Armanen runes

The name seeks to associate the runes with the postulated Armanen, whom von List saw as ancient Aryan priest-kings.

Von List claimed the pseudo-runes were revealed to him while in an 11-month state of temporary blindness after a cataract operation on both eyes in 1902.

[3] List's row is based on the Younger Futhark, with the names and sound values mostly close to the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

The Armanen runes were employed for magical purposes in works by authors such as Friedrich Bernhard Marby and Siegfried Adolf Kummer, and after World War II in a reformed "pansophical" system by Karl Spiesberger.

The collapse of Wilhelmine Germany at the end of the First World War led to an upsurge of interest in völkisch ideology, which rejected liberalism, democracy, socialism and industrial capitalism—all traits reflected in the political system of Weimar Germany—as "un-German" and inspired by subversive Jewish influences.

[8] By the end of the war (1918) there were about seventy-five völkisch groups in Germany, promoting a variety of pseudo-historical, mystical, racial and anti-semitic views.

[11] Runic signs were used from the 1920s to 1945 on SS flags, uniforms and other items as symbols of various aspects of Nazi ideology and Germanic mysticism.

[13] In recent times Karl Hans Welz,[14][15] Stephen E. Flowers, A. D. Mercer,[16] and Larry E. Camp[17] and have all furthered the effort to remove any racist connotations previously espoused by pre-war Armanen rune masters.

According to Stephen E. Flowers they are better known even than the historical Elder Futhark: The personal force of List and that of his extensive and influential Armanen Orden was able to shape the runic theories of German magicians...from that time to the present day.