Guido von List: Our Foundation

     Guido von List is a foundational figure in modern Asatru. As a child, he simply developed an obsession with pre-Christian religious sites in Austria. These were initially Roman-pagan, but he quickly learned that there were people in Austria before the Roman empire, and they were called Teutons and indeed had a religious and cultural history. He studied Tacitus and the other classical writers, and in a flash of inspiration decided that instead of simply studying the ancient Germanic gods, he would worship them as if the Christian millennium had not intervened. List was not however created in a vacuum; there were many proto-archaeologists working diligently throughout Europe at this time, completely overthrowing Christian dogma in the field of history and science. Von List is important to us as being a conduit between the researchers of the late 18th and early 19th century and the modern resurgence of our ancient religion today. 

    One book that is invaluable as introduction to List is "Testimony of the Spade" by Bibby. This is an extremely readable and exciting introduction to the major archaeological events of the early 1800's. Many people will say Darwin or Nietzsche were the great minds who overthrew Christanity, however this is quite misguided. The real overthrow happened about fifty years prior, from the Scandinavian nobility. The Scandinavian nobility had large landholdings, and had begun collecting ancient artifacts as early as the 17th and 18th century, but it had been scattered and uncataloged. Slowly but surely the identification of metal technology revealed the ancient past of Europe, and the Biblical chronology was revealed as nonsense. In order to bolster the discovery of the "ages" -stone, iron, bronze, the Scandinavians also pioneered dendritic (tree-ring) dating, sedimentary dating on ocean cliffs, and simple depth dating. Caves were spelunked, boundaries charted, and sacrificial sites identified. This activity yielded cultural and scientific information that completely upended the Biblical account for all time. The new information in turn yielded the Romantic movement in the early-mid 19th century, which culminated in usable translations of the Edda and other pre- and early Christian literary source material. 

    Enter Guido von List, raised as Catholic, but with a far advanced understanding of actual history that had been hitherto impossible under the Christian "5000 years old or die" regime. List was an avid mountaineer, hiker and explorer, but also an intellectual, reading Roman authors in the original Latin. He syncretized the latest archaeological and literary sources with these Latin writers, and essentially began what we would probably call "Odinism". He had a circle of followers, but it's unknown exactly how much of what we would recognize as actual Asatru religion they practiced. There was an enormous amount (1,000 years!) of Christian brainwashing and cultural domination that had to be overthrown, and this has been a very, very piecemeal process with two steps forward and one step back for the last 130 years. Odinism itself is now somewhat discredited as "monotheism", as essentially being Christianity with a veneer. Mixed in with this resurgent Aesir instinct was a lot of 19th century baggage including Jesuitism, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, Judaism and Kabbala. It has taken almost 130 years of study and practice to untangle authentic Germanic religion from the various inauthentic movements.

    List was an absolute fountain of new ideas and theories - he was studying the symbolism of coats of arms, place names, linguistics, the runes and the Eddas in ways that are still being carried on today. List as "mystic" seems to be where he has landed in the Asatru religion, but this characterization is somewhat unfortunate as it overlooks his fiction, which holds up today as some of the best Aesir-Germanic work available, and his scholarly work. List's mystical work after 1908 is indeed interesting, however even List was influenced by Kabbala and Blavatsky nonsense, possibly because that had (and has) greater sales potential at the time. People then enjoyed a little saucy black magic, witchcraft and the sexual license promised by these Oriental processes just as they do now. List's earliest writing was far more Germanic/Aryan and as such is very valuable for study. 

     List inspired a small circle that largely formed the "Thule Gesselschaft" which just after List's death formed a political/labor discussion group, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The NSDAP went on to its brief but memorable period of power in Germany, but was not "pro-List" in any way. The NSDAP arrested many List-inspired authors such as Friedrich Marby and Siegfried Kummer, as illegal magicians who were put in concentation camps. The NSDAP focused mainly on raising nationalist soldiers, whereas the völkisch groups often concentrated on "self-work" such as meditation, rune spells, etc. The interaction of all these groups is fascinating and well-documented. It would suffice to say that some aspects of Lists' religious beliefs entered National Socialism, but were not widely adopted. What did happen was a decisive break with Christianity that manifested even more strongly after the Second World War. 

    Today, Germans are relatively divided between Christianity (53%) and Atheism (42%), with East Germans especially atheistic, on the order of 70-80%. Other sturdy souls continued the revival of Asatru amongst the post-war Germanic peoples, including Alexander Rud Mills and Ilse Christensen. The biggest breakthrough of Asatru was with Stephen McNallen's founding of the Viking Brotherhood and Asatru Free Assembly in the early 1970's. McNallen's work allied him with an up and coming academic named Stephen Flowers. Flowers went on to publish the first translation of Listian rune work in 1989, and the world has quite frankly been a different place since. Flowers himself has attracted enormous amounts of controversy, and influence, as have McNallen and others. Sometimes what gets lost in the metaphysical appreciation of List as magician and mystic, is appreciation of List as researcher, poet and novelist. My work for the Guido von List Society is to make humbly available to that society original printings of List's major works from Austria from 1890-1918, and to use artificial intelligence translation to make basic English translations for List's complete works available. To simply read "The Secret of the Runes" and start creating Freemasonic style secret groups is one use of List's canon, but the work suggests much more. Carnuntum and Pipara offer poetry and ideas for ritual, including Weihnachten celebrations and the creation of Asatru culture through storytelling. Tolkien is great, but not enough - novels and stories that feature man and gods surviving through time, and exploring history and philosophy is just crucial. 

    Further issues raised by List include the use of Grimm's fairy tales and other folk writings in the living of Asatru. List's work on Mythological Places in Germany and Austria is also incredibly important for pilgrimage and study. The Externstein has become one of the largest tourist attractions in Germany, mainly for Asatru practitioners. List has a book with 25 different possible Externstein-type sites. The ruins of Carnuntum that inspired List as a young man have now become a major archaeological theme park and restoration project in Austria.      

    In Carnuntum, List writes that Carnuntum had to have been a major Roman city and that its destruction was a critical event in the triumphant history of the german people. This was not acknowledged then but is slowly gaining traction 130 years later. List wrote intuitively of gladiators in Carnuntum; in 2022 the rings of the only gladiator school outside of Rome were found just there in the Carnuntum ruins with the new sub-surface radar imaging. 

 What other important areas of research will be uncovered as List's works slowly rise from obscurity, like the sunken castle of the Aesir rises now to the skies of our world?