Rune Masters II

Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius (27 November 1701 – 25 April 1744) was a Swedish astronomer. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale which takes his name. The scale was inverted in 1745 by Carl Linnaeus, one year after Celsius' death from tuberculosis.

Life

Early life

Anders Celsius was born in Uppsala, Sweden on 27 November 1701. His family originated from Ovanåker in the province of Hälsingland. Their family estate was at Doma, also known as Höjen or Högen (locally as Högen 2). The name Celsius is a latinization of the estate's name (Latin celsus "mound").

As the son of an astronomy professor, Nils Celsius, and the grandson of the mathematician Magnus Celsius and the astronomer Anders Spole, Celsius chose a career in science. He was a talented mathematician from an early age. Anders Celsius studied atUppsala University, where his father was a teacher, and in 1730 he too, became a professor of astronomy there.

Career

In 1730, he published the Nova Methodus distantiam solis a terra determinandi (New Method for Determining the Distance from the Sun to the Earth). His research also involved the study of auroral phenomena, which he conducted with his assistant Olof Hiorter, and he was the first to suggest a connection between the aurora borealis and changes in the magnetic field of the Earth.He observed the variations of a compass needle and found that larger deflections correlated with stronger auroral activity. At Nuremberg in 1733, he published a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis made by himself and others over the period 1716–1732.

Celsius traveled frequently in the early 1730s, including to Germany, Italy, and France, when he visited most of the major European observatories. In Paris he advocated the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland. In 1736, he participated in the expedition organized for that purpose by the French Academy of Sciences, led by the French mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) to measure a degree of latitude. The aim of the expedition was to measure the length of a degree along a meridian, close to the pole, and compare the result with a similar expedition to Peru, today in Ecuador, near the equator. The expeditions confirmed Isaac Newton's belief that the shape of the earth is an ellipsoid flattened at the poles.

In 1738, he published the De observationibus pro figura telluris determinanda (Observations on Determining the Shape of the Earth). Celsius' participation in the Lapland expedition won him much respect in Sweden with the government and his peers, and played a key role in generating interest from the Swedish authorities in donating the resources required to construct a new modern observatory in Uppsala. He was successful in the request, and Celsius founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741. The observatory was equipped with instruments purchased during his long voyage abroad, comprising the most modern instrumental technology of the period.

In astronomy, Celsius began a series of observations using colored glass plates to record the magnitude (a measure of brightness) of certain stars. This was the first attempt to measure the intensity of starlight with a tool other than the human eye. He made observations of eclipses and various astronomical objects and published catalogues of carefully determined magnitudes for some 300 stars using his own photometric system (mean error=0.4 mag).

Celsius was the first to perform and publish careful experiments aiming at the definition of an international temperature scale on scientific grounds. In his Swedish paper "Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer" he reports on experiments to check that the freezing point is independent of latitude (and of atmospheric pressure). He determined the dependence of the boiling of water with atmospheric pressure which was accurate even by modern day standards. He further gave a rule for the determination of the boiling point if the barometric pressure deviates from a certain standard pressure.He proposed the Celsius temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, the oldest Swedish scientific society, founded in 1710. His thermometer was calibrated with a value of 100° for the freezing point of water and 0° for the boiling point. In 1745, a year after his death, the scale was reversed by Carl Linnaeusto facilitate more practical measurement.Celsius originally called his scale centigrade derived from the Latin for "hundred steps". For years it was simply referred to as the Swedish thermometer.

Celsius conducted many geographical measurements for the Swedish General map, and was one of earliest to note that much of Scandinavia is slowly rising above sea level, a continuous process which has been occurring since the melting of the ice from the latest ice age. However, he wrongly posed the notion that the water was evaporating.

In 1725 he became secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, and served at this post until his death from tuberculosis in 1744. He supported the formation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 1739 by Linnaeus and five others, and was elected a member at the first meeting of this academy. It was in fact Celsius who proposed the new academy's name.

Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík

Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík (Jón Ólafsson frá Grunnavík, also known as Jón Grunnvíkingur or Grunnavíkur-Jón, 1705 – 1779) was an Icelandic scholar. Originally from Grunnavík, Westfjords, northwestern Iceland, he was active in Copenhagen, where he served as assistant to Árni Magnússon.

He is the author of an Icelandic dictionary and a 1732 Runologia, a treatise on runology. As in the fire of Copenhagen of 1728, the original manuscript of the Heiðarvíga saga was lost along with a recent copy made by Jón Grunnvíkingur, he wrote down a summary of the saga from memory, which is the only form in which the saga's contents survive today.

The character of Jón Grindvicensis in Halldór Laxness's historical novel Iceland's Bell is based on Jón Grunnvíkingur.

Wilhelm Grimm

Wilhelm Carl Grimm (also Karl 24 February 1786 – 16 December 1859) was a German author, the younger of the Brothers Grimm.

Life and work

He was born in Hanau, Hesse-Kassel and in 1803 he started studying law at the University of Marburg, one year after his brother Jacob started there. The whole of the lives of the two brothers was passed together. In their school days, they had one bed and one table in common. As students, they had two beds and two tables in the same room. They always lived under one roof, and had their books and property in common.

In 1825 Wilhelm married a pharmacist's daughter; Henriette Dorothea Wild, also known as Dortchen, at age 39. Wilhelm's marriage in no way disturbed the harmony of the brothers. As Richard Cleasby said, “they both live in the same house, and in such harmony and community that one might almost imagine the children were common property.” Together, Wilhelm and Henriette had four children: Jacob Grimm (3 April 1826–15 December 1826), Herman Friedrich Grimm (6 January 1828–16 June 1901), Rudolf Georg Grimm (31 March 1830–13 November 1889), and Barbara Auguste Luise Pauline Marie (21 August 1832–9 February 1919).

Wilhelm's character was a complete contrast to that of his brother. As a boy he was strong and healthy, but as he grew up he was attacked by a long and severe illness, which left him weak all his life. His was a less comprehensive and energetic mind than that of his brother, and he had less of the spirit of investigation, preferring to confine himself to some limited and definitely bounded field of work; he utilized everything that bore directly on his own studies, and ignored the rest. These studies were almost always of a literary nature.

Wilhelm took great delight in music, for which his brother had but a moderate liking, and had a remarkable gift of story-telling. Cleasby, in the account of his visit to the brothers quoted above, relates that “Wilhelm read a sort of farce written in the Frankfort dialect, depicting the ‘malheurs’ of a rich Frankfort tradesman on a holiday jaunt on Sunday. It was very droll, and he read it admirably.” Cleasby describes him as “an uncommonly animated, jovial fellow.” He was, accordingly, much sought in society, which he frequented much more than his brother.

From 1837-1841, the Grimm Brothers joined five of their colleague professors at the University of Göttingen to form a group known as the Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven). They protested against Ernst August, King of Hanover, whom they accused of violating the constitution. All seven were fired by the king.

Wilhelm Grimm died in Berlin of an infection at the age of 73.

Guido von List

Guido Karl Anton List, better known as Guido von List (October 5, 1848 – May 17, 1919) was an Austrian/German (Viennese) poet, journalist, writer, businessman and dealer of leather goods, mountaineer, hiker, dramatist, playwright, and rower, but was most notable as an occultist and völkisch author who is seen as one of the most important figures in Germanic revivalism, Germanic mysticism, Runic Revivalism and Runosophy in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and continues to be so today.

He is the author of Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes), which is a detailed study of the Armanen Futharkh, his intellectual world-view (as realised in the years between 1902 and 1908), an introduction to the rest of his work and is widely regarded as the pioneering work of Runology in modern occultism.

Biography

Guido von List was born in Vienna in the Austrian Empire to Karl Anton List, a prosperous middle class leather goods dealer, and Maria List (née Killian). He grew up in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. Like the majority of his fellow Austrians at that time, his family was Roman Catholic, and he was christened "Guido Anton List" as an infant in St Peter's Church in Vienna on October 8, 1848.

In 1862 a visit to the catacombs beneath the Stephansdom (St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna) made a deep impression, and List regarded the catacombs as a pagan shrine. As an adult he claimed he had then sworn to build a temple to Wotan when he grew up. This he recounted in volume 2 (page 592-593) of his book Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder:

It was in the year 1862 - I was then in my fourteenth year of life - when I, after much asking, received permission from my father to accompany him and his party who were planning to visit the catacombs [under St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna] which were at that time still in their original condition. We climbed down, and everything I saw and felt excited me with a kind of power that today I am no longer able to experience. Then we came - it was, if I remember correctly, in the third or fourth level - to a ruined altar. The guide said that we were now situated beneath the old post office (today the Wohlzeile House No. 8). At that point my excitement was raised to fever pitch, and before this altar I proclaimed out loud this ceremonial vow: "Whenever I get big, I will build a Temple to Wotan!" I was, of course, laughed at, as a few members of the party said that a child did not belong in such a place… I knew nothing more about Wuotan than that which I had read about him in Vollmer's Wörterbuch der Mythologie.

Despite these artistic and mystical leanings, Guido was expected, as the eldest child, to follow in his father's footsteps as a businessman. He appears to have fulfilled his responsibilities in a dutiful manner, but he took any and all opportunities to develop his more intense mystical and naturesque interests. The trips that List had to make for business purposes gave him the opportunity to indulge his passion for hiking and mountaineering. This activity seems to have provided a matrix for his early mysticism.

His father died in 1877 when List was 29 years old. It appears that neither he nor his mother had his father's keen sense of business, and as economic times became difficult List quit the family business to devote himself full time to his writing, at this time still of a journalistic kind.

During this time List wrote articles for newspapers, such as the Neue Welt (New World), Neue deutsche Alpenzeitung (New German Alpine Newspaper), Heimat (Homeland), and the Deutsche Zeitung (German Newspaper), which dealt with his earlier travels and mystical reflections on the Loci (land spirits). Many of these written newspaper articles were anthologised in 1891 in his famous Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder. He also had articles appear in the Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung and on a regular basis in the newspaper Ostdeutsche Rundschau (East German Review), owned by the powerful publicist and parliamentary deputy Karl Heinrich Wolf. At this time he also came to know well Georg von Schönerer, a leading political figure and Pan-German member of the Imperial Parliament.

He also had many articles appear in periodicals such as Laufers Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik, Der Sammler, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert, Die Gnosis, Der Deutsche, Neue Metaphysische Rundschau, Die Nornen, Österreichische Illustrierte Rundschau andJohannes Balzli's occult magazine Prana.

In 1878 List married his first wife, Helene Föster-Peters. However, the marriage was not to last through this difficult period.

Through the years 1877–1887 List was also working on his first book-length (two-volume) effort, Carnuntum, an historical novel based on his vision of the Kulturkampf between the Germanic and Roman worlds centred at Carnuntum around the year 375 CE that was published in 1888 by the Wannieck family's organisation and publishing house Verein "Deutsche Haus" ("German House" Association) in Brno, where List made the acquaintance of the industrialist Friedrich Wanniheg. This association was to prove essential to List's future development.

Throughout this period in List's life he devoted himself to writing more neo-romantic prose, such as Jung Diethers Heimkehr ("Young Diether's Homecoming") in 1894 and Pipara in 1895. An anthology of his earlier journalism Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilderwas published in 1891, and List developed his writing skills in poetic and dramatic genres as well.

In 1892 he delivered a lecture on the ancient Germanic cult of Wuotan to the Verein Deutsche Geschichte (German History Association), and it is said that numerous other associations allied with this one proliferated in Austria at this time. Another group, theBund der Germanen (Germanic League), sponsored a performance of List's mythological dramatic poem, Der Wala Erweckung ("The Wala's Awakening") in 1894. In another performance of this drama in 1895, which was attended by over three thousand people, the part of Wala was read by Anna Wittek von Stecky, a young actress who in August 1899 became List's second wife.

During the years 1888–1899 List was involved with two important literary associations. In May 1891 Iduna, which had the descriptive subtitle of "Free German Society for Literature", was founded by a circle of writers around Fritz Lemmermayer. Lemmermayer acted as a sort of "middle man" between an older generation of authors (which included Fercher von Steinwand, Joseph Tandler, Auguste Hyrtl,Ludwig von Mertens, and Josephone von Knorr) and a group of younger writers and thinkers (which included Rudolf Steiner, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, and Karl Maria Heidt). The name Iduna was provided by List himself and is that of a North Germanic goddess of eternal youth and renewal. Richard von Kralik and Joseph Kalasanz Poestion, authors with specifically neo-Germanic leanings, were also involved in the circle. The other organisation List was involved with was the Literarische Donaugesellschaft (Danubian Literary Society), which was founded by List and Fanny Wschiansky the year the Iduna was dissolved in 1893. At this time List met Rudolf Steiner and Lanz von Liebenfels but his association with Liebenfels did not develop until Lanz had left the Heiligenkreuz monastery in 1899.

In August 1899, List married Anna Wittek von Stecky.

Mountaineering

In 1871, List's writing talents were given full rein as he became a correspondent of the Neue deutsche Alpenzeitung ("New German Alpine Newspaper"), later called the Salonblatt. He also began to edit the yearbook of the Österreichischer Alpenverein (Austrian Alpine Association), of which he became secretary in that year.

List was an ardent, enthusiastic mountaineer and hiker. On one of these adventures List came very close to losing his life. While climbing a mountain on May 8, 1871 in the Großes Höllental (Larger Valley of Hell) leading up to the Rax mountain in Lower Austria, a mass of ice gave way under his feet and he fell some distance. He was apparently saved only by the fact that he had landed on a soft surface covered by a recent snowfall. In memory of his good luck and to help others, at his own expense List had the track equipped with a chain put up and officially opened by him on June 21, 1871. It was also named (now calledGaislochsteig) after him the "Guido-List-Steig"

On June 24, 1875, List was camping with four friends near the ruins of Carnuntum. As the 1500th anniversary of the Germanic tribes' defeat of this Roman garrison in 375, the evening carried a lot of weight for List. Carnuntum became the title of List's first full-length novel, published in two volumes in 1888. After its success, it was followed by two more books set in tribal Germany; Jung Diethers Heimkehr ("Young Diether's Homecoming", 1894) and Pipara (1895). These books led to List being celebrated by the pan-German movement. Around the start of the 20th century, he continued with several plays.

Nobility and title

Between 1903 and 1907, he began using the noble title von on occasion, before finally settling on it permanently in 1907.

Death

In late 1918, the 70 year old List was in poor health during the final stages of World War I in which the naval blockade of the Central Powers created food shortages in Vienna.

In the spring of 1919, at the age of 71, List and his wife set off to recuperate and meet followers at the manor house of Eberhard von Brockhusen, a List society patron who lived at Langen in Brandenburg, Germany.

On arrival at the Anhalter Station at Berlin, List was too exhausted to continue the journey. After a doctor had diagnosed a lung inflammation, his health deteriorated quickly, and he died in a Berlin guesthouse on the morning of May 17, 1919. He was cremated in Leipzig and his ashes laid in an urn and then buried in Vienna Central Cemetery, Zentralfriedhof, in the gravesite KNLH 413 - Vienna's largest and most famous cemetery (including the graves of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Strauss.) in Vienna's 11th district of Simmering.

Philipp Stauff, a Berlin journalist, good friend of List and Armanist, wrote an obituary which appeared in the Münchener Beobachtercalled "Guido von List gestorben" on May 24, 1919,

Runic revivalism

The row of 18 so-called "Armanen Runes", also known as the "Armanen Futharkh" came to List while in an 11 month state of temporary blindness after a cataract operation on both eyes in 1902. This vision in 1902 allegedly opened what List referred to as his "inner eye", via which he claimed the "Secret of the Runes" was revealed to him. List stated that his Armanen Futharkh were encrypted in the Hávamál (poetic Edda), specifically in stanzas 138 to 165, with stanzas 146 through 164 reported as being the 'song' of the 18 runes. It has been said this claim has no historical basis.

The Armanen runes are still used today by some Ásatrú adherents who consider the Armanen runes to have some religious and/or divinatory value.

Futharkh spelling

List noted in his book, The Secret of the Runes, that the "runic futharkh (= runic ABC) consisted of sixteen symbols in ancient times.".

As a side note to this, in the English translation of the work, Stephen Flowers notes that "(the designation futharkh is based on the first seven runes it is for this reason that the proper name is not futhark -- as it is generally and incorrectly written -- but futharkh, with the h at the end; for more about the basis of this, see the Guido von List Library number 6, The primal language of the Aryan Germanic people and their mystery language)".

Hexagonal Crystal and the Armanen Runes

List's system was allegedly based on the structure of a Hexagonal Crystal. You can shine light through a crystal at different angles and project all 18 of the Armanen runes.

List's rune row was rather rigid; while the runes of the past had had sharp angles for easy carving, his were to be carefully and perfectly made so that their shape would be a reflection of the 'frozen light', a pattern that he had found in his runes. All of his runes could be projected by shining the light through a hexagonal crystal under certain angles. Rune Hagal is so-called 'mother-rune' because its shape represents that hexagonal crystal.

Karl Hans Welz states that the "crystalline structure of quartz is the "hexagonal system" which is also one of the bases of the Runic symbolism (the hexagon with the three inscribed diameters)." and that "The hexagonal cross section of quartz and the fact that all of the 18 Sacred Futhork Runes are derived from the geometry of the hexagon is the basis of an enormous increase in crystal power when it is associated with Rune images."

Influence

Guido von List Society

A look at the signatoriesof the first announcement concerning support for a Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft (Guido von List Society), circa 1905, reveals that List had a following of some very prestigious people and shows that List, his ideology and his influence had widespread and significant support, including that amongst public figures in Austria and Germany. Among some 50 signatories which endorsed the foundation of the List Society (which had an official founding ceremony on March 2, 1908) were the industrialist Friedrich Wannieck and his son Friedrich Oskar Wannieck and Karl Lueger (the mayor of Vienna). These supporters also included occultists such as Hugo Göring (editor of theosophical literature at Weimar), Harald Arjuna Grävell van Jostenoode(theosophical author at Heidelberg), Max Seiling (an esoteric pamphleteer and popular philosopher in Munich), and Paul Zillmann (editor of the Metaphysische Rundschau and master of an occult lodge in Berlin)

List's influence continued to grow and attract distinctive members after the official founding of the society in 1908. From 1908 through to 1912, new members included the deputy Beranek (co-founder of the "Bund der Germanen" in 1894), Philipp Stauff (a Berlin journalist and later a founding member of the Germanenorden), Franz Hartmann (a leading German theosophist), Karl Heise (a leading figure in the vegetarian and mystical Mazdaznan cult at Zürich), and the collective membership of the Vienna Theosophical Society.