The Radicalization of Myth and the Rise of Fascism
Runes: Nazi Symbols or Pagan Magic? pt. 1
I originally wrote this as a special studies paper in my last semester of college (2022), combining my two majors: Religion and World Literature. I’ve tried to break it down into more digestible sections (adding and subtracting a bit with updated knowledge), which I will be releasing over the next few weeks. So far it is 4 parts: historical background, the contemporary sphere, a discussion on philosophy and ancestry, and finally my personal experience with runes as psycho-ritual objects. It’s a topic I feel I only see discussed in one light or another: historical accuracy of bad fascists or love and light pagans claiming that the ancience of their beliefs excuses the baggage of the past. As both a practitioner of the occult and a lover of history, my goal is to help people think more critically about why symbolism is an effective way of moving nations (in positive as well as negative directions), about when it is essential we pay attention to it, and about how we might move in the world to make it safer for ourselves and our communities.
Part 1: Historical Background.
Citations below.
Whether through those offered by oral cultures or written, philological legacies are some of humanity’s most important developments. Language means storytelling, which means culture. But who owns the legacies–these folklores, their mythologies and their sacred practices– after the eons have worn on and the names of the ones who spoke or wrote them have faded in time? Who preserves their words? Who determines their impact, translates them, parses their meaning? And how do we, all the way here in the twenty-first century, reckon with the heritage of these questions?
When we look at the creation of runes somewhere around the second century CE, what runic studies calls the Elder Furthark, there is not much archaeological evidence to suggest they were anything more than marks to keep ledgers, name ownership, or claim victory (Findell). They were likely based on surrounding Roman influence and often found carved into stones or beds or house lintels. Indeed, the peoples who used runes–up until the coexistence and overcoming by the Church–did not use writing for the same storytelling purposes which we today consider a literature. Rather, theirs was an oral culture, history passed down through bardic performances of the skalds, or court poets. The stories that were told, even then, were determined by class. These words were preserved some 200 years later by Christian monks, so one may suspect some things got lost in translation. Yet these sagas still mythologize runes, casting them as tools of a sacred cult of mysteries.
Most histories I came across in my research (the ones that are not explicitly gearing up to introduce divination purposes) tread the idea of “rune-magic” with caution. I have reasons to do the same, but also would encourage us to remember that ancient peoples–and in this case the Vikings, though they are not the only people who used runes–did not discern between “reality” and “the supernatural” in such distinct and opposite forms, but lived with an idea of magic and folklore all around them.
To me the question of whether runes at that time were for magical or mundane purposes is pointless. It remains that symbols are subsets of language, simply forms for expressing human thought. The word ‘spell’ simply means ‘speak’ or tell. Who is to say naming something is no spell? Or marking victory for oneself? Or claiming some item is yours; under your protection, or the gods’ you believe in? The language must also be understood in its context, its interaction with Latin and simultaneous influence from earlier proto-germanic Pagan worship. Mythology, therefore, plays a huge role in defining the way we categorize runes and interact with them today.
By the 700s CE, the alphabet had morphed into the Younger Furthark. Latin and Christianity’s hold over Scandinavia would not tighten completely for many more years, and the two scripts (Latin and runic carvings) coexisted peacefully for several centuries (Baur). For instance, the Ruthwell Cross was erected in Scotland and told Christ’s crucifixion in runes from the point of view of the cross. It demonstrated the already powerful influence of Rome, which had already made its way into the literature itself.
While the runes were already known to have names related to their sound, from the tenth century through to about the twelfth there were preserved a series of poems elaborating on their uses. It was written in Old English and most likely by a Christian scholar ‘interest[ed] in archaic, exotic, and/or cryptic writing systems’ (Findell, 73), but remains useful in understanding the particular psychological attraction the runes have to modern day occultists (and totally makes me think of the character Athelstan in the TV show Vikings). Paul Mountfort, for example, uses these poems in his own runic divination guidebook as a fresh way to understand the runes– a way of going, perhaps, straight back to a “source,” albeit still a secondary one, to avoid altogether the negative implications of what really made the runes popular in our modern consumption.
By the time the Medieval period and furthorc had fully formed, most runic inscriptions were found in ecclesiastical settings (Baur), suggesting Christian scribes purposefully fell back on the runes to spread the word of their God and their “superior” Latin language to the heathens.
Around the thirteenth century, the mysteriously authored manuscript of the Codex Regius, containing the Poetic Edda, stories of heroic and mythological figures going back to the ninth century (such as Brynhildur, a woman ‘master of the runes’) was written. Havamal, in the Poetic Edda, is where we find the myth of Odin hanging himself on Yggdrasil in order to gain the wisdom of the runes. Snorri Sturluson, another Christian monk, then recorded the Prose Edda, or the Younger Edda, a guide to Old Norse mythology. At this point we are almost already two hundred years after the so-called “Viking age.”
Around the 1600s, Bishop Oddur Einarsson released the ruling of Kyraugastadadomur which outlawed any kind of heathen practice in order to convert them to Lutheranism. The Icelandic Tourism website mentions an Age of Fire during which twenty Icelanders were executed– “The first man burned at the stake for witchcraft in Iceland, Jon Rognvaldsson, received his sentence simply for having a few runic scrolls” (Icelandic Tourism).
So, when we arrive at the Gothic Revival in the late 1800s, early 1900s into today, we understand there was already a deeply layered history. Such a thing is easily manipulated, due to its mystery, for any number of ends. I turn now to Paul Mountfort’s article about the guidebook genre, which has roots in the Gothic revivalism (and fascism) that took seed out of European waves of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In 1811, the Gothic League for the “promotion of Northern Mythology” was founded, also known as the Geatish Society. Founding member Oehlenschläger encouraged his peers to reinvigorate their ancestral pride. “Throughout Europe, mythologies came to be understood as the purest, most untainted expression of the national spirit” (van Gervin). Mountfort somewhat self-reflectively acknowledges that the contemporary runic guidebook (of which he has published several) was founded as a result of these efforts, a literature born of propaganda. “The period was one in which literature and folklore were being conscripted into the project of nation building, with national identity and racial lineage especially valorized in Northern Europe” (19).
Meanwhile, twentieth century book publishing was experiencing a revolution at the hands of (particularly American) Protestants, hitting the global market with their values rebranded as psycho-spiritual (Drescher), advocating the “betterment of self.” Out of the repression of the Victorian Era and its spectacle of spiritualism was emerging a desperate desire for transcendence, and in Germany as in America and most of the Western world, a cultural shift was taking place.
In 1908, Guido von List published The Secrets of the Runes, taking up the tradition of elaborating on the poetic meanings of the runes, prompted by eleven months that he spent blind and supposedly experiencing a “series of visions that revealed” (20) said secrets. This system, Armanen Runes, references what he conceived to be Aryan priest-kings of antiquity (Wikipedia). It is a somewhat apocryphal piece in the canon of current runelore, but was the founding text for Briton L.A. Waddel’s 1927 book, The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet, which claims the Roman alphabet was based on the runes instead of the other way around. At this time, the Nazi party was gaining power, and such suggestions were utterly useful for their aim: systematically attracting spiritual drifters to the cause of ethnic cleansing.
It is hard to overstate how much the National Socialists used occultism and other eclectic practices of the ‘supernatural imaginary’ (as Eric Kurlander terms it–such as border science, pagan, new age, Eastern religions, folklore, mythology, and many other supernatural doctrines) to secure power by capitalizing on the cultural confusion of the time, “producing national myths, symbols, and stereotypes that made it possible for many...to confront the burdens of life” (Kurlander, 15). These actions “were compatible with many aspects of modernity, mass politics, and consumerism” and lent well to the building of an empire. Waddel’s book inspired the Nazi regime to adopt runic sigils, for example, doubling the sowulu, the rune for sun, as their notorious SS insignia.
Of course, this appropriation is not restricted to Norse pagan beliefs; their most well-known symbol, the swastika, was originally a Brahmanical Hindu symbol of peace. The prevalence of these instances exemplifies the larger truth that they would adopt any ideology that might provide an ounce of power. The image of the Viking as the quintessential white human was particularly powerful because it ground their political agenda to the very soil of Northern Europe: its folklore. Yet Hitler himself, contradictory as always, did not support the worship of “Old Gods,” declaring it futile after Christianity. This certainly says something about the dedication he had to keeping the symbols his party appropriated within their cultural contexts.
In his 2003 guidebook on the divinatory runes, Mountfort places psycho-spiritual runes in their historical context as functionally reconstructed under Gothic revivalism and the rise of fascism, but cautions against entirely associating them with the National Socialists. He makes a bold parallel to illustrate his point: “The gross and nationalistic distortions of paganism practiced in Hitler’s Germany no more reflect the Northern Traditions central beliefs than the Crusades, Inquisition, and witch burnings did Christ’s” (207). He also mentions various contemporary rune mystics who were sent to the camps by Hitler, namely Friedrich Marby (who developed a technique of rune gymnastics, a topic I might cover in a later article), to emphasize how runology is not necessarily complicit with Nazism. He then quotes Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick in A History of Pagan Europe that, “It is often written that Hitler’s regime in Germany...was pagan in inspiration, but this is untrue. Hitler’s rise to power came into being when the Catholic party supported the Nazis in the Reichtag in 1933...” (206).
I agree with Mountfort’s assertion that the actions of the National Socialist Party were not exclusive to Germanic Paganism; they used any possible angle to further their ultimate goal for creating a master race. The ideals of far-right Christianity, exclusive as they are, were similarly useful as the ancient mythos of the motherland, latently confirming horseshoe theory.
I would like to push back, however, on the idea that the history of runology is not truly associated with Nazism, due to runologists having been persecuted themselves. First, it is important to acknowledge there were eugenicist practices before the Nazi party. In fact, Virginia’s 1927 Buck v Bell Supreme Court decision (allowing for forced sterilization of the “unfit,” meaning minorities, poor people, and the disabled) was cited by Nazis at the Nuremberg trials as part of their defense (Encyclopedia Virginia). Colonization’s dependence on subjugation is a feature, not a flaw, of the West’s infrastructure.
The Third Reich was also not the only institution that re-popularized myths to secure racial purity. Well-known Spiritualist and founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky (living in the late 1800s), “claimed to have received ancient wisdom from various long-deceased mentors through spiritualist mediums, from whom she learned about the existence of mankind’s seven ‘root races,’ the fourth of which originated in Atlantis...she believed the wisdom of Atlantis was spread across the globe when the island was destroyed. The descendants of the Atlantans still carried in their blood the qualities of their forebears, she believed: they were members of the Aryan race” (Manheim, “The Dark Link Between Nazi’s and the Legend of Atlantis”). Atlantis was a metaphor in Plato’s work, but comes down to us now as a conspiracy theory much like that of aliens being the builders of the Egyptian pyramids. Instead of explicitly demeaning black people, it aggrandizes the white.
What I want to illustrate here is how those who manufactured the modern idea of what Eric Kurlander refers to as the “Supernatural Imagery” are interconnected and inseparable from ideologies that support ethnic cleansing. Invoking a tradition can never not invoke those who built it; therefore these issues remain in runic occultism’s legacy even outside of the alphabet’s association with the Nazis. No matter that not every individual who practices these forms of supernatural or religious belief uses these principles of superiority to carry out violence, it will always be true they have historically been used very successfully to do so. To ethically engage with it today means recognizing and calling out when these myths and symbols are being used to mask white supremacist agendas and justify their actions.
Join me next week as I continue to break down this controversial topic. I’m going to be looking at the implications of the history we explored here, highlighting its consequences and the positive and negative responses within various communities, and addressing the current fascist state we find ourselves in today. In the weeks afterward I will discuss some philosophy on how runes work, as well as an examination of some of my own practices, sources, biases, and some concluding thoughts.
Interested in seeing more in the meantime? You can follow me at ponderfoxobscura on Instagram or TikTok, or visit my website at theponderfoxobscura.wordpress.com.
Citations for today’s excerpt:
Baur, Stephanie Elisabeth. “Runic and Latin Written Culture Co-Existence and Interaction of Two Script Cultures in the Norwegian Middle Ages.” University of Tübingen, 2011.
Findell, Martin. Runes. The J.Paul Getty Museum, 2015.
Kurlander, Eric. Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Yale University Press, 2018.
Manheim, Noa. “The Dark Link between the Nazis and the Legend of Atlantis.” Haaretz.com, Haaretz, 24 Jan. 2019.
Mountfort, Paul Rhys. Nordic Runes: Understanding, Casting, and Interpreting the Ancient Viking Oracle. Destiny Books, 2003.
Mountfort, Paul. “Runecasting: Runic Guidebooks as Gothic Literature and the Other Gothic Revival.” Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, Dec. 2015, pp. 16–32.
van Gerven, Tim. "Chapter 2 The Mythology Debates II: Discord at the Geatish Society". Scandinavism: Overlapping and Competing Identities in the Nordic World, 1770–1919. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022.
Wolfe, Contributor: Brendan. “Buck v. Bell (1927).” Encyclopedia Virginia, 8 Mar. 2022, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/buck-v-bell-1927/.