Karl Maria Wiligut - Occult Involvement

Occult Involvement

In 1889 Wiligut joined the Schlaraffia, a quasi-masonic lodge. When he left the lodge in 1909, he held the rank of knight and the office of chancellor. His first book, Seyfrieds Runen, was published in 1903 under his full real name with the addition Lobesam. "Seyfrieds Runen" was a collection of poems about the Rabenstein at Znaim on the Austrian-Moravian border. In 1908 followed the Neun Gebote Gots, where Wiligut first claimed to be heir to an ancient tradition of Irminism. Both List and Wiligut were influenced by Friedrich Fischbach's 1900 Die Buchstaben Gutenbergs. Wiligut claimed to be in the tradition of a long line of Germanic mystic teachers, reaching back into prehistoric times. He also claimed to have spiritual powers that allowed him direct access to genetic memories of his ancestors thousands of years previously. From 1908, Wiligut was in contact with the occultist Ordo Novi Templi in Vienna. Wiligut claimed that the Bible had originally been written in Germanic, and testified to an "Irminic" religion - Irminenreligion or Irminism - that contrasted with Wotanism. He claimed to worship a Germanic god "Krist", whom Christianity was supposed later to have appropriated as their own saviour Christ.

Germanic culture and history, according to Wiligut, reached back to 228,000 BC. At this time, there were three suns, and Earth was inhabited by giants, dwarfs and other mythical creatures. Wiligut claimed that his ancestors, the Adler-Wiligoten, ended a long period of war. By 12,500 BC, the Irminic religion of Krist was revealed and from that time became the religion of all Germanic peoples, until the schismatic adherents of Wotanism gained the upper hand. In 1200 BC, the Wotanists succeeded in destroying the Irminic religious center at Goslar, following which the Irminists erected a new temple at the Externsteine, which was in turn appropriated by the Wotanists in AD 460. Wiligut's own ancestors were supposedly protagonists in this setting: the Wiligotis were Ueiskunings ("Ice kings") descending from a union of Aesir and Vanir. They founded the city of Vilna as the center of their Germanic empire and always remained true to their Irminic faith.

Wiligut's convictions assumed a paranoid trait in the 1920s as he became convinced that his family was the victim of a continuing persecution of Irminists, at present conducted by the Roman Catholic Church, the Jews and the Freemasons, on which groups he also blamed the defeat of World War I and the downfall of the Habsburg Empire.

During the 1920s, Wiligut wrote down 38 verses (out of a number purportedly exceeding 1,000), the so-called Halgarita Sprüche, that he claimed to have memorized as a child, taught by his father. Wiligut had designed his own "runic alphabet" for this purpose.

Werner von Bülow and Emil Rüdiger of the Edda-Gesellschaft (Edda Society) translated and annotated these verses. They claimed that numbers 27 and 1818 are connected with the Black Sun. Verse number 27 according to Willigut is a 20,000 year old "solar blessing":

Sunur saga santur toe Syntir peri fuir sprueh Wilugoti haga tharn Halga fuir santur toe

Werner von Bülow translates this as follows:

"Legend tells, that two Suns, two wholesome in change-rule UR and SUN, alike to the hourglass which turned upside down ever gives one of these the victory / The meaning of the divine errant wandering way / dross star in fire's sphere became in fire-tongue revealed to the Earth-I-course of the race of Paradise / godwilling leaders lead to the weal through their care in universal course, what is visible and soon hidden, whence they led the imagination of mankind / polar in change-play, from UR to SUN in sacrifical service of waxing and waning, in holy fire Santur is ambiguously spent in sparks, but turns victorious to blessing".

Santur is interpreted as a burnt-out sun that was still visible at the time of Homer. Rüdiger speculates that this was the center of the solar system hundreds of millennia ago, and he imagines a fight between the new and the old Suns that was decided 330,000 years ago. Santur is seen as the source of power of the Hyperboreans.

In esoteric currents of Neo-Nazism, Neofolk, National-Socialist black metal and Neopaganism, Wiligut's writings enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1990s.