Hagal

Of everything List devised, the Hagal figure travelled furthest, and it is a good illustration of how an invented symbol acquires the appearance of antiquity.

The claim

Hagal sits seventh of eighteen, the exact centre of the row, and List treated that position as significant. He called it the mother rune and argued that every other Armanen character could be generated from it by taking parts of its structure.

Drawn out as a six-armed hexagonal figure, the Hagal crystal, it was presented as the lattice underlying the whole cosmos: matter, spirit and the runes themselves all folded into one shape.

What the rune actually was

The historical rune is hagall, hail. All three surviving rune poems treat it as straightforwardly bad weather. The Old English poem calls it the whitest of grains, whirled from heaven and tossed by the wind; the Icelandic makes it cold grain and sickness of serpents. It is a hazard to crops.

List's reading, the hailstone as a crystalline seed containing spirit in latent form, out of which order unfolds, is an inversion. He turned a destructive thing into a generative one because his system needed a generative centre.

Where it went

The figure was taken up well beyond List's own circle. It circulated in German esoteric groups through the 1920s and 1930s, appeared among the emblems assembled in the runic material produced under the SS, and is still in use in contemporary Armanen practice and in New Age geometry, where it turns up under names having nothing to do with runes at all.

The trajectory is worth noticing. A shape invented around 1904 by a named author has been reproduced often enough, and detached from its author often enough, that it is now routinely encountered as an ancient Germanic emblem. Nothing was forged and nobody lied after the first claim; repetition did the rest.

The Armanen row is Guido von List's, published in 1908, and each of its eighteen characters sits on a historical original that he renamed and reinterpreted.

The character behind it

Hagal corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose Old Norse name was hagall, meaning hail. The rune poems gloss it as the coldest of grains, a hard seed that falls and melts. The character is well attested in the Viking-age inscriptional record doing ordinary work as the letter H.

What von List did with it

He kept the H value and the name in Germanised form, and then went considerably further with this character than with any other in the row, treating it as the rune from which the rest can be generated. That reading, and the drawn form he associates with it, are his own and have no counterpart in the historical material.

What is his and what is not

The hail-grain gloss is attested in the medieval rune poems. The idea of a single generative mother rune is not. Keeping those apart is the whole discipline required when reading this entry, because von List presented his construction as a recovery, and runologists do not accept that account.

Reception

The Armanen row was adopted in volkisch circles and by National Socialist organisations during the 1930s and 1940s, and characters from it appear in the insignia of those organisations. The atlas states this rather than omitting it.