He expounded a modern Pagan new religious movement known as Wotanism, which he claimed was the revival of the religion of the ancient German race, and which included an inner set of Ariosophical teachings that he termed Armanism.

He published three novels, Carnuntum (1888), Jung Diethers Heimkehr (1894), and Pipara (1895), each set among the German tribes of the Iron Age, as well as authoring several plays.

During the 1890s he continued writing völkisch articles, now largely for the nationalist Ostdeutsche Rundschau newspaper, with his works taking on an anti-semitic dimension halfway through that decade.

During an 11-month period of blindness in 1902, List became increasingly interested in occultism, in particular coming under the influence of the Theosophical Society, resulting in an expansion of his Wotanic beliefs to incorporate Runology and the Armanen Futharkh.

Through these ventures he promoted the millenarian view that modern society was degenerate, but that it would be cleansed through an apocalyptic event resulting in the establishment of a new Pan-German Empire that would embrace Wotanism.

[3] Like most Austrians at the time, his family were members of the Roman Catholic denomination of Christianity, with List being christened into this faith at St Peter's Church in Vienna.

[3] According to his later account, he developed an early interest in the pre-Christian religions of Austria, coming to believe that the catacombs beneath St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna had once been a shrine devoted to a pagan deity.

List later claimed that while his friends caroused, he celebrated the event with a fire and by burying eight bottles of wine in the shape of a swastika beneath the arch of the monument's Pagan Gate.

[8] List soon abandoned the leather goods business that he inherited, intent on devoting himself to literary endeavours as a journalist, even if this meant a significant reduction in his income.

[8] His interpretations emphasised what he believed were the pagan origins of Austrian place-names, customs, and legends, describing the landscape as being embodied by genius loci, and expressing clear German nationalist and völkisch sentiment.

Wannieck was also president of the Verein 'Deutsches Haus' ("'German House' Association"), a nationalist organisation of linguistically German inhabitants of Brno who felt encircled by the largely Czech population of South Moravia.

[10] List began regularly writing for a weekly newspaper, the Ostdeutsche Rundschau ("East German Review"), which had been established in 1890 by the Austrian Pan-German parliamentary deputy Karl Wolf.

[11] In 1891, List anthologised many of the magazine articles that he had written over the previous decades in his book Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder ("German Mythological Landscape Scenes"), extracts of which were then published in the Ostdeutsche Rundschau.

[11] List began lecturing on these subjects; for instance, in February 1893 he spoke to the nationalist Verein 'Deutsches Geschichte' ("'German History' Association) on the ancient priesthood of Wotan.

[12] Alongside his affiliation with the Bund, List was also a member of the Deutscher Turnverein (Germanic Gymnastic League), a strongly nationalistic group to whom he contributed literary works for their events.

He was regarded by his readers and followers as a bearded old patriarch and a mystical nationalist guru whose clairvoyant gaze had lifted the glorious Aryan and Germanic past of Austria into full view from beneath the debris of foreign influences and Christian culture.

In his books and lectures List invited true Germans to behold the clearly discernible remains of a wonderful theocratic Ario-German state, wisely governed by priest-kings and gnostic initiates, in the archaeology, folklore, and landscape of his homeland."

[16] He subsequently produced a manuscript detailing what he deemed to be a proto-language of the Aryan race, in which he claimed that occult insight had enabled him to interpret the letters and sounds of both runes and emblems and glyphs found on ancient inscriptions.

[19] This materialised as the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft in March 1908, which was largely funded by the Wannieck family but which also included many prominent figures from middle and upper-class Austrian and German society.

Titled "Ario-Germanic research reports", they covered List's opinions on the meaning and magical power of runes, the ancient Wotanic priesthood, Austrian folklore and place-names, and the secret messages within heraldic devices.

[24] During World War I, List erroneously proclaimed that there would be victory for the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, claiming to have learned this information from a vision that he experienced in 1917.

[23] Religious studies scholar Olav Hammer noted that List's Wotanism "increasingly came to consist of an original synthesis of his reading of Germanic mythology with Theosophy".

[34] Much of List's understanding of the ancient past was based not on empirical research into historical, archaeological, and folkloric sources, but rather on ideas that he claimed to have received as a result of clairvoyant illumination.

[48] List claimed that after the Christianisation of Northern Europe, the Armanist teachings were passed down in secret, thus resulting in their transmission through later esoteric traditions such as Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.

[55] He bemoaned the decline of the rural peasantry through urbanisation, having witnessed how Vienna's population tripled between 1870 and 1890, resulting in overcrowding, a growth in diseases like tuberculosis, and a severe strain on the city's resources.

[57] He was opposed to laissez-faire capitalism and large-scale enterprise, instead favouring an economic system based on small-scale artisans and craftsmen, being particularly unhappy with the decline in tradesmen's guilds.

[62] In April 1915 he welcomed the start of World War I as a conflict that would bring about the defeat of Germany's enemies and the establishment of a golden age for the new Ario-German Empire.

[64] For List, this better future would be intricately connected to the ancient past, reflecting his belief in the cyclical nature of time, something which he had adopted both from a reading of Norse mythology and from Theosophy.

[24] Further individuals — notably Rudolf John Gorsleben, Werner von Bülow, Friedrich Bernhard Marby, Herbert Reichstein, and Frodi Ingolfson Werhmann — took List's Ariosophical ideas alongside those of Liebenfels and built upon them further, resulting in a flourishing Ariosophical movement in the late 1920s and 1930s, with some of these individuals being within the coterie of prominent Nazi Heinrich Himmler and influencing the symbolism and rituals of the SS.

"[72] In 1984, Thorsson expressed the view that List's impact was such that he was "able to shape the runic theories of German magicians (although not necessarily their political ones) from that time to the present day.