Guido Von List - Ideology

Ideology

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.

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.

This conception bears strong resemblance to many other 19th century romanticised ideas of ancient polytheistic religions in Europe; a comparatively similar text in the thematic elements and overall textual bias is the famous Oera Linda forgery from the Lowlands region of western Europe.

He also believed in magical powers of the old runes. In 1891 he claimed that heraldry was based on the magic of the runes. In April 1903, he had sent 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. Although the article was rejected by the academy, it would later be expanded by List and become the basis for his entire ideology.

Among his ideological followers was Lanz von Liebenfels. More controversially, some allege that, in his pagan-Theosophical synthesis, List developed the direct precursor of occult Nazism. His defenders counter that any influence was indirect and inconsequential; in Nazi Germany the strongest occult influence upon Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was Brigadeführer Karl Maria Wiligut who believed List's Armanism to be a heresy from his own ancestral religion of Irminism and had various of List's followers interned in concentration camps.

List's concept of renouncing Christianity, a Semitic religion intertwined with Judaism, and returning to the pagan religions of the ancient Europeans did nevertheless find some supporters within the Nazi party and is favoured by some advocates of Neo-Nazism and White Nationalism in their turn. Germanic paganism has, as a result, been linked to Nazism since the early twentieth century — unfairly, in the eyes of many pagan revivalists.

List’s Ariosophy was closely related to the philosophy of the Thule Society. In 1919, Anton Drexler, a member of the Thule Society, founded the German Workers’ Party (DAP), the predecessor of the Nazi party (NSDAP). List’s prophecy that a “German Messiah” would save Germany after World War I was popular among Thule members. Thule member and publicist Dietrich Eckart expressed his anticipation in a poem he published in 1919, months before he met Hitler for the first time. In the poem, Eckart refers to ‘the Great One’, ‘the Nameless One’, ‘Whom all can sense but no one saw’. When the Thules met Hitler in 1919, many believed him to be the prophesied redeemer. As most Thule members were socially and politically influential, their faith was crucial to Hitler’s meteoric rise.