For those of you who have read my work, you know the importance that rune magick has on the themes expressed in my tales. In this article, I’d like to talk about how I came to bring this concept into my work. For those of you who are new to my writing, I hope this article will give you some preliminary insight into the characters I’ve created and the thought process behind them. But first, let’s talk about a real-life magician.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1848, Guido Karl Anton List, AKA Guido von List, is the single most important figure to modern esoteric runology. List was a mystic and priest of Wotan who wrote a number of esoteric works. Though List wrote some fiction, he is best remembered for his occult works—particularly his revelation or invention (whichever one prefers to believe) of the Armanen rune row as a complete esoteric system.

Stephen E. Flowers writes in his introduction to his English translation of List’s Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes): 

According to List, the Armanen rune row is the original rune row from which all others are derived. The row consists of eighteen runes that correspond perfectly with Odin’s rune poem, though some scholars will argue that the Armanen is just the Younger Futhark with two characters added to correspond to verses 146 through 164 of The Havamal. The Havamal or Words of the High One is the ancient Norse poem of Odin’s words. Strophes 146 through 164 is a magickal text in itself. Each verse corresponds to a rune.

I first encountered the Armanen when I met Austrian expatriate and the founder of the Knights of Runes order, Karl Hans Welz, at an occult bookstore in Atlanta around 1991. When Karl told me about the rune row I told him I wasn’t much interested in divination. He explained to me that the Armanen was a complete esoteric system and told me to come over to his house and he would show me some books he had written and we could discuss it further. Coincidentally, Karl lived right down the street from me in Norcross.

At that time, the Armanen remained a relatively obscure system in the United States, as nothing had been written in English other than Karl’s booklets and a few works by Stephen E. Flowers (AKA S. Edred Thorsson), though I didn’t know about Flowers’ work until much later on.

When I formed my heavy metal band Cauldron Born in 1994, I felt I needed a mascot to grace my album covers. I created a demonic-looking warrior and named him Thorn. Thorn is the third rune in the Armanen row and is of a martial nature. My mascot, Thorn, is the Thorn rune incarnate. Stephen Flowers states in his work The Runic Magic of the Armanen, “This is the most popular rune for curses.”

In 2014, I was invited to submit a story for DMR Books’ first volume of Swords of Steel. Though the Armanen is an actual occult system I wrap some of it in fantasy elements and take it in my own direction. In the following excerpts from my story, “All Will Be Righted on Samhain” (from the anthology Swords of Steel), Bunduica is an Iceni witch who has been severely wronged by the hand of Imperial Rome and invokes the Thorn rune for revenge.

Some minutes pass as Bunduica makes her way through the Briton forest, and then we get our first glimpse of Thorn leading the Wild Hunt:

After some time Bunduica seeks shelter from a storm in a cottage inhabited by an old witch, deep in the woods. Here we get our first proper introduction to Thorn:

Because the Thorn character is nearly omnipotent it is often necessary that he possess a more vulnerable character, usually through some object or device. Thorn returns in “The Heart of the Betrayer” (Swords of Steel II) and aids Argantyr against those who betrayed and tried to destroy him by taking possession of him through a weird suit of armor. Here is an excerpt:

Did I mention snake-men? They are a recurring theme in my fiction. Here is another excerpt from my book, The Snake-Man’s Bane, in which Thorn takes possession of a wandering musician who is in a whole heap of trouble, through a crystal talisman that serves as an artificial, magickal eye.

While the roots of the Armanen (at least in the modern age) can be traced back to Guido von List, runemasters have revealed varying approaches to the runes. Rune magick is a product of the Germanic psyche and is considerably different than the arts practiced by Levantine and Mediterranean magicians. One such concept of the rune magick practiced by Karl Welz is the runes as defining energies as opposed to defined energies. Defined energies being egregors such as demons, angels, etc. Defining energies are creative energies. I explore this distinction in the following excerpt from The Snake-Man’s Bane:

I am able to only touch briefly on rune magick and the influence it has had on my sword-and-sorcery tales in this article, but I feel as though I should talk about one more rune before I wrap up. Some rune magicians refuse to work with the Yr rune. Even though it is common to interpret each rune as having both divine and demonic qualities, the Yr rune is sometimes shunned because it is thought to be primarily feminine in nature, and therefore of the night and the demonic. Runemaster Siegfried Adolf Kummer, author of the seminal Armanen work Heilige Runenmacht (Holy Rune Might, originally published in 1932) states that the Yr rune “leads to black magic”. The rune itself symbolizes the roots of the tree, Yggdrasil connecting the nine worlds. In Karnov: Phantom-Clad Rider of the Cosmic Ice I explore the possibilities of the Yr rune as a female demon.

Later in the story we read the words of Abbot Eothoclemes as he describes the malefic magick practiced by the Yr-possessed witch, D’Vartha:

Here, I allude to the “tilted runes” (as Welz refers to them) as the oracle is forced to tell the truth about how D’Vartha became possessed by the Yr demon:

I have merely skimmed the surface of my references to the Armanen rune row and rune magick in my tales here. For anyone interested in further reading, pick up a copy of The Snake-Man’s Bane at Amazon. For anyone interested in experimenting with rune magick remember the words of Jedediah Orne of Salem, “I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use.”