Armanen Runes
Os
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Origin 1902 to 1908
Os is the fourth of the Armanen row and keeps the name of the Younger Futhark oss, which meant a god of the Aesir. List read it as the mouth, the breath, and speech: the ordering word that turns thought into form, and by extension spiritual power exercised through language. He built a good deal of his system on etymology, deriving hidden meanings from resemblances between words, and Os is a case where the method is visible and where philologists have not followed him. Armanen practice draws it for eloquence, for teaching, for the spoken formula, and for the authority that speech carries when it is true.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1902 to 1908 2Tradition: Armanen system (Guido von List) Origin Period800 to 1100 CE 1Tradition: Younger Futhark, the historical row von List built on Origin PeriodSixteen of the eighteen Armanen characters adapt the historical Younger Futhark script, in documented use across Scandinavia from about 800 to 1100 CE. The row itself was published by the Austrian occultist Guido von List, first as a periodical article in 1906 and then in full as Das Geheimnis der Runen in 1908. 2 Place of OriginVienna, Austria-Hungary. 2 Attributed Author / CompilerGuido von List (1848-1919). He published the row as a periodical article in 1906 and as Das Geheimnis der Runen in 1908, and did not present it as an invention: his claim was that he had recovered the secret alphabet of an 'Armanen' priest-king caste of a pre-Christian Aryan civilisation. No trace of such a caste exists in any source. 2 Origin of the NameAdapted from the historical Scandinavian rune name oss, 'god'. Sixteen of the eighteen Armanen characters are the Younger Futhark, the row genuinely used across Scandinavia in the Viking Age, and their names are largely the historical Scandinavian names, sometimes lightly altered. The meanings von List attached to them are new. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe Armanen row was formulated inside an Austrian volkisch milieu, was taken up by the Germanenorden and by later Ariosophical and SS-adjacent runic enthusiasts, and is today used both in ordinary modern esotericism and on the far right. The row itself does not distinguish the two, which is why its origin has to be stated rather than assumed. 2 Order
Position in the Sequence Attributions
Associated Sound Learn More
The Armanen Rune Os
Os is one of the eighteen Armanen runes, the runic row devised by the Austrian occultist Guido von List and published in his Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes) in 1908, developing ideas he had begun to set out from about 1902. It is given the sound-value O.
The rune and its meaning
Von List did not recover an ancient alphabet. He built his eighteen runes on the sixteen characters of the Younger Futhark, expanded to eighteen to match the eighteen rune-charms of the Havamal in the Poetic Edda, and assigned to each a mystical meaning of his own. In his system Os stands for the mouth and the breath of the Ase-gods, spiritual power and the shaping word; the arising of speech and of conscious mind.
These readings are von List's early twentieth-century esoteric invention, not the meanings of the historical Viking-age runes, and are described here as such. The Armanen system was later taken up by volkisch and, in the 1930s and 1940s, National Socialist circles; that political appropriation is a separate and widely condemned chapter, and forms no part of the historical or comparative study of the row set out here.
What von List Took for Os
The eighteen Armanen runes are Guido von List's, published in 1908. Reading one of them means separating the attested character underneath from the layer he put on top.
The character behind it
Os corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose Old Norse name was oss or ass, meaning a god of the Aesir, and whose Old English counterpart carried the name os. The Old English word can mean either a god or a mouth, and the rune poem plays on both. The character's sound value shifted across the Norse and English traditions, which is why its transliteration varies between A and O depending on the corpus.
What von List did with it
He fixed the value at O, retitled the character Os, and assigned it a meaning within his own system. The genuine ambiguity in the historical record is not what he was recording; he was building a row of eighteen and needed a vowel in this position.
The claim and the reception
Von List presented the eighteen as the recovered alphabet of an ancient Germanic priesthood, with the count set by the eighteen rune-charms of the Havamal. Historians of runology treat the row as an early twentieth-century construction and do not accept the recovery claim.
The Armanen row was subsequently taken up in volkisch circles and by National Socialist organisations during the 1930s and 1940s. That is documented, and the atlas states it rather than leaving it out.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attributed To
Devised by von List, by his own account during the temporary blindness following his 1902 cataract surgery, and published in Das Geheimnis der Runen in 1908.
Contained In
One of the eighteen runes of the Armanen row.
Derived From
Ansuz, Runes Von List's Os (the god-rune) derives from the Elder Futhark Ansuz (god, breath, the word).
Disciplines That Use This
The Armanen row, a twentieth century system rather than a historical futhark.
Originates in Language
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