Modern Revivals

This section gathers systems that present themselves as recoveries of ancient practice but were, on the evidence, composed recently. It holds the Celtic tree calendar drawn from Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), Guido von List's Armanen runes of 1908, and the Dreamspell count published by Jose and Lloydine Arguelles in 1990.

Each borrows the prestige and some of the material of a genuine ancient tradition (the ogham, the historical futharks, the Maya tzolkin), while being in its actual form a twentieth-century creation.

Sources The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic MythRobert Graves with The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi IdeologyNicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Dreamspell: The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013Jose Arguelles

The atlas groups these together not to dismiss them but to be accurate about their history, which their own presentation often obscures. The Celtic tree calendar is Graves's poetic reconstruction, not a calendar the ancient Celts kept; the Armanen runes are List's eighteen-rune row built from a vision, not a historical futhark; the Dreamspell borrows the tzolkin's structure but uses a different correlation to the Western calendar than the traditional Maya count.

Distinguishing a modern revival from the ancient source it draws on is a service to both, and each entry states plainly what is old, what is new, and who made it.

Sources The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic MythRobert Graves with The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi IdeologyNicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Dreamspell: The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013Jose Arguelles