The pairing of Man with its inversion Yr is genuinely List's, and what was subsequently done with the pair is a matter of printed record rather than inference.
The pair in the system
Man, the fifteenth rune, is the Younger Futhark madr, a human being. Yr, the sixteenth, is the same figure inverted, historically a yew or a bow. The visual relationship is real and old; the two characters genuinely are one another upside down.
List read them as a polarity. Man reaches upward, spirit, increase, the link between the human and the divine. Yr reaches downward, root, matter, the moon, error, the end of a cycle.
What they became
During the 1920s and 1930s the two were adopted in Germany as the Lebensrune and the Todesrune, the life rune and the death rune, and put to a specific documentary use: printed in place of the words for born and died.
They appear in that role in:
- genealogical and ancestry registers of the period, where proof of descent was an administrative requirement
- paperwork of the Lebensborn programme, which took its name from the life rune
- death notices in the press
- grave markers and memorials, including SS ones
Both characters remain current in far-right symbolism and are catalogued as such by organisations that track extremist iconography.
Reading them now
This does not make the medieval madr rune a fascist symbol, any more than a letter of the alphabet can be. But the Armanen Man is not the medieval madr. It is List's reading of it, and it is List's reading that was adopted.
Anyone drawing this rune for the increase and human flourishing it was supposed to signify should know what else it has signified, and how recently.