The Kala: Guido von List’s “Mystery Language”
In the last work published during his lifetime, The Primordial Language of the Aryo-Germanic People and their Mystery Language [Die Ursprache der Ario-Germanen und ihre Mysteriensprache] (1914), List gave his esoteric theories on the hidden meanings of sound.
His system depends upon the phonetic values, instead of numeric, in order to unlock the secret meanings of language.
He says that the Primordial Language or “original Aryan language” (which he calls the “Kala “) is founded upon sixteen vocalizations, of which:
• five count for the Vowels or “self-sounding” sounds: A, E, I, O, U;
• one for the Hauchlaut (literally “Breath-Sound”), the Aspirate or Aspiration sound (also called the voiceless glottal fricative): H (which is to pronounce the letter “h” at the beginning of a word);
• and the ten remaining are attributed to the Consonants: F/V, R, K/G, Th/D, N, S/Z, T, B/P, L, M.
List says “The law of becoming and development (Progression) is subdivided into ten levels” which correspond to the Vowel sounds in an interesting way:
These ten vocalizations of the Consonants have the corresponding attributes:
The Aspiration sound (corresponding to the Hagal rune) does not seem to have been given a value.
These Vowel and Consonant sounds are combined together to make syllables or sound formulas which, according to List, have an esoteric significance. The ordering of the sounds does not matter (it can be vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel), because the power and meaning is in the combination of sound qualities, and not in their ordering:
These so-called ‘bud-words’ or ‘kernel-words’ can then be combined to form “Ur-words”, or Primordial words (the word Ur in German is related to Primordial, Original, Before, etc).
A third kind of word is the root-word and can be the same as an Ur-word or even a kernel-word. The rune names themselves are all considered root-words.
Summary
When we put all of this together, List explains that we can derive the esoteric meaning behind words. These are some of the examples he gives:
FA = I + 1-4,
BAR = VIII + 1-4 + II,
NOTh = V + 8-9 + IV,
UOTAN (Wotan) = 10 + 8-9 + VII + 1-4 + V, etc.
List understood the Runes not only as letters, but also as phonetic values, which he says are related to an ancient language (the Kala ) and that by breaking words down into their syllables (or ‘bud/kernel-words’), one is able to extract their esoteric meaning.
The use of this consonant & vowel combinations with a particular rune is something that many other runologists have continued to use, effectively becoming the associated Vocalization or Mantram for each rune. This is probably one of the reasons why List has been described as the pioneer of völkisch rune occultism.