Man

The pairing of Man with its inversion Yr is genuinely List's, and what was subsequently done with the pair is a matter of printed record rather than inference.

The pair in the system

Man, the fifteenth rune, is the Younger Futhark madr, a human being. Yr, the sixteenth, is the same figure inverted, historically a yew or a bow. The visual relationship is real and old; the two characters genuinely are one another upside down.

List read them as a polarity. Man reaches upward, spirit, increase, the link between the human and the divine. Yr reaches downward, root, matter, the moon, error, the end of a cycle.

What they became

During the 1920s and 1930s the two were adopted in Germany as the Lebensrune and the Todesrune, the life rune and the death rune, and put to a specific documentary use: printed in place of the words for born and died.

They appear in that role in:

• genealogical and ancestry registers of the period, where proof of descent was an administrative requirement
• paperwork of the Lebensborn programme, which took its name from the life rune
• death notices in the press
• grave markers and memorials, including SS ones

Both characters remain current in far-right symbolism and are catalogued as such by organisations that track extremist iconography.

Reading them now

This does not make the medieval madr rune a fascist symbol, any more than a letter of the alphabet can be. But the Armanen Man is not the medieval madr. It is List's reading of it, and it is List's reading that was adopted.

Anyone drawing this rune for the increase and human flourishing it was supposed to signify should know what else it has signified, and how recently.

The Armanen row is Guido von List's, published in 1908. This character and its inverted partner have a documented later history that has to be stated with them.

The character behind it

Man corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose Old Norse name was madr, meaning man in the sense of a human being. The rune poems gloss it as the joy of man and the increase of dust, a memento mori, and the Old English tradition reads its equivalent in the same register.

What von List did with it

He kept the M value and the name in German form, and read the character as life and the human being upright. In his system the inverted form of the same character, which he calls Yr, carries the opposite reading.

The afterlife

That upright and inverted pair was taken up in National Socialist Germany as a printed convention: the upright character used to mark a birth date and the inverted one a death date in printed announcements and records of the period. The pairing is von List's and the usage is documented.

The atlas records this because the two characters are still encountered in that role and the history explains why. It is not a claim about the medieval rune, which is attested for centuries before any of it and carries no such convention.

The Armanen row as a whole was taken up in volkisch circles and by National Socialist organisations in the 1930s and 1940s.