Esoteric schools

It starts in 1902

Rune occultism has a start date, which is unusual for an esoteric tradition and extremely useful.

In 1902 the Austrian writer Guido von List underwent cataract surgery and spent eleven months blind. During that period, by his own account, he received a revelation of the true meaning of the runes. He published the results in Das Geheimnis der Runen, The Secret of the Runes, in 1908.

What he produced was the Armanen Futharkh: a row of eighteen runes, which he derived from the eighteen charms Óðinn lists in the Ljóðatal of the Hávamál.

That number is the tell. No historical runic alphabet has eighteen letters. The Elder Futhark has twenty-four, the Younger Futhark sixteen, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc twenty-nine or more. Von List reverse-engineered a row to fit a stanza count in a thirteenth-century Icelandic poem, and presented it as the original from which all the others had degenerated.

Before 1902 there is no rune occultism to speak of. Runes were an antiquarian and philological subject, deciphered by Sophus Bugge and studied by linguists. Everything esoteric attached to them afterwards descends, directly or at a remove, from a blind man's vision in Vienna.

What happened next

Von List's system did not stay in the occult bookshops.

It was taken up by the Völkisch movement — a German nationalist current combining folk revivalism, racial theory and mysticism — for which an ancient Germanic wisdom-script suppressed by Christianity was an extremely useful idea.

From there it entered the Third Reich. Karl Maria Wiligut, an occultist who claimed ancestral memory reaching back thousands of years, became an SS officer and adviser to Heinrich Himmler, working on runic and ritual matters at Wewelsburg.

The consequences are visible on objects. The SS insignia is a doubled Sowilo, designed in 1932 by Walter Heck, reaching that form through von List's misreading of the rune as Sig, victory. Algiz was used as the Lebensrune, the life rune, on Lebensborn documents, with the inverted form marking deaths. Othala appeared on SS division insignia. Tiwaz appeared on training-unit badges. A modified Wunjo served as a Hitler Youth rural-service badge.

This is not an obscure footnote and it is not ancient history. Othala remains listed in the Anti-Defamation League's Hate Symbols Database. The doubled Sowilo is illegal to display in Germany and several other countries. Some of these shapes are still in active use by far-right groups.

None of it has any connection to the Iron Age. It is a twentieth-century appropriation of a two-thousand-year-old alphabet, and knowing that is the difference between using a letter and unknowingly quoting a movement.

The postwar rebuild

The rune revival that most people encounter today is a later and largely separate development, built after the war and mostly in English.

Ralph Blum, The Book of Runes, 1982. Commercially enormous, packaged with a set of tiles, and the direct ancestor of modern rune casting. Blum was candid that he had modelled his method on the I Ching and tarot, used an ordering of his own, and introduced the blank rune, which has no historical basis whatsoever.

Edred Thorsson (Stephen Flowers), from the mid-1980s, brought actual philological training to the subject — he holds a doctorate in Germanic studies — and produced a considerably more historically engaged system. Most of the elemental and deity correspondences now presented as traditional come from this strand.

Freya Aswynn, Leaves of Yggdrasil, 1988, developed a parallel system with a strong emphasis on the Norse sources and on personal practice.

Between them these three account for most of what a rune set's booklet says. That work is thoughtful and much of it is well informed. It is also forty years old, and it is not what an Iron Age carver believed.

The honest description of a modern correspondence table is: a late-twentieth-century synthesis, drawing on medieval poems, informed by philology of varying quality, and shaped by whichever author's system the compiler happened to read.

Modern Heathenry is a separate question

It is important not to collapse two different things, and popular writing frequently does.

Heathenry — also Ásatrú, Forn Siðr, and other names — is a contemporary religious movement reconstructing pre-Christian Germanic practice. It is a recognised religion in several countries; Iceland's Ásatrúarfélagið was granted recognition in 1973 and has been building a temple in Reykjavík. It has clergy, congregations, ritual calendars, and a substantial body of internal debate about method and sources.

Within it there is a well-documented and openly acknowledged split. Inclusive or universalist Heathenry holds that the religion is open to anyone; folkish Heathenry restricts it on ancestral or ethnic grounds and is where the movement's overlap with the far right sits. Major inclusive organisations have issued explicit public statements rejecting racism, and the argument between the two camps is conducted in the open.

So: the fact that a rune shape was used by the SS does not tell you anything about the person wearing it now, and a very large number of people use runes with no political content whatsoever. Equally, the history is real and some groups do use these symbols deliberately.

The practical consequence is narrow and worth stating: a few specific shapes carry public meaning their user does not control. Othala and the doubled Sowilo are the clearest. That is a fact about how a symbol will be read, not a judgement about who is reading it.

How to check a claim

Because the lineage is documented, claims about rune meanings can be traced, and a few questions do most of the work.

Which alphabet is this? If a system has eighteen runes, it is Armanen and it is invented. If it uses the Elder Futhark's twenty-four with Blum's ordering, it is 1982.

Is there a blank rune? Then the set descends from Blum, whatever else it claims.

Which poem is the meaning from? Kenaz means illumination follows one English witness against two Norse ones. That is a defensible editorial choice and it should be visible as one.

Is a reversed meaning offered for a symmetrical rune? Nine of the twenty-four cannot be reversed. A book supplying merkstave readings for Isa or Gebo is not working from the shapes.

Is the source named? Ancient Norse tradition holds is almost always Thorsson suggests or von List asserted. The named version is more useful and no less interesting.