Pagans, Nazis, Gaels, and the Algiz Rune

Adam Dahmer

doi:10.33356/temenos.83429

Abstract

Although Beltaners – members of Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Society (BFS) – can trace the immediate origins of their society’s festivals to the collaborative efforts of anarchist performance artists and folklorists reacting against the Thatcherite government policies of the late 1980s, the ritual celebrations they routinely re-enact in the present ultimately derive from much older traditions associated with Scotland’s highly minoritised Gaelic-speaking population, a cohort to which few modern Beltaners belong. Performers at today’s festivals often incorporate runes into their regalia – a practice which does not reflect Gaelic tradition, but which is not unknown among ideologues of the far right. This paper interrogates rune use at BFS festivals, asking whether the employment of Germanic cultural elements in Celtic festivals by non-Celtic-speakers represents a distortion of history and debasement of an embattled ethnic minority, and whether it is ethically acceptable for an explicitly anti-racist organisation to share a symbolic repertoire with representatives of known hate groups. Based on data derived from fieldwork consisting chiefly of participant observation and on the consultation of relevant academic literature, this paper evaluates the potentially problematic nature of BFS ritual performers’ rune use and related behaviours by analysing the intentions that underlie their actions, the consequences that have resulted from them, and the historical interaction of runes, ethnonationalism, and the occult that has shaped perceptions of runic meaning among those who use runes in modern times.

Highlights

Beltaners – members of Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Society (BFS) – can trace the immediate origins of their society’s festivals to the collaborative efforts of anarchist performance artists and folklorists reacting against the Thatcherite government policies of the late 1980s, the ritual celebrations they routinely re-enact in the present derive from much older traditions associated with Scotland’s highly minoritised Gaelic-speaking population, a cohort to which few modern Beltaners belong
After examining the available scholarly and general-interest works of turn-of-the-century runic researchers, following the resurgence in public interest in the occult uses of runes, neopagan practitioners in various emerging spiritual traditions had arrived by the mid-1980s at a broad consensus as to the symbology of Algiz and other runes, and have since broadcast this consensus extensively by word of mouth, in print, and online (Barnes 2012, 142)
An examination of the history of runes from antiquity to the present reveals the enduring fascination they have held for occultists – some of whom have had ties to Germanic ethnonationalism

Summary

Runes and the far right

Certainly spurred by the zeitgeist, the intellectual entanglement of rune lore and German National Socialism in the early twentieth century largely resulted from the scholarship and enthusiastic ideologising of one Nazi intellectual, the German Indo-Europeanist academic and political propagandist Alfred Rosenberg (Strmiska 2005, 24ff.). Rosenberg helped articulate and popularise the discredited theory that the first IndoEuropeans – an ethnonym at that time synonymous with ‘Aryans’ – had been essentially Germanic in speech, behaviour, and appearance, and that white speakers of Germanic languages represented their ‘purest’ genetic descendants and cultural heirs This formulation would be used to justify the territorially expansionist and genocidal policies of the Third Reich on the basis that Europe had become the homeland of the Indo-Europeans through military conquest, and that, as the modern incarnation of that once-great people, Germans had the right both to occupy the entirety of the European continent and to dominate or destroy any ethnic group that represented either a competitor with or a defective offshoot of the Aryan bloodline. To begin to answer that question, this discussion must offer a description of rune use within the BFS and give at least a brief account of performers’ motivations for engaging in the practice

Rune use at the Edinburgh Beltane festival

The Algiz rune

The question of runic meaning

Rune lore for Beltaners

Why use Germanic script at a Celtic festival?

The nature of the allegedly problematic of Beltaner rune use

Conclusion