Rune Might: The Secret Practices of the German Rune Magicians - Edred Thorsson 2018
From the Ashes: A New Runic Revival
Background
In the years immediately after the Second World War, and to some extent continuing to the present day, the runes were so closely associated with the Nazis that the use and discussion of them in academic as well as esoteric circles was hampered by adverse public opinion. Those of the old rune magicians who had survived the war in Germany slowly began to make their way back to their work, and new voices were also heard.
The best known of these new voices was Karl Spiesberger. He published his groundbreaking rune magic synthesis in 1955, Runenmagie (Rune Magic). Spiesberger was an initiate of the Fraternitas Saturni, in which he bore the order name Frater Eratus. Much of his work stems from that order’s understanding of the runes. Spiesberger, like most authors on esoteric or magical subjects, presented a mixture of the old with some original innovations of his own. To some extent these innovations were certainly drawn from the eclectic teachings of the Fraternitas Saturni. What Spiesberger essentially tried to do was remove the “racist” aspects of the Armanic and Marbyan rune-work and place the whole system in a pansophical, or eclectic, context. To List, Marby, or Kummer, the runes represented the key to esoteric understanding; to Spiesberger they were just one more tool to be used by any individual magician. Spiesberger’s works were always cast in the 18-rune futhark as originally envisioned by Guido von List and magically further developed by S. A. Kummer.
Another exponent of the new runic revival was Roland Dionys Jossé, who published a work, also in 1955, called Die Tala der Raunen (The Tala of Whispering). In this work he made use of the 16-rune futhark, which was a major historical departure for the practice of runic esotericism in Germany. Jossé rightly assumed that the seventeenth and eighteenth runes of the “Hávamál” (taken up by List as a text with scriptural authority) were actually additional runes lying outside the numerological system. Jossé presented a complex but highly workable numerology and a system of astrology based on the formula of 16.
The numerology can be simply explained as a system of first transliterating a person’s name into the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark, then reducing it to a key number by units of 16, adding the remainder until a number below 16 (or 18, if one is working with the Armanic Futhork) is reached. For example, the name Robert Zoller would be treated in the following manner using the Armanic Futhork:
That is, there are five units of 16 in the sum of the numerical values of the name (16 × 5), with seven left over. These are added to the number of units to arrive at the key number of the name, which is 12. Therefore, the key rune for this individual, according to this system, would be the TYR-rune (↑). The German word for the zodiac is Tierkreis, literally “circle of beasts,” whereas it was known in esoteric circles as the Tyr-Kreis, “Circle of Tyr.”
The greatest of the rune sages to survive the upheavals of the Nazi period was F. B. Marby, of course. He continued to publish works relevant to his Marby-Runen-Gymnastik. In 1957 he came out with what is perhaps his greatest literary work, Die drei Schwäne (The Three Swans), which had been completed before his arrest by the Nazis in 1936. This book is a kind of mystical autobiography, and, as published in 1957, it contains copious notes and commentaries by the author that make it invaluable in understanding the Marbyan system.
No other land has been more esoterically bound up with the runes in modern times than Germany has been. Since the dawn of the occult revival in Germany the runes have been playing their part in that revival. Therefore, when we look at the ways in which the runes are used in magical circles in Germany today, we see a deep-level network of interconnections that is much richer, but also more diffuse, than those we might expect to find in England or the United States. There is at least one German order based on what are essentially runic ideas: the Armanen-Orden. The magical order Fraternitas Saturni, which maintains an eclectic magical curriculum, probably also continues to include instruction in the art of rune magic as a part of that curriculum. One of its high initiates, Ralph Tegtmeier (Frater U D ), published several books in Germany on the 24-rune futhark system in the early 1990s. These appear to have been to some extent influenced by Rune-Gild research, as one of his books, Runen: Alphabet der Erkenntis (Runes: Alphabet of Knowledge), was dedicated to Edred Thorsson, “Runenmeister sans pareil.” The good frater was also the translator of the German version of my book Runelore.
The Armanen-Orden was for all intents and purposes a moribund institution before it was rejuvenated by Adolf Schleipfer in 1967. He received the charter of the order from the then-aged president of the Guido von List Society, Hanns Robert Bierbach, and proceeded to rebuild it based on what seems to be a syncretization of the ideas of not only List but also of the other rune mystics and magicians of the German past (Marby, Kummer, Gorsleben, etc.), as well as the traditions of the Order of the New Templars and the Fraternitas Saturni. The rune magic of the Armanen continues to be taught mostly within the confines of the Armanen-Orden itself. Another almost exclusively rune-based system is that of Marby’s Rune Gymnastics. The magical system continued to be promoted through the works of F. B. Marby, as published by the Rudolf Arnold Spieth Verlag into the 1990s. Another school essentially based on the Armanen runic system gathered around Werner Kosbab in the 1980s.
In the 1990s the Germanic religious revival experienced a new upswing in Germany. Contrary to widespread opinion, not all of these groups and organizations were or are allied with the political right. But since the time of the reunification of Germany, runes and rune-like signs and symbols have increasingly been the object of legal persecution in Germany as the federal authorities seek to ban and prohibit what they have determined to be symbols dangerous to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.
There appears to have been a new expansion of interest in the runes in Germany during the initial years of the twenty-first century. This mirrors the runic phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the strong linkage to völkisch ideology is not nearly as dominant as before. What is taking place there now is a slow and steady—and not always smooth—readjustment to the indigenous national esoteric traditions of the Germanic peoples in Germany. In this instance there has been a good deal of influence from the Anglo-American schools, such as the Rune-Gild. This is perhaps because the pioneering spirit is often strong in cultural outposts, and hence the vitality of what seems to be a new idea is full of a special vitality there. This vitality can expand from its epicenter to the rest of the world.
It should also be noted that that Swedish-based Dragon Rouge, which promotes the use of the “Uthark” as originally described by the Swedish philologist Sigurd Agrell, is also active in Germany and throughout the world today. Thomas Karlsson is the chief scholar and writer in this endeavor. He wrote a book titled Uthark: The Nightside of the Runes (2002, forthcoming edition titled Nightside of the Runes, by Inner Traditions, 2019). The Uthark system, like the Armanen tradition, shows the historical flexibility of the runelore. This doctrine holds that the numerological values of the runes of the Older Futhark begin with the U-rune as number 1. Agrell noticed that when this adjustment is made the numerological values of many ancient runic inscriptions are numerologically intelligible in terms of the numeric symbolism of the Hellenic and Mithraic cultural streams.
At one point in the United States the Armanen system was most prominently represented by an organization calling itself the Knights of Runes (KOR), founded by the ingenious Austrian-born inventor Karl Hans Welz. This group has since become decentralized. More information on the work of this interesting runic investigator can be found through online searches.
It must also be said that the Armanen magical tradition of the runes has also been enjoying a renaissance of sorts since the late 1980s. Books continue to be published in the tradition, more especially now in English. An example would be A. D. Mercer’s Runen (2016). Unfortunately, some recent translations of the older German material that have been made available recently (typically via the internet) seem to have been done by machines and often lack the nuance and insight necessary to complete understanding of the Armanen mentality or lore.
As an additional footnote to the contemporary scene, it might be mentioned that the Rune-Gild promotes the knowledge of, and individual experimentation with, the Armanic and Marbyan forms of rune magic. The present study is just one concrete manifestation of that work. However, the magical initiatory system of the Rune-Gild continues to be fundamentally based on the purely traditional forms of historically authentic runelore: the futharks of 24 and 16 runes and the Anglo-Frisian system.