Ka

Ka is one of the eighteen Armanen runes, the runic row devised by the Austrian occultist Guido von List and published in his Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes) in 1908, developing ideas he had begun to set out from about 1902. It is given the sound-value K.

The rune and its meaning

Von List did not recover an ancient alphabet. He built his eighteen runes on the sixteen characters of the Younger Futhark, expanded to eighteen to match the eighteen rune-charms of the Havamal in the Poetic Edda, and assigned to each a mystical meaning of his own. In his system Ka stands for the generative kin-fire and the world-tree arising from the seed; capability, art and the power that brings a thing into being.

These readings are von List's early twentieth-century esoteric invention, not the meanings of the historical Viking-age runes, and are described here as such. The Armanen system was later taken up by volkisch and, in the 1930s and 1940s, National Socialist circles; that political appropriation is a separate and widely condemned chapter, and forms no part of the historical or comparative study of the row set out here.

The eighteen Armanen runes were published by Guido von List in 1908 and are his own row, assembled from historical material rather than inherited whole.

The character behind it

Ka corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose Old Norse name was kaun, meaning a sore or ulcer, which the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems treat as an affliction. The Old English rune poem gives its equivalent the name cen, a torch, and describes a bright flame. Two traditions, two very different glosses, both attested.

What von List did with it

He kept the K value, named the character Ka, and assigned it a meaning from his own system. Where the historical record offered him a choice between an ulcer and a torch he took neither on its own terms, which is characteristic of how the whole row was built: the shapes and roughly the sounds are historical, the names are Germanised, and the meanings are his.

What the row claims to be

Von List presented the eighteen as a priestly alphabet recovered from an ancient Germanic past, with its count taken from the eighteen rune-charms of the Havamal. Runologists do not accept this, and describe the row as an esoteric construction of its own period.

Reception

The row was taken up in volkisch circles and by National Socialist organisations in the 1930s and 1940s. The atlas records that reception as part of the object's history.