page_title: Heathenry (new religious movement)
section_title: Romanticist and Völkisch predecessors
hierarchical_section_title: Heathenry (new religious movement) / History / Romanticist and Völkisch predecessors
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Scherl: Der bekannte Wiener Schriftsteller Guido von List, Aufnahme: Conrad H. Schiffer, Hoffotograph, Wiesbaden [Archivzugang: Dezember 1913] Abgebildete Personen: List, Guido von: Schriftsteller, Österreich Information added by Wikimedia users.According to the original description above, the photographer was Conrad Hubert Schiffer (d. 1942 according to HADIS), court photographer, Wiesbaden. Schiffer had taken over the studio of Carl Bornträger (b. 1826 in Königsberg, d. 1901-09-24 in Wiesbaden, according to HADIS) at Taunusstrasse 24 (p. 160 of the Rheingauer Adressbuch 1909-1911). For Schiffer, HADIS has photos from 1875 to 1915, Bornträger's studio was founded in 1864. According to [1], the image was published in 1910 in Guido List: Gesammelte Werke, Zweite Reihe: Forschungsergebnisse, 3. Band: Bilderschrift der Ariogermanen. Verlag der Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft, Wien 1910, and was taken on June 12, 1909.
context_page_description: Heathenry, also termed Heathenism, contemporary Germanic Paganism, or Germanic Neopaganism, is a modern Pagan religion. Scholars of religious studies classify it as a new religious movement. Developed in Europe during the early 20th century, its practitioners model it on the pre-Christian belief systems adhered to by the Germanic peoples of the Iron Age and Early Middle Ages. In an attempt to reconstruct these past belief systems, Heathenry uses surviving historical, archaeological, and folkloric evidence as a basis, although approaches to this material vary considerably.
  Heathenry does not have a unified theology but is typically polytheistic, centering on a pantheon of deities from pre-Christian Germanic Europe. It adopts cosmological views from these past societies, including an animistic view of the cosmos in which the natural world is imbued with spirits. The religion's deities and spirits are honored in sacrificial rites known as blóts in which food and libations are offered to them. These are often accompanied by symbel, the act of ceremonially toasting the gods with an alcoholic beverage.
context_section_description: During the late 18th and 19th centuries, German Romanticism focused increasing attention on the pre-Christian belief systems of Germanic Europe, with various Romanticist intellectuals expressing the opinion that these ancient religions were "more natural, organic and positive" than Christianity. Such an attitude was promoted by the scholarship of Romanticist intellectuals like Johann Gottfried Herder, Jacob Grimm, and Wilhelm Grimm. This development went in tandem with a growth in nationalism and the idea of the volk, contributing to the establishment of the Völkisch movement in German-speaking Europe. Criticising the Jewish roots of Christianity, in 1900 the Germanist Ernst Wachler published a pamphlet calling for the revival of a racialized ancient German religion. Other writers such as Ludwig Fahrenkrog supported his claims, resulting in the formation of both the Bund fur Persönlichkeitskultur (League for the Culture of the Personality) and the Deutscher Orden in 1911 and then the Germanische-Deutsche Religionsgemeinschaft (Germanic-German Religious Community) in 1912.
  Another development of Heathenry emerged within the occult völkisch movement known as Ariosophy. One of these völkisch Ariosophists was the Austrian occultist Guido von List, who established a religion that he termed "Wotanism", with an inner core that he referred to as "Armanism". List's Wotanism was based heavily on the Eddas, although over time it was increasingly influenced by the Theosophical Society's teachings. List's ideas were transmitted in Germany by prominent right-wingers, and adherents to his ideas were among the founders of the Reichshammerbund in Leipzig in 1912, and they included individuals who held key positions in the Germanenorden. The Thule Society founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf developed from the Germanenorden, and it displayed a Theosophically-influenced interpretation of Norse mythology.
  In 1933, the eclectic German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) was founded by the religious studies scholar Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who wanted to unite these disparate Heathen groups. While active throughout the Nazi era, his hopes that his "German Faith" would be declared the official faith of Nazi Germany were thwarted. The Heathen movement probably never had more than a few thousand followers during its 1920s heyday, however it held the allegiance of many middle-class intellectuals, including journalists, artists, illustrators, scholars, and teachers, and thus exerted a wider influence on German society.
  The völkisch occultists—among them Pagans like List and Christians like Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels—"contributed importantly to the mood of the Nazi era". Few had a direct influence on the Nazi Party leadership, with one prominent exception: Karl Maria Wiligut was both a friend and a key influence on the Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler. Wiligut professed ancestral-clairvoyant memories of ancient German society, proclaiming that "Wotanism" was in conflict with another ancient religion, "Irminenschaft", which was devoted to a messianic Germanic figure known as Krist, who was later wrongly transformed into the figure of Jesus. Many Heathen groups disbanded during the Nazi period, and they were only able to re-establish themselves after World War II, in West Germany, where freedom of religion had been re-established. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was a social stigma surrounding völkisch ideas and groups, along with a common perception that the mythologies of the pre-Christian Germanic societies had been tainted through their usage by the Nazi administration, an attitude that to some extent persisted into the 21st century.
  The völkisch movement also manifested itself in 1930s Norway within the milieu surrounding such groups as the Ragnarok Circle and Hans S. Jacobsen's Tidsskriftet Ragnarok journal. Prominent figures involved in this milieu were the writer Per Imerslund and the composer Geirr Tveitt, although it left no successors in post-war Norway. A variant of "Odinism" was developed by the Australian Alexander Rud M
caption: Guido von List, who promoted an early form of Heathenry
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