Who was Guido von List, and what did his 'Armanen runes' actually come from?

Guido Karl Anton List was born on October 5, 1848, in Vienna, to a prosperous, Roman Catholic, middle-class family, and died on May 17, 1919. According to Goodrick-Clarke's scholarly account, List began his career conventionally, as a journalist writing on Austrian rural folk culture and customs for nationalist newspapers from 1877 onward, developing a strong völkisch emphasis on what he considered authentic pre-Christian German heritage. His turn toward occultism accelerated during an eleven-month period of blindness he suffered in 1902 (following a cataract operation), during which he said he received insight into what he called 'Wotanism' (his claimed revival of the ancient pre-Christian religion of the Germanic peoples) along with an inner esoteric teaching he termed Armanism, drawn partly from his reading of Theosophical literature.

Out of this period came List's best-known invention: the eighteen 'Armanen runes,' a set of symbols he said he received in mystical insight and described in his 1908 book Das Geheimnis der Runen ('The Secret of the Runes'). The Armanen runes are not historical runes; they are List's own modern invention, loosely modeled on the genuinely ancient Younger Futhark alphabet used by early medieval Germanic peoples, reshaped and reinterpreted to fit List's claims about a lost Aryan spiritual hierarchy. List taught that an ancient caste of initiated priest-kings called the 'Armanenschaft' had once ruled Germanic society through esoteric wisdom encoded in these symbols, wisdom he claimed had survived underground through the Christian era and which he alone was now recovering.

List's growing following among völkisch and pan-German nationalist circles led to the founding of the Guido von List Society in 1908, funded by upper-class patrons, which published his writings and maintained an inner circle, the High Armanen Order, with List presiding as Grand Master. Along with Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, List is credited by Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism as a co-founder of Ariosophy, the racial-occult movement that fused this invented Germanic paganism with claims of Aryan racial superiority; the Germanenorden, a nationalist secret society founded in 1912 partly under List's influence, later gave rise to the Thule Society, which had documented ties to early figures in the Nazi movement. List's system stands opposed to Christianity on its own terms (he explicitly framed his Wotanism as a recovery of pre-Christian German paganism the church had suppressed, not as any variant within the Christian tradition), and his racial-hierarchical reading of that paganism carries the same historical weight of consequence documented in the broader Ariosophy movement he helped found.