Revival of the Runes: The Modern Rediscovery and Reinvention of the Germanic Runes - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2021

Miguel Serrano
The Rise of Contemporary Scientific Runology and the Re-Emergence of the Rune-Gild

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández (1917—2009) was a proponent of National Socialism in his native Chile as a young man during the Second World War, a war in which his country remained neutral. Serrano was initiated into a völkisch esoteric stream of thought by a “mysterious” German immigrant during these years. Later he would enter the diplomatic service of Chile in a career that would last from 1953 to 1970, when the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende took power in Chile. With the ouster of Allende, Serrano returned to Chile and undertook his work in articulating the idea of “Esoteric Hitlerism.” It is clear that he was interested in esoteric matters his whole life, he was versed in German culture, and he had been an adherent of National Socialist ideology since the 1930s. However, it also appears that his esoteric Nazism stems from himself and was the product of the times in which he began to write the works that supported these ideas; that is, from the late 1970s onward. He, too, picked up on what was in the air during those years. Perhaps because of his ties with a respectable establishment, his ideas became influential in certain circles. (Due to some shady dealings, his books were only translated into English late and in a haphazard way, or they probably would have been even more influential.)

In 1984, Serrano published the best-known work in his “Esoteric Hitlerism” trilogy: Adolf Hitler, el Último Avatãra (Adolf Hitler: The Last Avatar). In this book he provides an almost hundred-page outline of runic symbolism based on the eighteen runes of the Armanen Futhork. His runology is fitted out with elaborate illustrations by the German artist Wolfgang von Schlemm (1920—2003), some of which were inspired by the work of the German esotericist Peryt Shou (1873—1953) as found in his 1920 book Die “Edda” als Schlüssel des kommenden Weltalters (The Edda as the Key to the Coming Age). Shou was not particularly involved with runic symbolism himself, nor was he a völkisch philosopher. In the final analysis, Serrano’s work is poetic, mystical, inspired (by something), but is not coherent from a runological perspective. His is a very unique take on the runes. He draws on material from the Armanen and other German rune-esotericists and couples it freely with Indian mysticism and Gnoticism, synthesizing these elements and other elements in a “Pan- Aryanist” crucible.

Fig. 10.2. Diagram from Serrano’s El Último Avatãra that is referred to as the “Rune Zodiac” and characterized as the “Secret Platform” or plane of combat against the extraterrestrial enemy, the Demiurge

The following passage from the English translation of El Último Avatãra (Serrano 2014, 223) is instructive with respect to his attitudes and ideas concerning the use of the runes.

Runes appeared to Wotan as sound-signs, number-letters. They are the exterior form that now carries the Vril and are sent to vîras as weapons in the Great War they undertake against the Demiurge Jehovah, within his corrupted Universe. They deliver us the necessary schematic knowledge of the Science of Return, keys with which to open doors. Only they can give us the possibility of escape, of the leap into Sunya, the Void of the Black Sun, beyond this diabolical Creation. So the Jew will never use them. They do not serve him. Only Aryans. Yet the Jew has falsified the Hagal Rune, using it as the “Star of David.” The Rune symbols are the only ones among magic alphabets with sharp symmetric shapes that resemble the bodies of divyas alone and no others. Rune exercises, Runic Yoga of the body, impregnate their matter with magic vibrations. [The one who] knows his Runes acquires the power of material dissolution and reintegration, of voluntary death and resurrection. He will be able to make his Note vibrate in the highest pitch. To escape, thereby, from the Circle of Returns.

The mixture of runic ideas with Hindu religious concepts and elements of the postwar myths of Nazi occultism (Vril, the Black Sun) coupled with overt Anti-Semitic verbiage are characteristic of Serrano’s writings. His world-denying (Hindu/Gnostic) ideology is a clearly non-Germanic trait. Serrano’s overall approach and style is similar to that found in Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 The Spear of Destiny or Pauwels’s and Bergier’s 1960 Le Matin des magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians), both of which seem to have exerted some influence on him. Serrano’s text is an evocative spell in its own right, but one that is restricted to a “poetic truth” at best.