The Armanen Runes and Das Geheimnis der Runen

List set out his eighteen runes in Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes), serialized in 1906 and published as a standalone book in 1908. Each of the eighteen is paired with a sound value and, in List's presentation, a mystical meaning he read as ancestral Germanic knowledge; several of the eighteen are visibly adapted from letters of the historical Elder Futhark, the runic alphabet actually used by early Germanic peoples, while others are List's own invention presented as recovered rather than devised.

Modern runology and the history of esotericism treat the Armanen runes as a modern construction rather than an authentic ancient system, and List himself as the founder of Ariosophy, the current of völkisch occultism that combined runic and Theosophical material with racial ideology. That current, developed further by later writers, fed directly into the esoteric fringe of National Socialism after List's own death, a legacy scholarship on the period treats as central to understanding him rather than incidental to it. List presented the eighteen runes as keyed to a corresponding eighteen verse poem in the Old Norse Havamal, reading a medieval Icelandic text as if it independently confirmed a system he had in fact just composed, a circular method of argument later scholarship has treated as characteristic of his approach generally rather than as an isolated lapse.