as an exoteric secret sign of high holiness, which is represented exoterically by the ge rune.
So, while the exoteric doctrine teaches that man emerged from the Nordic God and will return to the Nordic God, the esoteric doctrine knows the invisible cohesion of man and divinity as the bifidic biune dyad - and so it can be consciously said: Man - be one with the Nordic God!
Thus in the Eddic song Wotan's runic wisdom the skald interpreted the individual runes - in concealed forms - and implied the magical songs or invocatory formulas connected to them, without actually communicating them - thus preserving the skaldic secret - but he revealed enough that their sense can be rediscovered.
He could confidently conclude the Wotan's runic wisdom: Now have I ended the high song here in the hall of the High One, needful to the earthly, not to the Giants.
Hail to him, who teaches it! Hail to him who learns it!
Of the salvation, all you listeners, make good use!
With this, the skaldic rune poem and its interpretation, it has been proven that the runes were more than our letters today, more even than mere syllable signs or word signs, that is, they were holy signs or magical characters.
Actually they were nothing less than collectors for the purpose of autosuggestion, media for concentrated thought and intensive meditation.
The characterisation as holy signs is therefore fully justified, as is the other name runes, that is, the rowning (whispering) ones, the secretly speaking ones.
Only after these beginnings did those runes, and a number of others that the Wotan's runic wisdom does not name, gradually shrivel up into letters in our sense of the word - that is, into empty, inarticulate phonetic signs.
The great, still uncounted, mass of the other holy signs or hieroglyphs, which were not simplified into insubstantial phonetic signs, but which were rather - as has already been stated - often developed with ongoing elaboration into the most elegant ornamental motifs with the characteristic preservation of the basic lines of their primary forms, and which also expanded their names and symbolic values, formed the Aryan system of hieroglyphs or pictographs, which remained a secret of the skalds:
Until now, no one had thought to decipher or read them, because no one recognised these widely disparate signs as hieroglyphs.
First it would also do well to ascertain where those - until now silent or in the best case misinterpreted - holy signs or hieroglyphs are to be found, this in order to prove the context of the special formations of individual signs (corresponding to the kind of the areas in which they are found), and finally to establish through their names the primal word forms and ideas that they represent, and from these to form a basis for their decipherment and reading. However, to know the areas in which these signs are found, that is, to find the arts and sciences which supported these signs and which still support them, some other information must be obtained.
The old tripartite division of the Aryans, which doubtlessly has its origin in the intuitive recognition of the evolutionary laws of nature, and whose impetus is surely to be sought in the observation of evolution according to natural laws - from the seed through the bloom to the fruit containing another seed - became the essential imperative of the Aryans and of the Teutonic peoples who emerged from them, including the Germans.
Therefore, we find in all institutions of the Aryan peoples, in their religions, mythologies, social levels (provider class, teacher class, soldier class) as well as in their language (the primal Aryan), this ideological classification, which, as already mentioned, actually distinguishes verbal concepts into three levels: 1. arising 2. being, doing, ruling, working, and 3. passing away to new beginning so that every kernel word, primal word, root word or stem word has a concept in each of these levels.
But each individual level again breaks down into trilevel sublevels with the same tendency, and each of these do the same, and so forth, so that every root word and every stem word demonstrates at least three, but usually many more, conceptual values increasing in this threefold progression.
Even modern High German is subject to this primal evolutionary law of the Aryan and Germanic languages, which came about before these was any grammar, and which therefore cannot be determined by grammatical rules - although spelling rules endeavour to obscure these levels of meaning in order to prevent misunderstandings that could arise from the confusion of the concepts.
To give an example of this from New High German, refer to the word Rauh (raw) or Rauch (rough), which in its arising level means to be raw or rough in contrast to being smooth; through the figure of speech, to work something out of the raw or rough, it is attributed to the first level, for example, rough materials or raw materials, rough and ready, and so on. In the second level, that of being or governing, it indicates law and justice as in rau grave (Rauch Graf), rau hen (Rauch Huhn), rau tenth (Rauch Zehnt), and so on. In the third level of passing away to a new beginning, the word is characterised by the figure of speech to go up in smoke (Rauch); this means the smoke of fire, fog or frost as a sign of destruction.
The newer rules of spelling now divide these three ideas by the way they are written: 1. Rauh (rough, raw) 2. Rau (rau) 3. Rauch (reek, smoke).
Other examples are the word Rad (wheel), that is similarly broken up in the orthography and indicates: 1. Rath (rede, council), as a title and description of activity as that which furthers things 2. Rad (wheel), the turning, rate, increase, and 3. Ratte (rat), the destructive animal.
A no less interesting example is the word Hund (hound) with its many attendant concepts.
The arising level also means the all inclusive or basic, so that we have a Hund (also Hunt); the car on four rollers used to haul ore in the mines (English: hutch); a measure of cut peat (twenty Hunde of peat make a load); a measure of grain; a measurement of the field (big enough to sow a Hund of grain); the name of the founder of a house or dynasty (Fidei Kommis), for example, the Hounds of Künring; a sign of honour in hieroglyphs, the red hound for the establishment of a law.
In the being level the term Hund (hound) indicates the well known mammal.
In the passing away to new arising level the word Hund (hound) includes the concepts of stoppage, rot, destruction, death; compare the hound on the whim (whim beam, Goppelhund), the dragging brake; an instrument of torture used to dislocate the joints; a devil's mask (with names such as hell hound, sun hound, moon dog; a judicial sign of humiliation (hound dog in the passing away level means to come down (herunter (hunter) kommen), to decay!; therefore, condemned men bore a mangy dog to the place of execution as a characterising symbol; later this symbolism was expanded: thieves carried a bitch to the gallows, and she was hung beside the thief; the bitch and the thief were both called Tewe (bitch), that was clear; disturbers of the peace carried a setter (Bracke) to the scaffold - Bracke is identical with breaker, as a peace breaker or law breaker; the red hound means, in the third stage, decayed justice in contrast to the first stage as foundation of justice or codification of law), as a term of insult (dog as an insulting name has nothing to do with the quadruped; it indicates a violent, despicable person who wants to bring everything down (herunter (hunter), compare Hund), to decay) as well as a proverb (to go to the dogs (Auf den Hund kommen) also has nothing to do with our pet, unless it means it is a less valuable draft animal than the horse, but rather also refers to downfall (Herunterkommen (Hunterkommen) into poverty and decay).
These examples, which could be expanded into the hundreds, prove that even the modern German language is subject to the original law of tripartition, even if modern spelling rules - for reasons of clarity of meaning - make the effort to distinguish the concepts through orthographic conventions.
But if one takes these modern words back to their stem words, one will recognise this tripartition at once, especially when one writes the root words and primal words - as mentioned at the beginning - in runes, or at least keeps this mode of writing firmly in mind.
During the course of this discussion two words were used, and we referred to the fact that we would discuss their three levelled interpretation: the Greek word hieroglyph and the Nordic word Yggdrasill.
At that time, it was noted that the Greek word corresponded to the original Aryan word hiroglif or iroglif.
Both words can be used as examples of the tripartition of concepts.
The word hieroglyph appears in the old Aryan language, as already mentioned, as hiroglif or iroglif, and may be divided into three root words, ir, og, and lif, which are based on the three primal words ar, ag and laf.
These root words have the following three levelled meaning: 1. Arising stage: ir = beginning og = to eye, see, regard lif = to sleep; concealed life 2. Being stage: ir = to contain an arc, in a circle, iris og = to profit, increase lif = to live 3. Passing away stage: ir = error, confusion og = to separate (schneiden (orlog = war: as the decider (Entscheider) lif = to conclude; certainty without doubt Out of this, the three levels of interpretation for the word hiroglif result as follows: 1. First stage: the beginning is regarded in the concealed mind 2. Second stage: the (knowledge) contained (in the sign) increases the living (knowledge) 3. Third stage: confusion cuts off certainty, that is, whatever is fixed by writing can no longer be confused The Greek interpretation from hiero = holy and glypht, glypho = cut into stone is insufficient.
Even if hiero meaning holy is covered quite well by hiro having to do with the beginning, the second half is wrong, because hieroglyphs were far more often written or painted than carved into stone.
But if one wanted to have glypho stand for spiritually deepened, and thereby recognise the sense of sacrally deepened, then such an interpretative speculation would come quite close to the old Aryan concept.
In a similar fashion the word Yggrasill is divided into three root words, ig, dra and sil, which result in the following three levelled meaning: 1. I ig = I as shaper, generator, producer, consecration dra = turning generation (trifos), generation of fire sil (sal) = salvation 2. II ig = (uig, wig) struggle (Viking) dra = to drag, carry sil = law, pillar (Säule) 3. III ig = terror, death dra = to destroy (dragon) sil (zil) = aim, end Out of this, three levels of interpretation of the word Yggdrasill (Igdrasil) result as follows: 1. First: I, generating salvation in the primal fire (Urfyr)! (compare the burning thorn bush in the bible, Exodus III:2) 2. Second: Warrior of the law, war tree, war horse 3. Third: Aim of terror or destruction, the tree of terror.
This explains much that is otherwise not comprehensible, especially the incorrect interpretation of the name as horse of terror.
The world ash tree Igdrasil is the tree of life of Aryan humanity, their sacred fire, their original salvation (compare the burning thorn bush).
It is, however, thought of as living, therefore existing and governing, and for this reason it is the warrior (war bearer) - graphically, the war horse of humanity.
Ultimately it will be the tree of terror, by which humanity will pass away.
But it is also the wind cold tree about which Wotan sings in the rune song.
For this reason, the designation world ash tree is also meaningful, for ash is Ask == the first man, the primal father of humanity who bore the same name (the primal mother was called Embla, that is, alder tree) and manask, menisk (Mensch = man (human) - has its origins here.
However, as man signifies the generative, shaping one in the first stage, and in the second stage humanity is indicated as living and existing, so in the third stage the ruined individual - no longer worthy of being called human: das Mensch, slut, is scornfully named.
Ask in and of itself indicates: 1. the beginning of humanity, figuratively the primal father 2. the ash, and 3. the ashes and from that: asceticism (Askese), destruction of reproduction.
Manask or monak is therefore the monk, a word that we also have in Aryan as well as in Latin (MONACHVS), for surely even Latin is derived from Aryan.
Even though these few, and only briefly sketched, examples should be sufficient to indicate the tripartition of all concepts in the Aryan system and their netlike interweaving, nevertheless another example should be taken into closer consideration in order to take up the thread again and spin it out further.
Already above mention was made of the tripartition of the folk into provider class, teacher class and soldier class.
In this regard it should be remembered that Tacitus and Plinius, and to some extent the Greek travelling scholar of the fourth century B.C. - Pytheas -- all already had made mention of a tripartition of Germanic society, which according to their documents consisted of three tribes - • Ingaevons • Irminons • Istaevons According to Tacitus, the earthbound God Tuisco (Týr, Zio, the generator) had a son Mannus (Menask, man) who generated three sons, namely: • Ingvo • Irmin • Istvo who are supposed to be the tribal fathers in the familiar three levels of conceptual meaning: • Ingvo (ing-fo) = (1) perpetuator, maintainer, (2) the young wanderer, and, (3) the one who decides in court. • Irmin = (1) (2) (3) • Istvo (ist-fo) (from this probably comes the Hungarian man's name Istvan for Stephen) = (1) the generator, who generates in death, the returning one, the one to be reborn, (2) the continuously existing one, and, (3) the one who goes into darkness, submersion.
The ending -ons in the three tribal names means on three levels: 1. the ancestors, the primal origin; 2. to wander; and 3. to change, transformation, rotation. Therefore the tribal name Ingaevons means: 1. the ones who came forth out of ancestral origin, 2. the wandering young descendants, wanderers, Wandals (Vandals), and 3. the alteration through the judgement of fate.
The tribal name Irminons means: 1. the ones who came forth out of the ancestral origins of the solar man, 2. the wandering governors, solar judges, Semanes (not Semnones), and 3. conclusion of opinion by a turn of fate.
The tribal name Istaevons indicates: 1. the ones reborn out of the realm of the ancestors, 2. the ones constantly wandering, and 3. the ones who pass away through a consequence of fate.
According to tripartition, the first level of conceptual meaning serves as the general designation for the Ingaevons, the second for the Irminons, and the third for the Istaevons.
But all three designations have their special uses according to the rules of the trifidic triune triad, for all three are really but one, that is, the whole indivisible Germanic people.
All of this is based on the fact that all Aryans or Teutons felt themselves to be one folk.
On account of this, every individual, be he freeman or king, had to belong to the provider class in order to prevent this class, as the main class, from being devalued.
Everyone had, therefore, to be a farmer, that is, Ing-fo - an original maintainer and perpetuator of the ancestors.
The second class was the intellectually advanced, the intelligentsia, the rules, the teaching class, to which the skalds, the high nobility, and the kings (princes, counts, and so on) belongs - without ceasing to be farmers.
It has already been said above that Ar means the sun and the law of the sun, and the eagle is its symbol and hieroglyph.
Therefore a member of the second class was called an Arman or Irmin, namely a sun man, Seman. (Tacitus mutilates this word in Semnones, just as, for example, Iulius Caesar confused and made incomprehensible the folk name Helfesen or Helfetsen as Helvetians; the same is true for all Germanic folk names and place names in Roman or Greek writings, and it would be a welcome task for someone to set these names aright and thereby make them speak; for names always say something, they are not empty shells when they are correctly reconstructed; and that shall and must happen!)
The Semans were the men of knowledge (Wissenden), and from them emerged the skalds - the priests of Wotan - or, better said, their core group was the skalds, who, as priests and teachers, were also the judges - for in those times exoteric Aryan religion was simultaneously science and law.
One believed what one knew -- or at least intuitively recognised, and lived accordingly. Since the Semans, Irminons, Skalds and so on were one and the same with the scholars, artists, and so on, the second class is the teacher class - in spite of the fact that it too belonged to the farmer class - and is to be recognised as the root area of the activation of the Aryan spiritual work.
Therefore, all original lines of the collective arts and sciences are to be derived from it.
However, the skalds must remain the central focus in which all the diverse special manifestations of the hieroglyphics can be unified.
The third class, the soldier class, the Istaevons, who are those who pass away due to a consequence of fate - is in no way that which we today understand as the military - for all members of the folk were responsible for the common defence - but rather they were the great mass of surplus populace who had to migrate in order to establish new states.
There was no personal ownership of land and soil, only familial estates - the elder governed it for his clan, the members of which only had rights of usage over it.
If their number became too great for the ownership of land, then the surplus would have to migrate (hel fesen) - never to return.
They elected a duke (= war leader), and he searched for land.
Since such migratory expeditions --or colonisation efforts - were carried out completely according to Cosmic Law, the power of the Aryans to found and maintain state structures, recognised by all historians in all times and places, is evident.
Throughout the whole world we find these Aryan foundations which are testified to in historical as well as continuing folk names, land names and place names of Aryan state establishments - reaching all the way back into prehistoric times.
Because the skalds, as the scientists, maintained language, art, and science, they were also primarily concerned with scientifically directing the transition from Wotanism to Christianity, and to prepare the way for a peaceful blending of the two religions.
But this effort was soon disturbed as the second violent period of Christianisation broke forth under bloody Karl the Great (Charlemagne) - the Slaughterer of the Saxons.
In spite of the fact that the skalds were persecuted and scorned, they collected themselves together and secretly took the German faith and the German law in a concealed manner into the underground lore of the fem (five) fingers of the sword's hilt - and thus arose the band of the Holy Vehme. Out of the skaldic order the Minnesinger order later emerged, as did the German builders' guild and the German heraldic guild.
From all this, in broad branchings, sprang the judicial sciences, poetic arts, linguistic sciences, graphic arts, and so on.
Because the skalds, as poets and singers, were also the maintainers and formulators of language - and because it was necessary for them to preserve in strict secrecy the Wotanism that they took with them underground into their underground lore (in order not to be persecuted as pagans and heretics), they had to use the threefold interpretation of words to have their messages delivered - even by messengers - without these or other noninitiates being able to understand the correct interpretation.
Through steady skilful practice they reached such refinement in this double-edged type of poetry, called underground lore or concealed sense, that one and the same text could conceal two completely different messages, whose obvious sense (understood by everyone) would actually be secondary, while the concealed sense would contain the only real, secret message for the men of knowledge.
However, not all words in such messages served the concealed sense, but rather only single words among them.
These were distinguished by their initial sounds (alliteration), and were therefore called codewords or passwords.
Now, these codewords explained the accompanying text in a completely different direction - usually in the exact opposite direction from the apparent meaning - and in this way they explain many medieval poems that are otherwise incomprehensible.
In this hidden Wotanism we can, however, understand the cause of the strictly guarded guild secret of the minnesinger order, the heraldic guild, the German builders' guild, the Vehme, and other bodies that emerged from it.
In addition, we can understand the formal richness of their customs of initiation, advancement, and internal association in this way.
However, in a very notable way, their secret symbology, which they fixed in the holy signs as hieroglyphs and the like, according to underground lore or concealed sense, gave a double secret meaning.
The interpretation of these hieroglyphs is also twofold, and if one will, threefold, as in the following: The interpretation for the common, unitiated folk, which is evident in the portrayal - whether in speech, writing, pictures, or sculpture (or even in custom and gesture)-- is the same; for example, a lion, a fox, a bear, a greeting, and so on.
The lower symbolism or the exoteric, which is usually expressed in the ecclesiastical clerical understanding or in commonly known, easily understood correspondences, and which in any event was created for the purpose of being offered to the lower grades of the guild (apprentices, journeymen, and so on) as the lesser light.
This is done in order to test their trustworthiness and secretiveness, before the complete great secret or the greater light can be given to them in the higher grades (elder journeymen, master, herald, royal herald, and so on).
In this exoteric level, for example, the lion indicates the lion that goes about looking for the one he will devour, or courage, royal essence, and so on; the fox points to cunning and craft; the bear to strength, and so on; the handshake greeting (grip) has its secret characteristic by which one is able to recognise the one who is being greeted, whether he is a Fellow or not, and if so, to what degree he belongs.
The password would then aurally strengthen the impression gained from his grip and facial characteristics.
The high symbolism of the esoteric, the great secret of underground lore, the full light, proceeds from a purely Armanic perspective, and interprets only abstract concepts of theosophical metaphysical content.
It has the ultimate aim to provide a basis for that which was in the beginning blended with the full light, but it is to be introduced with growing intuitive knowledge, gradually dispensing with all symbolic aids and finally being able to base itself on its own intellectual conceptualisation. 
Only then will the hieroglyphs be alive, as they make clearly expressed conceptual interpretations perceptible from flat comparisons.
On this esoteric level, the examples of hieroglyphs already introduced may be rendered in the following way: lion = life, law, light, sun; fox = generation (fas, voss); also the greeting increased in meaning and even became more secret - for precaution was necessary.
Also the codewords of greeting and passwords received another meaning from what they had in the second degree.
If the essence and origin of the Aryan hieroglyphics are now clear, then too their branchings in various areas of use are easy to prove -- areas in which use was made of them, and areas in which use is still made today.
However, it must be said right from the beginning that the usual interpretations today, without exception, are relevant to the second degree - on the exoteric level.
This is because the third degree of interpretation - on the esoteric level - has been lost.
But it should also be noted here that this loss is only apparent.
The key to the deciphering of the secret lies in the language which we still speak today, and in the tripartite nature of the word concepts.
In the course of this study, it was discovered that the skaldic guild unites within itself the origins of all arts and sciences which are even today in full bloom, and that the skalds were active - already in distant antiquity in considerably pre Christian times - as poets and singers, as heralds (painters), as master builders (sculptors, stone masons, carpenters), as philosophers and theosophists - as well as judges.
They founded and refined their symbolism and hieroglyphics in these branches of arts, sciences and crafts, and ultimately in the Christian era they handed down their arts and crafts through various developments, which had been taken into underground lore along hidden ways, to the guild leagues of sciences which had grown out of them.
Through the struggles against the church (witchcraft trials, persecutions of heretics, upheavels during the reformations) as well as through other upheavals in the Holy Roman empire of the German nation the majority of traditions in those bodies were lost, and only disparate remnants of misunderstood formal odds and ends have been partially preserved to the present day, while the soul - the inner life - has disappeared.
The same is true of freemasonry, which originated from the stonemasons' guilds.
Only in the still flowering art and science of our ancient Aryan, indigenous heraldry, or science of coats of arms, have Aryan hieroglyphics been preserved.
But today even heralds know only the exoteric readings of their hieroglyphics.
They call them secret figures and heraldic devices without having a notion of their esoteric legibility.
Medieval and early medieval buildings of Romanesque - or, better said, old Saxon or old Germanic and Gothic - styles form a further area of discovery. In these buildings, hieroglyphs were elaborated into extremely high artistic developments, so that those structures speak, when the hieroglyphics are read.
And they can convey surprising results.
The revived contemporary Gothic style, however, had no notion of hieroglyphs in its tracery, which is only stylised decoration, and which therefore degenerated inter misunderstood forms and symmetries.
No less often do these symbols find their way into speaking records, into legal antiquities and pieces of wisdom, into folk customs, folk beliefs and proverbs, then into alchemy and medicine, into astronomy, astrology, and into all disciplines related to the mystical endeavours of antiquity and the middle ages - right on up to the present day.
That many of these signs were even, so to speak, popularised in the most everyday utilitarian objects and even determined the forms of such things is certainly conceivable with such a widespread tradition.
Here, for example, we only have to mention the forms and names of our breads and baked goods.
In brief, it is not easy to find an area in the life of the German folk which these hieroglyphs, holy signs, and symbols do not illuminate.
However, for present purposes, only heraldry, German architecture, and legal symbolism will be considered. In the symbolism of heraldry all the runes are abundantly met with in the heraldic figures.
They form the dividing lines of heraldic devices.
Because they were painted on shields and were calculated to have a certain effect at a distance, the heralds tinctured the background beside the runic lines with contrasting colours.
The colours used also had a definite meaning, and were again dependent upon the rune.
The heralds learned to see the runes and to blazon the shields according to the surfaces defined by the runic lines, and therein lies the confusion.
For example, they blazon a coat of arms with the fa rune: per pale, sinister a bar sinister: similarly with a gibor rune: upper pale rompu, lower pale rompu: dexter or sinister fess fracted, bevelled or square: downward fracted bar sinister: dexter bend fracted: and so on, and so forth, according to the portrayal and position of the rune. A coat of arms with the thurs rune: per bend with counter pile: with counter pile, or with counter wedge bend: and so on, whereby the first two indicate the upstanding thorn, and therefore arising of life (phallus), and the last one indicates the sunken thorn, or the death thorn (compare Brünnhilde, Sleeping Beauty).
The holy signs were developed in even more interesting ways.
In the first place, we must discuss the fyrfos (flyfot): which, as soon as the bordering line of the tinctured fields appeared, was blazoned by the herald as quarterly per square or quarterly per wavy: and so on. Later, as the figures were being executed in painted surfaces (and no longer only in linear fashion), the fyrfos was also being portrayed as a coloured figure with linear outlines, and was called the swastika (Hakenkreuz).
Because the fyrfos, even under the codename swastika, was still the heathen cross, and thus could bring a herald under suspicion of heresy, the greatest care was taken to conceal its hooks as much as possible in order to make it appear more like the Christian cross.
In this way the many so called heraldic crosses originated, such as, among others, the gringoly (serpent headed) cross: the t-square cross: the Jerusalem cross: the arrow point cross: the bononée cross: the fleury (Deutscher Ritterorden, Order of the Teutonic Knights) cross : the moline cross: the bough gable, the mill spindle cross, and so on.
One of the most significant concealments of the fyrfos is probably the so called Maltese cross: which appears to be made up of two opposed swastikas in linear fashion: which now form the well known eight pointed figure that is painted a different colour on the inside (from the field on the outside), and so it took on the appearance of an independent figure; however, this was only intended to feign such a sign.
This sign was called Baphomet or the talking head and was used as evidence for heresy in the Templar trials, and as one of the grounds for the condemnation (1313) of the Templar Order.
It was, however, nothing but their speaking head sign (that is, main sign in the sense of the third esoteric secret degree of the Wise mentioned above). The Knights of Malta and the Knights of Saint John, who today still use the same cross, were only able to avoid a fate similar to that of the Templars by means of heavy sacrifices.
But the Order of Teutonic Knights also uses the German Armanist swastika in the cross fleury still concealed in the ancient and honoured fyrfos -which is discernible to the Wise.
A further very interesting example of a hidden swastika is offered by the crest of the lower Saxon town Bad Pyrmont am Osning near the Porta Westphalia, well known for its mineral waters: It contains two swastikas executed on a flat surface.
These crosses are superimposed in such a way that, of the underlying cross, only the wedge shaped parts of the arms and the spreading hooks can be perceived, so that in its entirety it gives an impression similar to the cross moline.
The ordinances in heraldry, that is, people, animals, utilitarian objects, and so on, are also hieroglyphs like countless other heraldic devices - which cannot be discussed in detail here-- and as such are only legible according to the third esoteric degree of underground lore or the great secret. Following what has been said above, these always have a concealed sense and never signify that which is represented as such.
Therefore, in the springtime of heraldry, when underground lore was still active, these portrayals never appear formed in a naturalistic way, but rather are always treated ornamentally in the style so characteristic of the old coats of arms.
The picture, be it an eagle, a lily, a fire dog (= andiron), fire goat (Fyrbock), or whatever, never signifies just the object itself but rather the hieroglyph derived from this object; and it is this, too, that the artistic ornamental elaborations are supposed to indicate.
An instructive example is offered by the heraldic eagle, about which it has already been stated above why it is the hieroglyph or device of Aryandom and of the later German empire, a hieroglyph which was already being borne by the Aryans in Asia, for example, Cyrus the Archaemenian, as well as the Pharaohs, the Greeks, and the Romans.
It symbolised the power of the state and was naturally one headed.
When it occurred to the papacy to free itself from the power of the state, thus beginning the investiture contest, the German king put the double headed eagle on the imperial coat of arms and thereby said that he was lord of both forms of law, of the secular law of the state as well as of ecclesiastical law.
The eagle maiden of the crest of the city of Nuremberg only has meaning when it is addressed by its old name, that is, wipare -- which would sound like weibaar (eagle woman) today, but which is preserved in the word Weberin (Weberin -- female weaver = Webarin = Wibarin = Weibaarin; in Listian code, eagle woman).
It signifies the female weaver of fate, the Norn, after which Nuremberg is named, and so it speaks as does every - genuine - old crest.
Wibare, the weaver, is, however, at the same time the Arkona (Sun Lady) as well as the Urkona (Primal Lady, or Primal Mother, or Ancestral Lady). So in turn it is the white lady about which so many castles and palaces report and which is also at home in the castle of Nuremberg.
Also the saga of the white lady, or the ancestral lady, belongs to the realm of hieroglyphics, for she is found at places of primeval origins (birth), but never at places of rule or governance (of life).
In any case, all sagas, folk tales and myths according to the third esoteric secret level have special meaning with regard to the place to which they are connected, and they also work to explain the place names themselves; a report on the concealed sense and other concealed sense places as well as on the concealed skaldom at the locations of pre Christian temple sites), and contribute in a completely unexpected way toward the illumination of the primeval history of Aryandom over the whole world, not only in central Europe.
The sculptures on Romanesque (or, better said, old Saxon or early Germanic) and early Gothic cathedrals and secular buildings - which had been up to now puzzling - find their key in the symbolism of the German building lodges and in this system of hieroglyphs.
These figures were continuously being perfected into a richly articulated ornament right up until the late Gothic and transitional style, and they are even still recognisable in isolation during the early renaissance; but later they are lost track of completely - which happened in conjunction with the decay of the German building lodges.
But even in the traditions of architecture, the main holy signs, that is, the trifos: or vilfos: (actually willfol), the fyrfos: (fylfot, swastika), and the ruoth cross: or wheel cross (Radkreuz), also called the whisk: take on very important meanings in all sorts of ornamentation used in the construction of tracery and rose windows; the first as the flamboyant trifoil: the second as the flamboyant quadrafoil: and the third as the Saint Catherine's wheel: The other Gothic hieroglyphs are too numerous to count, but wherever one looks, these will be found in a very special arrangement -- proclaiming the great secret of underground lore to the Wise.
The trifoil as the vilfos: indicates the will to generate, with references to the creation of the world as well as to the activisation of life.
The flamboyant quadrafoil: as the swastika: however, signifies the all encompassing cross, from haag (to) hedge (in).
The name swastika: is just a codeword for hag cross; it symbolises the Nordic God in the All as well as in every ego, as a haag (see hagal above). The wheel cross: which appears in a hidden form as the Saint Catherine's wheel: points to the judgement of the world at the end of time, and so the flags during the Peasants' War (1525) had wheels on them (the little wheel flags) -- the peasants wanted to hold court over their oppressors!
The five angled star, the Vehme star, Truthenfuss (truh = turn, fuss = foot): is the hieroglyph of revolving or turning generation, of rebirth - one of the most important articles of faith in the Aryan religion.
In its exoteric interpretation, this sign simply says: return, and was therefore a favourite sign used at hostels and inns, in order to convey the meaning: whoever is a guest here should come again.
Thus these hieroglyphs are easily carried over into the highest theosophical and metaphysical realms of ideal conception, all according to their functions and dispositions, for they exist in the sphere of everyday life in order to transfigure this life, in order to show that ideal striving and real struggle actually flow into one another as the great mystical biune bifidic dyad.
It will already have been noticed that when the main or primeval holy signs were named: vilfos: fyrfos: and ruoth cross or wheel cross: they also had other names, for example, vilfos, fourfos, whisk, and even further designations such as trifos, turnfos, three foot, triskelion, four foot, and so on.
It can be seen that in order to conceal the esoterically indicated will, the insignificant many (viel) was imposed in order to veil the esoteric tri (three) (turning, of the turning of the earth and stars, of the whirlwind, of the storm, and so on), and at the same time mystically to indicate the number three, as well as the number four for fyr.
This hidden fyr occurs to an uncommon extent in architecture, for example, in quartering (Vierung, the intersection of nave and transepts), in the guide or slide (Führung), in the square (Vierege) (fyroge = fire eye = the Nordic God's eye).
The last of these earned an important meaning in secret rituals under the code name TAPIS (a carpet) and also TABVLA QVADRATA: which symbolises arising, existing, and passing away to a new arising.
The corner diagonal to that of the middle lamp of existence had no light, for it indicated the northern side, the darkness of corporeal nonbeing, which was followed by the new light in the east, the coming rebirth, the new light of arising.
Around this TAPIS, with its three lights in the east, south, and west, and its mystical darkness in the north, the Fellows of the builders' lodges made their symbolic migrations through the life of the immortal ego, of the spiritual ego, whose ways lead them through countless births and an untold number of lives in human form, toward an equal number of deaths, and through these into the darkness of the Primeval, in order to attain to new arising through many rebirths, to renewed life in renewed human bodies.
These migrations of the immortal ego are, however, intended to indicate not a circular development, but rather a continuous rising -- like a spiral staircase -- in order to approach the final aim of the highest perfection, of a similitude to the Nordic God, and ultimately to full union with the Nordic God in this spiral form.
All hieroglyphs which indicate the stepladder point to this end, but - and this is the important thing - but without ever losing the real rock solid foundation which lies firmly established in the recognised indivisibility of the physical from the spiritual, and in the acknowledged biune bifidic dyad.
It is in this that the main strength of the - indestructible! - Aryan religion lies.
While the Aryan Indian Buddhist acknowledges only the spiritual and disdains the physical (and so by maintaining his ethnic individuality has lost his political freedom), and while, on the other hand, the Mediterranean Aryans (Greeks and Romans) acknowledged only the physical, thereby quickly attaining a high culture and status as world powers, but through damage to their moral force lost the culture they had attained, and disappeared without a trace; the central European Aryans - the Teutonic peoples, including the Germans - by recognising the biune bifidic dyad cultivated the spiritual and physical as inseparable and coequal - and so they preserved not only their ethnic individuality, but their national freedom as well.
In possession of both of these, they were also able to hold on to their original Aryan Armanendom as a priestly class in contrast to all other peoples of the earth. In the symbolism of German administration of justice, a great number of such holy signs, symbols, and hieroglyphs are once more found: however, in a much more lively variety of forms than in painting (heraldry) or in sculpture (architecture).
This is because they served in matters of law as speaking attestations (as verbal and truthful signs), and as such were placed in opposition to the statements of witnesses and the living evidence.
Therefore they were neither painted nor chiselled not symbolised in any other way, but appeared in their natural state and therefore attained a very noteworthy meaning in their symbolic hieroglyphic interpretations.
In the administration of justice, too, the old Aryan tripartition is naturally found again as: 1. arising, or law (Cosmic Law) 2. the existing, ruling (justice), and 3. the passing away to renewed arising (the court).
Because law and justice culminate in the decisive pronouncement of the court (and, consequently, as the third level, this provided the final result) the holy sign of the court was the ruoth cross, rod cross, or rowel (wheel) cross, which was therefore also known as the Vehme cross: consisting of a fyrfos whose hooks were bent in the circular shape of a wheel rim.
As the Vehme cross, it appears engraved on the blade of the great Vehme sword as an equilateral cross enclosed by a circle.
At the cross point, the letter V appears, and furthermore, in the quadrants between the arms, the letters S.S.G.G. were engraved.
These letters probably displaced the formerly used runes and , which signified: Vehme, and the old passwords: string, stone, grass, branch, that is, white = law; brick = secret; rage = thunder = doing = Ar = right doing; greyen = to uphold; that is: Through law and underground lore, right doing is upheld. In abbreviated form this is S.S. and G.G.
In underground lore or Cosmic Law, all this signifies: present in the hidden, which exoterically refers to the watchfulness of the Vehme, esoterically to the omniscience of the Nordic God as the highest judge.
For this reason the ruoth cross was the symbol of the court, and it is for this reason that the crucifix on the bench of the modern judge should be seen - not as a symbol of religion - but rather as a substitute for the ruoth cross.
Wherever the words Rothenkreuz (red cross), Rothenburg (red castle), or even roth (red), Rad (wheel), Ratt (rat), and so on, occur in place names, there is where there was at one time marked steads of the Vehme, as, for example, near Hochroderd in the Viennese woods.
All red crosses that stand in lonely forests were at one time Irminsuls or Roland columns, that is, mark columns, which designate such marked steads (for basic information about this, that is, concerning the temple site, the holy stones, and marked steads at the red cross, and all red courts were at one time the property of the Wise of the Vehme (for example, the red court in the eighth parish in Vienna, at one time the town of Josephstadt).
Therefore speaking attestations were - as has been said - opposed to the living witnesses, and both were therefore considered as equal in German law. They were consequently memorial marks or tokens for the recollection of an original act; they were therefore pictorial signs, and hence hieroglyphs.
Such living images include the coif and breast, dogs, roosters, chickens, geese, and so on; speaking images include eggs, cheese, oats, grains, and so on; while memorials (also thought of as speaking) such as stones, hills, graves, trees, straw, twigs, helmets, shields, lances, axes and spurs, memorial coins, gloves, and so on, are well known. Mountains, hillocks, columns, rivers and brooks served as halls - likewise speaking attestations - and it is from these that we get hall mountains, rivers, forests, and fields.
These halls are not only borders, but also holy, and consequently also the target, the final goal. • The straw pulled from the field and handed over to the new owner was the speaking attestation of transfer (renunciation) or a property.
Hal is that which is hale and holy. The one leaving the land therefore gave over the property with all that was hale and holy still attached to it. In the drawing of straws, the longer straw decides the lot - as the greater boon (Heil). Even today we say: He drew the shorter one, when one has bad luck. • Similarly, the staff (sta-fa, standing) of steady generation, that is, life continuously renewing itself, is a much used hieroglyph. In the hand of the judge it is the wise staff - the guiding staff which guides the law - and so it is therefore white in colour, because white (wit, wyd) as a colour means law.
As a red staff - in the criminal court - it is the staff of justice (right staff), for red as a colour means justice (right, ruoth).
It is for this reason that the executioner wears a red coat.
For the condemned the staff is broken, that is, life is broken, just as he has broken the law, and is therefore called a lawbreaker. • The staff of the king is of gold. Gold as ore designates the descendants; the king preserves living justice for the future. The royal staff is called the sceptre, which, as scipan or scepan, means the shaper of justice (therefore those who occupied the courts were called the scephan = Schöffen, magistrate, juryman, as shapers or creators of justice, and not something like the Schöpfer - ladle, scooper - as in dipping water from a well. • The bishop's staff, crosier, is called the crooked staff.
However, being bent, crooked, or turned means an inverted life, that is, my kingdom is not of this earth; the bishop should, according to this hieroglyph, have no power in secular justice. In the investiture contest it was decided otherwise, however. • The hand is the sign of ownership, but also of personal freedom. The unfree man might neither give nor take by his own hand, but rather only by the hand of the magistrate; only the freedman had the power of his own hand. Only he, as a genuine property holder might take something away by his own hand. • From this idea come the expressions to promise by mouth and hand, and the magistrate shall manage the residents. • The bond (Handfeste, that is, something fixed by hand) is a document or letter ratified by a seal and signature. • The dead hand - of the unfree man - is one that can neither give nor take.
The modern concept of dead hand, referring to clerics, is not relevant here. • The Vehmic magistrate disposed with his left hand.
Again we are dealing with concealed sense or underground lore, for Ling (left) = head; he managed (behandelte) and he maintained (behauptete) the sentence that he shaped.
The imperial princes at the Imperial Diet disposed with the right hand. • Hand clapping was - and is still today - a sign of approval.
The investiture of royal jurisdiction without a retinue upon a man was carried out by the one being invested kneeling while holding his flat right hand in the flat right hand of the king.
This was a ceremonial handshake. • To get to the upper hand means to go to a higher court. • A chopped off hand or an ax on places or on government buildings hieroglyphically indicates municipal jurisdiction or baronial jurisdiction. • The hand with a sword is the hieroglyphic sign of jurisdiction, designating the supreme censure or the highest jurisdiction, and also the seat of government (the National House in Vienna). • The gloved hand indicates the protective jurisdiction, the civil court. From this we get the hand token (Handmal) as the sign of the court at a border stead (Malstatt, be this now a stone, a pillar, or whatever kind of mark (Malzeichen). • A bloody hand takes no inheritance, that is, whoever sullied his hands with human blood would lose his inheritance.
According to tribal law it fell to his next of kin.
But also no judge who judges with a bloody hand, that is, who exerts capital punishment, may take (confiscate) the property of the condemned man from his heirs.
Therefore: A life for a life, the property remains to the heirs, only the horse, harness, gear and coinage belongs to the magistrate, and whatever is above the belt to the bailiff and that below the belt to the hangman. • Much else could be said concerning the hand, handshake, and other hand signs, but this should suffice. • The hat was the hieroglyph of protection, and growing out of this, of the lord's justice.
In obviously meant shelter (die Hut, shelter) and guardian (die Hütung, guarding).
At the enfeoffment the liege and the vassal would grasp each other's hands inside a hat.
This signified that the vassal was under the shelter (die Hut) and protection of the liege, but also that the vassal was ready to aid the liege if he needed it. • The hat on a pole (Gessler's hat) is a sign of sovereignty; the village mayor who came to the auction of a bankrupt farmer's property entered the barnyard and stuck his walking stick (staff = life) in the ground in the middle of the yard and clapped his hat over it.
With this action he had taken possession of the farm, by right of his power. • Women swore by hair and breast: Ir rise das sol sin ir trouwe, that is, her hair (risan = that which grows), that is, her coif, shall be her troth (faithfulness).
The breast is the sign of nourishment, of wet nursing, of mothering, of Minne (Minne, Menne, Männe, Manne, Moraminne, Miromanne, Meremenne, and the rest = the woman who nourishes, the wet nurse).
Minne is memory.
This is why hair and breast is in the saying: Remember the one who grows - as a mother of future generations it is her duty to be mindful of, and to stand by, truth, justice, and Ar. Female breasts also mean the same thing in heraldry and architectural symbolism, for example, with the Wibare (ar-wife, see above), the sphinx, and so on. • Here it should still be remembered what was said above about the hound as a symbol of justice as well as a chivalric sign of shame in order to show how all three levels of the concepts mesh, and how one and the same hieroglyph can be -- according to their arrangement -- a sign of honour or shame.
This has only now been made comprehensible. • However, there also existed yet another foundation of concealed sense to which the reader's attention can only now be drawn, because this rule will only be comprehensible from the hair and breast example.
Above it was said that concealed sense secretly indicates the hidden meaning of words on some other level of interpretation, in which the Wise had to be able to recognise the concealed right sense - but when the profane hearer perceived and interpreted the word it was only comprehensible according to the listener's level of understanding.
Thus there came about many double meanings: Ar (sun) and Aar (eagle); fos (fot, as in fylfot) and Fuss (foot); fos (fot, as in fylfot) and Fuchs (fox); life and lion, birth and bear, Brake (setter) and Brecher (breaker, law breaker), and so on, are all to some certain extent direct concealments, while the examples hair and breast are known as indirect concealments.
Now, indirect concealments are based on a transposition of concepts, such as tress or lock for hair, that is, the collective for the singular; such as breast for the concept of motherhood, that is, the means for the end.
They stand, therefore, despite the poetic veiling, in very close associations of meaning with the intended interpretations.
For us, the difficulty of interpretation comes in because we have to look for this far off from the modern or usual meaning of the words, and often only after many detours can we recognise the interpretation - if ever found - as being one very close to what we sought.
In this regard, it should also be pointed out that the interpretation of a word in its concealed sense is never valid as a model for all other cases, but rather each one must be solves independently, even if the solution of one case can be of use as an analogy.
The rules valid for such variations just have to be found. Their causes may be discovered in local linguistic customs from the time period in which they originated and in other circumstances; however, in this regard, it may also be noted that even today hard and fast rules without exception are difficult to find.
This is because these variations demand free room to play and not narrow limitations.
These were living word pictures shaped from the living language, and were felt to be such.
This feeling has been lost through overuse.
Even today, there is a similar situation with double entendres and wordplays which will surely become incomprehensible to later generations for whom the contexts will have become quite strange.
In this regard, it must be expressly noted that concealed sense or underground lore is in no way comparable to such wordplays.
A further condition for the correct understanding of these holy signs, runes, symbols and hieroglyphs - and one which may never be ignored - lies in the clear comprehension of pre Christian ethics, as well as pre Christian morals.
One can never forget that Wotanism grew out of the intuitive recognition of evolutionary laws in natural life, out of the primal laws of nature, and that the exoteric Aryan religion formed by Wotanism spread a teaching and conducted a mode of living based on the laws of evolution.
It set for itself a final goal of bringing into being a noble race, whose destiny it was to be to educate itself and the rest of humanity as to the actual task of human beings.
This task consisted of the extension of the work of the Nordic God according to the intention of these laws - that is, to further the constant process of generation founded on the laws of evolution. In the recognition of the multiune multifidic multiplicity of the All and in the recognition of the eternity of the ego as an individual, which was recognised in all its countless preexistences and postexistences as immortality, the individual conquered the fear of death and led the consciousness of the folk, borne along by such a teaching, on another and a far more certain pathway toward a disdain for bodily death. This led to spiritual as well as physical heroism, to Armanism, and to their being the teachers of all other peoples.
Another religious system came and fought against Wotanism in that it disdained the physical and only recognised the spiritual, and ignorantly wanted to inhibit the process of evolution, processes that exist - and are therefore desired by the Nordic God - the incontrovertible primal laws of nature.
They intended to overcome the fear of death, by denying the preexistences and postexistences of individual selves in physical being, and in its place taught an eternal spiritual life divorced from the physical world.
This doctrine would -- if it could win lasting influence, which appears out of the question - destroy the noble race as well as heroism in the spiritual and physical realms, and in its place breed a population of slaves who would be forced to degenerate into the most dull witted shamanism - below even the cultural level of the Australian Aborigines - that is, if the will of the Nordic God, which expresses itself programmatically in the immutable laws of nature, would ever allow such a thing.
Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a lifedenying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions.
This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.
From the side of this false morality there developed that which the early medieval Germanic folk still called situlih that is, true wisdom.
This old word has been weakened to sittlich (moral, ethical, customary) in our modern language, and preserved with a completely altered meaning, which roughly translates as immoral.
This teaching, which accorded with the laws of nature, was openly distrusted as a sexual religion.
It hardly needs to be especially pointed out what a healing power just this distrusted sexual morality can exercise today, and what it will exercise in spite of everything, for the primal laws of nature are the divine law of primeval evolution, they are the will of the Nordic God, and therefore cannot be denied in the long run.
It is, however, precisely from the standpoint of this powerful morality (the true wisdom of Wotanism) that the holy signs and hieroglyphs must be examined, for Wotanism lifted women to the level of Goddesses, and lifted the procreative act (fyrfos, fa rune , ge rune , thurs rune , and so on) to a sacrament, while later cultural periods - which in a self satisfied manner fancied themselves to be exalted over the previous ones - set about to take away the divine status from women, to degrade them to prostitutes, and to profane the creative act of generation as a simple vice.
For only a few independent thinkers and their students has it become possible to renounce the learned moral theory, with all its hypocritical asceticism, and all its conventional policelike views that hem in all free thought, and to recognise in the old Aryan sexual morality the truly traditional and true wisdom - which must and will lead our folk to salvation.
Therefore, it is only those who will understand and value what is to follow, while the others, according to their inclinations, may be horrified.
Arising, being, passing away to renewed arising is the old Aryan Germanic primeval three; the fa rune opens and the ge rune closes the futharkh, the rune row.
Every exoteric system of religion, and so too the Wotanic exoteric Aryan religion, recognised human sacrifice as indispensible in appeasing the divinity.
But these human sacrifices are based on cannibalism, which is still echoed - even if it sounds mythical - in all religions in the form of blood rituals. Even in the Song of the Nibelungen it is reported that the heroes in Etzel's (Attila's) burning hall quenched their thirst with the blood of their fallen comrades, and in Poor Heinrich we get a detailed report of such a blood sacrifice - even if it is one mitigated to the level of a healing ritual.
So we are really not all that far away from the times of cannibalism.
What we call execution today is the last remnant of bloody human sacrifice.
Later, man made the transition from cannibalism to the eating of human flesh, even if the faith still demanded human sacrifice - prisoners of war, criminals, and, in the absence of these, slaves.
Only later did the representative animal sacrifice, and still later the representative bread sacrifice - whether in the form of sacrificial cakes or the host is irrelevant -- take its place.
Esoteric schools already recognised at an early time (see above) that the entire life span in a human body signifies a sort of sacrifice, but only very gradually could they cause the symbols to be transformed into bloodless ones, and to rescue from that faith the people who would have been sacrificed by substituting sacrificial cakes which were formed and named after the intended victims.
Even today during the consecration the priest says: This is my true blood!
This is my true flesh!
He has to repeat this during each sacrificial operation in the most ceremonial manner in order to convince his faithful that the substitute sacrifice is the will of the Nordic God. In spite of this there occurred as late as the seventeenth century so called black devil's masses, or coercive masses, which included actual human sacrifice (examples of excessively hideous black masses, which promoted the development of the most unrestrained imagination, are found in the History of Magdaleine Bavent, nun of the monastery of saint Louis of Louviers (Paris: Jacques the Gentile, 1652), and in Drugs and poisoners, by Doctor Legue, who used the records of the trial against Abbot Guibourg, a scandalous trial at the time of the Roi Soleil Louis XIV which compromised the highest aristocracy in such a way that it had to be hushed up as quickly as possible; these examples are said to be typical even for later times right up to the present day, as such spawns of madness celebrated their orgies in the mysteries of Satanism, and are thought to even still celebrate them).
If such things were happening in Christian - relatively recent - times, how hard might it, and must it, have been for the skalds to succeed in replacing bloody sacrifices with bloodless ones.
That they were successful is, however, shown by the forms and names of bread still in use today, which harken back far into the pre Christian ages. But here it should not be thought that they had been able to suppress bloody sacrifice completely, for attitudes and customs that are so deeply rooted only die out very slowly, and always revive again wherever the old faith - without esoteric leadership - sinks into superstition, sorcery, and fetishism, such as it turns out to be in witchcraft and the lore of the witches' Sabbath.
These substitute sacrifices were so called sacrificial cakes or sacrificial breads, and they symbolised the human body in whose stead they were brought to the Nordic Gods as sacrifice.
Later other shapes also symbolised animal bodies, and still later even symbols or holy signs of the Nordic Gods themselves by which the sacrificer, who consumed the sacrificial food, thought to sanctify himself.
Here we already have the three basic designations: bread, cake, and loaf. Bread (berod; ber = to bear, to generate; od = spirit, intellect, wit; therefore an artificial product generated by wit and intellect) is considered one of the first products of the human gift of innovation, and certainly the first artificially prepared food, which is already indicated in the name.
Cake (Kuchen; kok = to prepare; an = origin; therefore, mother cake, to which the idea of birth is attached = symbol of the feminine) was already the first representative sacrificial baked good substituted for a woman.
Loaf, which in some dialects is still called lab Brot, loaf bread (lab = life, body (Leib) of the human, life) is such a representation, which is indicated by the navellike impression in the middle of a typical German loaf of bread such as the Kaiser roll.
As a loaf, bread was designated as being suitable as a sacrifice. Now, however, there occurs in addition to these an absolutely incomprehensible quantity of bread and pastry forms, which appear to be explicable only according to what has been said above. • The Wecken (breakfast roll) is the male member as the awakener of procreation, symbolically designating the man in order to substitute for him as a sacrificial offering. • The Baunzerl represents femininity in exactly the same sense. • The Stangl (salted bread stick) is the staff (sta-fa; sta = standing, steady; fa = procreation; therefore: steady procreation) and designates continuous procreation, while the salt (sal = salvation, hale) strewn and baked on it makes this form of bread recognisable as a talking image of the constant salvation of procreation. • The Kipfel (cyphen = bowed, therefore also called Hörndel, croissant) is the mood horn, and it has already been shown above how the moon is associated with femininity.
The crescent moon as the Wendehorn is, however, also the rune of Freya, who promotes childbirth.
A skaldic circumlocution which explains the Kipfel and Hörndel as the golden horseshoes of Wotan's steed which the lucky find in the grass is merely concealed sense, and again relates to the childbearing principle. In the rough of life the lucky ones find the mother of their children, the one who prepares the future. • The Semmel (se = sun, spirit, soul; mel = meal, to mill or marry) is divided into five parts, and therefore represents the Femstar or Vehmstar or the witch's foot, the pentagram (see above), and symbolises rebirth.
The maternal, physical binds (mills or marries) itself to the spiritual in continual return to rebirth. • The Bretze (pretzel) (bere = to bear; tze, tse, se = to make, and therefore conducive to birth) is in the form of the bar rune, and not, as is falsely interpreted, in the form of a wheel. • The pretzel, also called a Fastenbretze (fasting pretzel) (fas = generation; ten = to withhold), was therefore a symbolic, holy food, which proclaimed the warning to refrain from sexual intercourse during pregnancy.
We may not regard such symbols in a limited way as divine coercion or as coercion exercised through religious proscriptions; they were much more a well thought out and effective means of educating a naïve folk spirit, and as such are the founding pillars of later hygienic proscriptions upon which our society still rests today. • The Kringel (little ring, cracknel) (kar = to enclose; ringel = ring; enclosed in the ring; or also from krink = circle, that is, the orbit) is the course of the sun, or life, of the eternal return. • The Krapfen, Kroppel, or Krapfel was the sacrificial pastry which was offered and consumed in the second half of the great festival of beginnings, which we call Yule, or Holy Nights.
The first half of the festival, from the twenty fourth of December to the thirtieth of December, stood for the creation of the world and for the past; the thirty first of December was the cleft in time, which divided and bound past and future - the now; while the second half, from the first of January to the sixth of January, was the celebration of the mystery of the creation of man (generation) and of the future.
This then lined up with Fasching (fas = generating; ing = continuous, descended from something; see Ing-fo above).
Furthermore, the Krapfen (crap = to tear out or to tear down; fen, fe, fa = generation) served as a symbol of the awakening of life and was therefore the food eaten as Fasching. • The Fladen (flat cake) (Osterfladen, Osterflecken) was the Easter pastry and the Easter sacrifice. Fladen means pure, and is still preserved in the woman's name Elsfleth. Ostern (Easter) (os = mouth, vagina; tar = generating) is the festival of the marriage of the Sun God with the Earth Goddess, the festival of the regeneration of natural life; the pure virginal Earth Goddess enters into the bonds of marriage with the Sun God -- this indicates the name and form of the Fladen. • The Stritzel or Heiligenstritzel (holy Stritzel) was the sacrificial bread of the great festival of the dead, that today we celebrate in Christian form as All Souls' or All Hallows'.
It is braided together out of three long pieces of dough in a manner similar to braiding a person's hair.
The name of this sacred bread (Struzzel, from striuza, stra, stoh = empty, to part with, to take away; and therefore straw, Stroh, as the empty stalk, from which we get the crown of straw as a sign of shame, the straw maid; but stro is also return, and therefore straw widower, grass widower - so that here we have a picture of death and the coming rebirth) therefore hieroglyphically gave reassurance that we will se our dead loved ones again after rebirth.
It is also for this reason that it has the symbolic tripartition of the tresslike form. • The Vierfussel (four footer), a favourite Yule pastry, that is even today frequently chosen as a Yule tree decoration, is in the shape of the swastika formed by two S shapes cross each other, and it indicates -- even if today it is unconscious, like almost every other pastry shape and name -- the ancient holy fyrfos. • The Beugel (bowed one) is a subordinate form and subordinate name of the Kipfel. • The Mohnbeugel (poppy bread) as a Yuletide food points to the moon and man as well as to Minne = memory. • Now, we should also call to mind the Lebzelten (gingerbread tent) of the Lebkuchen (gingerbread cake) - an old Germanic sacred pastry.
Leb comes from the root word laf, from which the word Laib (loaf) is also derived, and now means in the first, arising level: loving, generating, and so on; in the second, being level or becoming level: life, body, liver, and so on; in the third, the passing away toward new arising level: death, fermentation, curdling, and so on, from which we get the lee barrow = grave mound or mountains of the dead.
The gingerbread tent therefore also has three meanings, as can be recognised even today in the things to which it is dedicated.
It is a symbol of love and of symbolic declarations of love in its forms as a child in swaddling, rider, cock rider, heart, and so on, the forms of which are, of course, hieroglyphs.
As festival pastries, so to speak as pastries of life, it has the most various forms, such as fishes (good luck fishes), and so on, while it is recognised as a pastry for offerings to the dead in the shape of a round or rectangular (fyroge, see above) tent.
This latter form refers to the symbolic journeys through birth, life, dying, death and rebirth (therefore fruit kernels and seeds are baked into the three corners, which so well symbolise the three great lights).
The name tenting (Zelten (from tent, Zelt), that is, tel = generation, hence Telt = the generated, the earth, and Tellus, the Earth God), however, points to birth as well as to resurrection. • In addition to these, however, one pastry of mockery - of which many existed and still exist - may be mentioned, which to some extent falls outside the majority of gingerbread tentings.
These are actually made in two colours.
They are baked out of light yellow dough and are triangular in shape, bulging out like a pillow.
They are filled with a dark brown mass of similar dough, which seems to well up out of the light dough through a slit in the covering.
This package of very ancient usage is euphemistically called a wind bag, but its correct name is nun's fart.
The interpretation of the name must be more exhaustively treated: Nun (Nonne) means lonely, sterile, unfit, injurious; this is why some destructive insects are designated by this word.
This word was already present when women's cloisters came into being, and so their inhabitants were designated by an already available word.
The pastry and its name therefore have nothing to do with cloistered women.
The modifying word is derived from the root word fas, and designates offspring.
So the whole indicates something begotten by the unfit, something airy or hollow.
The giving of such a pastry was an expression of scorn, usually directed toward old maids, or perhaps in another way that mocked some disability. Connected to this are numerous customs practised on Shrovetide Tuesdays to mock old maids; practices which, however, betray deep meaning.
The expression old furniture (altes Möbel) for older, unmarried girls is not in the transferred sense borrowed from an old piece of domestic equipment, but rather directly: old moevel = meovel = unfit, infertile.
The unmarried status for a girl was, in that era - a time in which marriage was held in high esteem for ecological reasons - no enviable one.
Shrovetide Tuesday was the Shrovetide Thing Day, a day for holding court, which was originally held in bloody seriousness, and which only later assumed farcical characteristics in Christianised Germania.
Numerous customs remind us of this pre Christian seriousness, among them also the very ancient Viennese folk custom in which the old maids have to rub the tower of saint Stephen's church on Shrovetide Tuesday.
This scene forms one element in the program of the different Shrovetide parades every year.
This is again concealed sense or underground lore, and is solved according to the code words: old maids rubbing Stephen's tower, alte Jungfer Stephansturm reiben, as follows: mona stafa thurn ri ban, that is, unfruitful steady generation wend wax death or ban; which means: from the infertile, who do not live up to their procreative responsibilities, grows death or curses.
The contemptuous insult in German: das Mensch (slut) may have such a curse to thank for its origin.
The unfortunate one who escaped death was cursed and forced to do menial tasks of servitude; deprived of her former human value, she was now only an object --das Mensch. With these examples about runes, holy signs, symbols, hieroglyphs, and so on, neither these themselves nor even the areas in which they occur, have been exhausted - just think of the thousands of pre Christian sayings.
But certainly enough has been shown to indicate that an uncommonly large hoard of such otherwise unperceived mystical signs is present whose meanings are relatively easy to find.
But it would have to be the subject and task of a great systematically arranged work to collect all of those signs in their many interrelations, to refer to all the areas in which they might be discovered, to ascertain their exact interpretations, and only on this confirmation to reproduce the old Aryan Germanic picture writing completely - so that all the scattered pictographic works can be deciphered with complete certainty to everyone's satisfaction.
The task could not fall to an essay of the kind that this one represents.
It was sufficient here to show and to confirm by means of incontrovertible proofs (and we Teutons possess a great hoard of such evidence) that the seven seals of the secret of the runes and holy signs have been broken.
Emerging from this secret, however, was a direction of special interest for our present purposes; and - with the omission of other disciplines - this study was therefore devoted exclusively to this one direction, that is, to the old Aryan worldview as a foundation of the Aryan Germanic philosophy, and to the ethics and esotericism that results from this philosophy.
The formation of myths, folk tales, and sagas, and of customs and practices, could only be considered in passing; the same is true of the lore of nature, of the earth, and stars, while history and still other areas of knowledge could receive no mention at all - for even the main area itself (despite all efforts at thoroughness and exhaustiveness) could only be illuminated on the most important points.
The pivotal point of the old Aryan Germanic worldview laid down in the runes and holy signs and of its theosophical metaphysical understanding, however, rests on the clear understanding of a higher spiritual being - the Nordic God! that consciously and with intention engendered or created matter, with which it bound itself indivisibly until their passing away; with matter equally indivisible from being - ruling within matter - this being controls and develops it until matter has fulfilled the aim for which it was engendered, whereupon it will again be dissolved and a higher form of being - the Nordic God! - will again be dematerialised as the Primeval, which it was before the engendering of the world.
From this main point of understanding, the following points of knowledge may be deduced: 1. the biune bifidic dyad (spirit and body); 2. the triune trfidic triad (the Primeval, the All, the Primeval; past, present, future; arising, being, passing away to new arising); 3. the multifidic multiune multiplicity (the ego in the All as All); 4. the divine internity; since every ego is a part of the Nordic God, and therefore is immortal as an individual, it consequently only migrates along the way through matter toward eternity through the mutation of uncounted preexistences, present existences, and postexistences; 5. the recognition of duty to help to develop and perfect the work of the Nordic God; 6. the will to fulfil this duty, because the will of the Nordic God must be the personal will of every ego; and 7. the act of fulfilment, through the sacrifice of one's life.
Upon this esoteric doctrine rest all exoteric teachings; the same appear set down in all attestations of skaldic poetry, as well as in all rules of life and hieroglyphic commandments of the skaldic force of coercion (see above).
Just to cite one example: Wotanism assures those who fall in battle of a heroic heaven with eternal joy in Valhalla.
Whoever was killed in battle became one of the Einherjar (warriors of Valhalla) -- which excluded renewed existence as a human being -- and this was supposed to unite the warrior permanently with the Nordic Godhead.
This is an apparent contradiction of the esoteric teaching - but only an apparent one!
The Teuton who trusted in his esoteric faith went to die in battle with firm conviction - with the power of unquestioned autosuggestion! - that he would enter into Valhalla as one of the warriors of Valhalla (see above), there to enjoy the eternal bliss of battle and love.
This unquestioning conviction -- whether it arose from knowledge or faith - works as a powerful autosuggestion at the moment of death, and where possible this firm spiritual conception is promoted by the hypnotic suggestion sent from afar by a skald, a seeress (Albruna), or by his comrades in arms.
This conception (see above) was recognised as spiritual protection, which influenced the conduct of life in the next period of reincarnation in a determinative way, so that such a man - as the expression goes - is born already a hero, in that he begins his next human existence already more conscious than others, and he has himself born into appropriate circumstances of life, or when this does not go smoothly, the unconscious power - the dark impulse - manifests itself to overcome all restricting limitations in order to reach its goal.
Phenomena, such as, for example, a Bismarck, who was already convinced in his youth that it was his destiny to unify Germany, are only explicable by means of such a supposition.
On the other hand, the phenomena of personalities such as those who are able to introduce their trailblazing thoughts to the world only at an advanced age, without achieving success, are recognised as spirits who - only beginning to awaken and to recognise their tasks too late - are forced to steel their spiritual power against their - apparent - failures, in order to complete their unfinished work in their next rebirth, or perhaps in several renewed human incarnations.
This is possible if they go into death with the firm conviction of the truth and necessity of their purpose.
In this case, they will present themselves in their next human life as figures such as that of a Bismarck, a Columbus, a Luther, or many another (only from the standpoint of this supposition is a previously incomprehensible passage in the bible (Mark, X:29) explicable; there Christ speaks directly of rebirth and of the victory of his idea in a renewed human body: Many will be the last, who are the first, and many the first, who are the last.).
Again, only by means of such a supposition is it clear why we often have to look back centuries for the origins of ideas that have shaken the world, how they are constantly suppressed and forgotten but again - without perceptible inner context - suddenly flame up again as if born anew to gain final victory.
This esoterically explains the exoteric promise of Valhalla, as well as its fulfilment: the warriors of Valhalla who fall as sacrifices for their ideas, whether on the battlefield, at the stake, or by starvation - the sacrifices of the modern excommunicant, of the boycotted heroes of the spirit - all find in the conviction of their martyrdom that allconquering bliss and in life after death that state of happiness which determines their next human incarnation and which leads them to a renewed heroid career and to final victory.
This is the promised Valhalla: heroic providence in future epochs of life in renewed human bodies.
Those who die a straw death (peaceful death in bed -- see above) go to Thrundheim to become the servants of Thór (Donar).
After what has already been said, this needs no further interpretation.
Redemption also awaits them in future incarnations, until they are successful in remembering the mission that has become theirs and in fulfilling their task.
Thus in the course of uncounted generations all men will become warriors of Valhalla, and their state - willed and preordained by the Nordic Godhead - of general liberty, equality, and fraternity will be reached.
This is that state which sociologists long for and which socialists want to bring about by false means, for they are not able to comprehend the esoteric concept that lies hidden in the triad: liberty, equality, fraternity, a concept which must first ripen and mature in order that someday it can be picked like a fruit from the World Tree.
That which I have been permitted to offer here in a brief outline as the revealed secret of the runes, appears at first glance to be quite surprising, mainly due to its simplicity.
However, it may not be overlooked that in spite of this, as one penetrates deeper into the secret, it becomes variously interlaced by all the intertwining and apparently confusing lines in the whirl of which one amazingly comes to understand the multiune multifidic multiplicity / unity of the All - and the Nordic Godhead itself.
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