Sig

This is the point at which the Armanen material stops being an eccentric footnote in the history of occultism, and it should not be handled by omission.

Separate three things

The confusion here is usually caused by collapsing distinctions that the sources keep apart.

• The sun-rune is ancient. The character appears in the Elder Futhark, conventionally named Sowilo, and in the Younger Futhark as sol. It means the sun. It is all over the corpus, in ordinary inscriptions, with no occult content whatever.
• The victory reading is List's. Renaming it Sig and glossing it as the lightning-bolt of the triumphant will is a move made between 1902 and 1908. It has no medieval warrant.
• The insignia is later still. The doubled Sig emblem of the Schutzstaffel was drawn by Walter Heck, a designer working for the badge manufacturer Ferdinand Hoffstaetter in Bonn, in the early 1930s. Accounts differ over whether the design dates to 1929 or 1933.

What was adopted was List's reinterpretation, not the historical rune. The emblem means victory because List had said it did.

The milieu, not a coincidence

The standard scholarly treatment is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985), and its findings are careful in both directions.

List was the centre of an organised movement. The Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft, founded in 1908, was funded by wealthy volkisch backers and had an inner circle, the Hoher Armanen-Orden. Adjacent to it, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels developed the explicitly racial doctrine he named Ariosophy in 1915. This was a small world, and it was a racial-nationalist one before the NSDAP existed.

Goodrick-Clarke's conclusion is not that occultism caused Nazism. It is that Ariosophy formed part of the ideological seedbed from which the movement drew, and that specific individuals and specific symbols passed directly across.

Karl Maria Wiligut is the clearest instance of the direct passage. Promoted SS-Brigadefuhrer under Himmler, operating under the name Weisthor, he ran a runic and prehistoric research brief inside the SS and designed the Totenkopfring. His system was his own rather than List's, but he came out of the same Viennese occult scene.

What this does not license

Several things do not follow, and overstating the case is its own kind of dishonesty:

• The historical runes are not Nazi symbols. They are an alphabet, used for centuries by people with no possible relation to twentieth-century politics.
• Not every modern user of the Armanen row is a fascist. Post-war Armanen organisations exist and most of their membership is not politically organised at all.
• List died in 1919. He did not join a party that did not yet exist and cannot be held responsible for what was done with his symbols afterwards.

What it does license

That the Armanen row was produced inside a racial-nationalist movement, that its solar and Aryan glosses were part of that movement's argument, and that its symbols were taken up by the SS because of what List had made them mean.

The honest position is not to avoid the material. It is to refuse to present it as ancient, and to name what happened to it.

The Armanen row was published by Guido von List in 1908. This character is the one where the difference between what he took and what he made matters most.

The character behind it

Sig corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose Old Norse name was sol, meaning the sun. The medieval rune poems gloss it as the sun, the light of the world, and nothing more contentious than that. It is well attested in the Viking-age inscriptional record as the letter S.

What von List did with it

He renamed it. Where the historical character is named for the sun, von List named his Sig, from the German for victory, and read it accordingly. That is not a translation of the Norse name and not a variant attested anywhere in the medieval material. It is a substitution, and it is the substitution that gave the character its later career.

The afterlife

In 1933 a doubled form of this character was adopted as the emblem of the SS, and it remained in use as such through the National Socialist period. The symbol is prohibited or restricted in several European jurisdictions today on that account.

The atlas records this because the history is documented and because omitting it would misrepresent what the character is. The sun-rune of the rune poems and the Sig of the Armanen row are not the same object, and the second is what was adopted.