‘popular’ tales and epics had not preserved much that pertains to secondary divinities, demons, giants and spirits of all sorts. (37) [Original emphasis.]
In the Eddas, Wotan (whose name derives from the word in all Germanic languages meaning fury, and which in modern German is wuten, to rage) was the god of war, whom dead heroes met in Valhalla. It was Wotan who gained an understanding of the runes after being wounded by a spear and hanging from a tree for nine nights, and who related the eighteen runic spells that held the secrets of immortality, invincibility in battle, healing abilities and control of the elements. In Norse legend, the runes are not only a system of writing but also possess an inherent magical power. Goodrick-Clarke describes List as ‘the pioneer of volkisch rune occultism’, (38) since he was the first to link the runes of a certain written series with Wotan’s runic spells. ‘List attributed a specific individual rune to each of Wotan’s verses, adding occult meanings and a summary motto of the spell. These occult meanings and mottoes were supposed to represent the doctrine and maxims of the rediscovered religion of Wotanism. Typical mottoes were: “Know yourself, then you know everything!” … and “Man is one with God!” ‘ (39)
The central tenet of Wotanism was the cyclical nature of the Universe, which proceeded through a series of transformations: ‘birth’, ‘being’, ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’. This cyclical cosmology was a primal law and represented the presence of God in Nature. Since Man was part of the cosmos, he was bound by its laws and thus required to live in harmony with the natural world. ‘A close identity with one’s folk and race was reckoned a logical consequence of this closeness to Nature.’ (40)
List also utilised Theosophical concepts in his development of Wotanism, in particular those of Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth who wrote extensively on Aryan sexuality and racial purity. Sebaldt believed that the Universe was whisked into being by the god Mundelfori, and that its fundamental nature was one of the interaction of opposites, such as matter and spirit, and male and female. Aryan superiority could therefore only be achieved through a union of racially ‘pure opposites’. In September 1903, List published an article in the Viennese occult periodical Die Gnosis that drew heavily on this idea, referring to ancient Aryan cosmology and sexuality. The phases of this cosmology were illustrated with variations on the swastika, the Hindu symbol of the Sun, that List appropriated and corrupted to denote the unconquerable and racially pure Germanic hero. (41)
List was also heavily influenced by legends of lost civilisations and sunken continents, such as the fabled lands of Atlantis and Lemuria, and by the theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky. He went so far as to compare the Wotanist priesthood with the hierophants of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. Theosophical concepts also formed the basis of his Die Religion der Ario-Germanen (1910), in which he devoted considerable space to the Hindu cosmic cycles which had inspired Blavatsky’s concept of ‘rounds’ or cosmological cycles. List identified the four rounds of fire, air, water and earth with ‘the mythological Teutonic realms of Muspilheim, Asgard, Wanenheim and Midgard, which were tenanted respectively by fire-dragons, air-gods, water-giants and mankind’. (42) These realms lie at the centre of the Nordic creation myth. At the dawn of time, there was nothing but a vast, yawning abyss. Niflheim, a realm of clouds and shadows, formed to the north of the abyss, while to the south formed the land of fire called Muspilheim. When Ymir, the first living being and the father of all the giants, was slain in battle, his body was raised from the sea and formed the earth, Midgard. (43) According to List, the Ario-Germans were the fifth race in the present round, the preceding four corresponding to the mythical Teutonic giants.
Wotanist doctrine held that the natural evolutionary cycle of the Universe was from unity to multiplicity and back to unity. The first stage of this evolution (unity to multiplicity) was represented symbolically by anticlockwise triskelions and swastikas and inverted triangles. The second stage (multiplicity back to the unity of the godhead) was represented by clockwise and upright symbols. In this scheme, the Ario-German was seen as the highest possible form of life, since he occupied the ‘zenith of multiplicity at the outermost limit of the cycle’. (44)
List was a fervent believer in the lost civilisations of Atlantis and Lemuria, and claimed that the prehistoric megaliths of Lower Austria were actually Atlantean artefacts.
In his Die Ursprache der Ario-Germanen (The Proto-Language of the Ario-Germans) (1914), he included a chart comparing the geological periods of Earth with a Hindu kalpa (4,320,000,000 years), which also corresponded to a single theosophical round. We will have much more to say on the Ariosophist belief in lost civilisations later in this chapter, and in the next.
For now, let us turn our attention to the other principal personality in Ariosophy, List’s young follower Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, who founded the notorious anti-Semitic hate sheet Ostara and created the Order of the New Templars in 1907. Like his mentor List, Liebenfels had a middle-class Viennese upbringing, which he would later deny in favour of an imagined aristocratic background.
Liebenfels chose as a headquarters for the Order of the New Templars a ruined castle, Burg Werfenstein, perched on a cliff on the shores of the River Danube between Linz and Vienna. He was obsessed with the idea of a Manichaean struggle between the ‘blond’ race (characterised by creativity and heroism) and the dark ‘beast-men’, who were consumed with lust for ‘blonde’ women and who were bent on the corruption of human culture. Two years earlier, Liebenfels had established the racist periodical Ostara (named after the pagan goddess of spring) that called repeatedly for the restoration of the ‘blond race’ as the dominant force in the world. This could only be achieved through racial purity, the forced sterilisation or extermination of inferior races, and the destruction of socialism, democracy and feminism. (45)
These racist concerns led Liebenfels to conceive the bizarre notion of founding a chivalrous order based on the monastic and military orders of the Crusades. As Goodrick-Clarke notes, Liebenfels had been drawn since childhood to ‘the Middle Ages and its pageant of knights, noblemen, and monks. His decision to enter the Cistercian noviciate owed much to these sentiments, and it is likely that his adult desire to identify with the aristocracy derived from similar fantasies.’ (46) Liebenfels’s fantasies also included holy orders, which perhaps naturally resulted in an intense interest in the Order of the Knights Templar. This interest was fuelled by the medieval Grail Romances, which were at the time enjoying a widespread popularity due to their treatment by Richard Wagner in his operas. To Liebenfels and many of his contemporaries, such romances were significant in their painting of the Grail Knights as searchers after sublime and eternal values: this view provided a powerful antidote to the hated modern world with its rampant industrialisation and materialism.
The most renowned and applauded Order in Christendom at the time of the Crusades was undoubtedly the Knights Templar, and Liebenfels developed a fantasy in which these knights became champions of a racist struggle for a Germanic order that would enjoy a hegemony over the Mediterranean and the Middle East. According to Goodrick-Clarke:
In 1913 he published a short study, in which the grail was interpreted as an electrical symbol pertaining to the ‘panpsychic’ powers of the pure-blooded Aryan race. The quest of the ‘Templeisen’ for the Grail was a metaphor for the strict eugenic practices of the Templar knights designed to breed god-men. The Templars had become the key historical agent of [Liebenfels’s] sexo-racist gnosis before 1914. (47)
At this point, it is worth looking very briefly at the history of the Knights Templar and how their rise and fall influenced Liebenfels’s Weltanschauung (world view). The Order of the Knights Templar became one of the most powerful monastic societies in twelfth-century Europe, and came to symbolise the Christian struggle against the infidel. In AD 1118, a knight from Champagne named Hugh of Payens persuaded King Baldwin I of Boulogne (whose elder brother, Godfrey, had captured Jerusalem nineteen years before) to install Payens and eight other French noblemen in a wing of the royal palace, the former mosque al-Aqsa, near the site where King Solomon’s Temple had allegedly once stood in the Holy Land. The Order later comprised three classes: the knights, all of noble birth; the sergeants, drawn from the bourgeoisie, who were grooms and stewards; and the clerics, who were chaplains and performed non-military tasks. (48) Choosing the name Militia Templi (Soldiers of the Temple), (49) they vowed to defend the mysteries of the Christian faith and Christians travelling to the holy places. The Order initially derived its power from St Bernard of Clairvaux, head of the Cistercian Order, and from Pope Honorius II, who officially recognised the Templars as a separate Order in 1128. (50) It is believed that the Templars took their inspiration from the Hospitallers, who protected Catholic pilgrims in Palestine and pledged themselves to a life of chastity and poverty.
The Seal of the Templars showed two knights riding on a single horse — a sign of their poverty (at least in their early days); the design was retained for decades after the Order had become one of the richest of the time. (51) The vast wealth that the Templars were to acquire was partly the result of the Order’s exemption from local taxes, coupled with their ability to levy their own taxes on the community. The Templars honoured their vow of poverty for the first nine years of their existence, relying on donations from the pious even for their clothes. Their battle standard was a red eight-pointed cross on a black-and-white background; their battle cry was ‘Vive Dieu,
