Guido Karl Anton List was born in Vienna on 5 October 1848, the son of a leather goods merchant, and worked for years in the family trade while building a parallel career as a journalist, novelist, dramatist and enthusiastic mountaineer and hiker in the Alps. His writing turned increasingly toward a romanticized, invented vision of pre-Christian Germanic religion, drawing on the Eddas, on contemporary völkisch nationalism and on his own reading of Theosophy, and by the 1890s he had a following that treated him as a recoverer of lost Germanic wisdom rather than as a novelist and journalist by trade.
In 1902 he underwent cataract surgery on both eyes and, during the temporary blindness that followed, reported a visionary experience in which the runes he later called Armanen were revealed to him as a wisdom the Germanic peoples had once possessed and then lost. He founded a following organized around this material, the Guido von List Society, before his death in Berlin on 17 May 1919. Before his turn to esotericism he had already built a substantial public reputation through conventional means, publishing novels and plays set in a romanticized pre-Christian Austria and writing travel pieces on the Alps for the Viennese press, so his later following came to him already primed by years of popular, if not academic, visibility rather than arriving from nowhere.