A Book With a Political Afterlife

The book did not stay a curiosity of Vienna occultism. List's Armanism supplied a vocabulary of Germanic priesthood, ancient wisdom and racial descent to a milieu that fed directly into the volkisch movement, and societies formed around his teaching in Austria and Germany before the First World War. Historians of that milieu treat him as one of the principal figures through whom nineteenth century esotericism reached the ideological environment in which National Socialism formed.

Two of the runes he named were taken up as emblems by organisations of the Nazi state, in forms recognisable from his row rather than from the historical alphabets. That adoption is not incidental to the book and cannot be separated from it by pointing out that List died before it happened. The row was designed to carry a doctrine of ancestral and racial recovery, and the doctrine is what was taken. The atlas catalogues the work because it is the origin of a rune system still in use, and because covering new religion on the same terms as old means recording modern constructions rather than quietly omitting them. Recording it includes recording this, which is the part most likely to be left out of a practitioner account and is not optional here.