Germanic mysticism
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Germanic mysticism was a development of late 19th and early 20th century German romanticism loosely inspired by historical Germanic paganism and traditional concepts of occultism pioneered by Guido von List's Armanism from the 1870s, and gaining notability from the 1910s involving authors including Guido von List, Peryt Shou, Lanz von Liebenfels, Rudolf John Gorsleben, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, Friedrich Bernhard Marby, A. Frank Glahn and Julius Evola, resulting in organizations like the Guido von List Society, Germanenorden, Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft, Order of the New Templars or Thule Society.
The connection with historical Germanic culture is tenuous, and mostly evident in the mysticists infatuation with runes, in the form of List's Armanen Runes.
Following WW I, together with influences from theosophy (Ariosophy, occultist ideas of an Aryan race and regarding the swastika symbol), Germanic mysticism contributed significantly to Nazi mysticism (see Karl Maria Wiligut) in the 1920s and 1930s, notably resulting in Himmler's Ahnenerbe.
In the later 20th century, Germanic neopaganism movements oriented themselves more towards polytheistic reconstructionism, turning away from theosophic and occult elements, but elements of Germanic mysticism continue to play a role in some white supremacist organizations like the Artgemeinschaft or Armanen-Orden. Alleged mystical or shamanic aspects of historical pre-Christian Germanic culture, summarized as seidr are also practiced in Odinism (Freya Aswynn, Nigel Pennick, Karl Spiesberger, see also Germanic Runic Astrology, The Book of Blotar)
[edit] Armanism
Guido von List called his doctrine “Armanism” (after the "Armanen," supposedly the heirs of the sun-king, a body of priest-kings in the ancient Ario-Germanic nation). Armanism was concerned with the esoteric doctrines of the gnosis (distinct from the exoteric doctrine intended for the lower social classes, Wotanism).
According to The History Channel's "Decoding the Past" episode "The Nazi Prophecies," Guido von List, and not Lanz von Liebenfels, was the founder of Ariosophy. Ariosophy has been termed a theoretical precursor of the Nazi genocide.
The foremost expert on Guido von List in the English-speaking world, Stephen E. Flowers, refuses to connect that the theories of List and other early 20th century rune magicians led directly to the excesses of Auschwitz. One German academic, Stephanie von Schnurbein, in commenting on Flower's introduction to 'The Secret of the Runes', in Religion als Kulturkritik [(Winter, 1992), p. 136], states "Dabei erwähnt [Flowers] an keiner Stelle, daß List und die anderen Ariosophen Vordenker des Rassenwahns des Nationalsozialismus waren..." (In this work [Flowers] nowhere mentions that List and the other Ariosophists were intellectual predecessors of the racial madness of National Socialism...").
Although it is now considered conventional wisdom, although Flowers states that this is with “with little to no actual critical investigation,” that the ideas of List, Lanz, and others were directly implemented in the Nazi genocide, it has been argued that because the very term "Ariosophy" was analogous to its predecessor, "Theosophy," that the racial ideas in Ariosophy can be traced to Theosophy. Flowers states that ‘’ “no one has ever shown that racial policies of the NSDAP are based on so-called "Ariosophical" ideas.” ‘’
It has further been stated that even the writing of the most "extreme" of the Ariosophists, Lanz von Liebenfels (cited several times by List in The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric), cannot be definitively linked to the applied anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Apologists for Lanz state that Lanz did not write unfavorably about the Jewish race, that he cooperated with Jewish scholars in many of his publications, and while it can be argued that individual Nazis became familiar with the mystical racism of Theosophy through the works of List and Lanz, it does not necessarily follow that List and Lanz were culpable in the crimes of the Nazis.
Defenders of List and Lanz claim that the Anti-Semitism that drove Nazi policies was much older and more deeply rooted among the peoples of central Europe than can be credited to the "fringe works" of mystics and rune magicians. It has been alleged, for example, that the roots of Nazi Anti-Semitism can be traced to the Lutheran and Catholic Churches as it was the Catholic Church Fathers who first invented ideas about the Jews being an inferior "race," and who drove Anti-Semitic policies right up to and all during the Second World War. (see David Kertzer, Popes Against the Jews [Knopf, 2001].
