...This article follows the historian Goodrick-Clarke in summarizing these developments under the term Ariosophy, although this broader use of the word is retrospective and was not generally current among the esotericists themselves. They were part of a general occult revival in Austria and Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, loosely inspired by historical Germanic paganism and traditional concepts of occultism, and related to German romanticism. The connection of this Germanic mysticism with historical Germanic culture, though tenuous, is evident in the mystics' fascination with runes, in the form of List's Armanen runes.

Overview

Ideology regarding the Aryan race (in the sense of Indo-Europeans, though with Germanic peoples being viewed as their purest representatives), runic symbols, the swastika, and occultism are important elements in Ariosophy. From around 1900Esoteric notions entered Guido List's thoughts by 1899 at the latest (Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 51-52). In April 1903 he sent his manuscript, proposing what Goodrick-Clarke calls a "monumental pseudo-science" concerning the ancient German faith, to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna (ibid., 41). onwards, these ariosophic ideas (together with, and influenced by, Theosophy) contributed significantly to an occult counterculture in Germany and Austria. An historic interest in this topic has stemmed from the ideological relation of Ariosophy to Nazism, and is obvious in such book titles as:

• The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
• The Man who gave Hitler his Ideas (Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab), Wilfried Daim's biography of Lanz von Liebenfels
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