The Austrian writer and esotericist Guido von List was the founder of the occult teachings of Ariosophy. European nationalists and racists considered him their mystical guru. Thanks to the insight of this patriarch, his followers believed that the glorious Aryan and German past was spared the influence of foreign cultures and Christianity. Inspired by the ideas of Nietzsche and Blavatsky, List himself served as the forerunner of Nazism.
Guido Karl Anton List, who left his mark on history as Guido von List, was the eldest son of leather merchant Karl Anton List, who sold saddlery equipment, and the grandson of an innkeeper and wine merchant. His paternal great-grandfather ran the hotel.
Mother Maria List, née Killian, came from a family of Viennese entrepreneurs, real estate traders. Guido List had no right to the noble prefix "von", which he allowed himself to personally ascribe.
He was born on October 5, 1848 in Vienna, which was at that time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Guido was brought up in a conservative Catholic family, where he was instilled with a love of nature, drawing, mountaineering and rowing. Later, the writer himself admits that even then - in childhood - he developed an interest in spiritualism and Germanic mythology.
"Young Liszt had a very good relationship with his parents," writes Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, a British esoteric scholar and director of the Exeter Center for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO). - Liszt loved to take their children on walks around the capital, and these excursions awakened Liszt's passion for nature and countryside.
Artistic inclinations were revealed in him, he always tried to express his feelings with pen and paints. Encouraging his efforts, his father gave him lessons in painting and drawing. List's notes dated 1863 and drawings of castles, landscapes of Lower Austria and Moravia have survived."
In 1862, my father and his friends went to view the catacombs under the capital's Cathedral of St. Stephan (Domkirche St. Stephan zu Wien). Guido went with them. The gloom and low vaults made such a strong impression on the 14-year-old that he knelt before the destroyed altar in the underground chapel and vowed to build a temple to Wotan.
“Obviously, he saw in the labyrinth under the cathedral a pre-Christian tomb dedicated to a pagan deity. Subsequently, List argued that his conversion should be dated to this youthful revelation. Instead of the religion of the fathers - Catholicism, Guido begins to profess the pagan god Wotan - Wotanismus.
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Wotan, Wodan or Odin is the highest of the gods of ancient Germanic mythology. He is called the All-Father, since he is the father of everyone - both gods, people, and Valkyries. In old Asgard, Odin had 12 names, but besides this, he has other names, since any mortal can give him his own name.
After completing his studies at the trade academy, he worked for his father's firm and in parallel was engaged in writing and journalism. He tries his creative powers both in prose and poetry. From 1868 to 1870, Guido Liszt (still without the "von" prefix) runs the small private theater Walhalla - Valhalla. In 1871 he became a member of the Austrian Alpine Club (Österreichischer Alpenverein), whose headquarters were located in Innsbruck. The newly formed sports society, whose yearbook Guido edits, soon becomes the mouthpiece of the Velkish movement.
The Völkische Bewegung, a racial-biological reformation movement closely associated with anti-Semitism, emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century in the Kaiser's Reich and the Habsburg monarchy. In addition to racism and chauvinism, anti-capitalist sentiments were very widespread among the Felkish. When Guido List managed to leave the city to be in the lap of nature, he called it an escape from the "muddy shroud of the metropolis" and "disgusting scenes of the wild pursuit of profit." He was especially eager to meet the day of the summer solstice.
On June 24, 1875, Guido and four friends rowed to the ruins of the former Roman city of Carnunt, 40 kilometers east of Vienna, where they set up a tourist camp. For friends, it was just a picnic, and for Liszt, the 1500th anniversary of the victory of the Germans over the Romans, which he celebrated with fire and the burial of eight swastika-shaped wine bottles under the arch of the Pagan Gate. Carnuntum in 15 AD e. was a Roman military camp, and since 106 it becomes the capital of the Roman province (Upper) Pannonia - Pannonia superior.
After the death of his father in 1877, Guido independently runs the family business, to which he is not very adapted and is not disposed to. On September 26, 1878 List married Helene Förster-Peters. In this marriage, he will have a daughter. The following decade remained in Guido's memory as a difficult time, when a young couple had to survive on his meager journalistic income. All these years List worked on the great novel Carnuntum (published in two volumes in 1888), inspired by the memories of his adventure in the vicinity of this city in 1875. This work later had great success, and not only among nationalists. List depicted a conflict between the Germanic indigenous population of the Vienna Basin and the Roman colonialists or the Roman Catholic Church. The attack of the Germans on Carnunt, invented by List, was in his fantasy an event that predicted the future death of Rome.
In 1888, Heinrich Kirchmayr's historical work Der altdeutsche Volksstamm der Quaden "Ancient Germanic tribe of quads" was published. The book was published by the publishing house Verein 'Deutsches Haus' in Brno, whose president was the major industrialist Friedrich Wannieck. He was struck by the parallels between Liszt's artistic imagination and Kirchmire's academic work. The industrialist and Liszt became close friends. And Wannieck's generosity, according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of The Occult Roots of Nazism, "subsequently led to the founding of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft twenty years later."
In 1899, eight years after the death of his first wife, List married the actress Anna von Wittek, who starred in one of his early plays. Their acquaintance took place on December 3, 1894 - on the day of the premiere of Liszt's mythological play Der Wala Erweckung - "The Awakening of the Shaft", which was to follow his speech on the German mission. The entrance tickets read: "Not valid for Jews." The wedding ceremony took place in an Evangelical Protestant church. According to British biographer Guido von List, "his wife's Lutheranism reflected the spiritual hesitations of many Austrian Pan-Germanists who wanted to express their disappointment with the empire by abandoning the accepted Catholic faith."
In 1902, after a cataract operation, Guido Liszt would go completely blind for 11 months. At this time, he turned to the interpretation of ancient Germanic runes and the study of the "Aryan proto-language" and other symbols in ancient inscriptions. In 1903, the Kaiser's Academy of Sciences in Vienna returned Liszt the manuscript with his "research" without any comments. In 1907, Guido List entered the noble particle "von" into the address book of the Viennese nobility, on the basis that his ancestors were nobles, but his grandfather refused the title. From that time on, he became known as Guido von List. The following year, Guido, with his comrades and like-minded people, founded the Liszt Society. Within it, in 1911, he created the Hohen Armanen Orden (HAO), a circle of initiates that brought together a few members of the Society, but after a while disintegrated.
During the First World War, List's works were in great demand by front-line soldiers, and he received many response letters. His books were read in the trenches and hospitals.
In the spring of 1919, when famine reigned in the belligerent Danube monarchy, Liszt and his wife decided to go to the estate of the patron of the Liszt Society, who lived in Langins, near Brandenburg. Upon arrival at the train station in Berlin, List felt overwhelmed. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia. On the morning of May 17, 1919, the mystic poet and prophet of national revival died in a boarding house in Berlin. He was cremated in Leipzig, and an urn with ashes was buried in Vienna's central cemetery. Guido von List's obituary appeared on one of the four pages of the Munich Observer newspaper - Münchner Beobachter. The next year, this newspaper, published by Rudolf von Sebottendorf under the name Völkischer Beobachter, will become the official Nazi organ and will remain the leading newspaper of the party until 1945.
Booker Igor