Vril

Vril, the Power of the Coming Race

File:Vril coming race 2008.jpg Cover of a 2008 printing
Author	Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Broadview Press
Publication date	1870
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

The Coming Race (original title), also reprinted as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, is a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1871. The novel is an early example of science fiction. However, many early readers believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called Vril was accurate, to the extent that some theosophists accepted the book as truth. Furthermore, since 1960 there has been a conspiracy theory about a secret Vril-Society.

History

The Coming Race was originally published anonymously in late 1871 but Bulwer-Lytton was known to be the author. Samuel Butler's Erewhon was also published anonymously, in March 1872, and Butler suspected that its initial success was due to it being taken by many as a sequel by Bulwer-Lytton to The Coming Race; when it was revealed in the 25 May 1872 edition of the Athenaeum that Butler was the author, sales dropped by 90 percent because he was at the time an unknown.

Plot summary

The novel centres on a young, independently wealthy traveler (the narrator), who accidentally finds his way into a subterranean world occupied by beings who seem to resemble angels, who call themselves Vril-ya. The hero soon discovers that they are descendants of an antediluvian civilisation who live in networks of subterranean caverns linked by tunnels. There they live in their technologically supported Utopia, chief among their tools being the "all-permeating fluid" called "Vril", a latent source of energy which his spiritually elevated hosts are able to master through training of their will, to a degree which depends upon their hereditary constitution, giving them access to an extraordinary force that can be controlled at will. The powers of the will include the ability to heal, change, and destroy beings and things—the destructive powers in particular are awesomely powerful, allowing a few young Vril-ya children to wipe out entire cities if necessary. The narrator suggests that in time, the Vril-ya will run out of habitable spaces underground and will start claiming the surface of the earth, destroying mankind in the process, if necessary.

The uses of Vril in the novel amongst the Vril-ya vary from an agent of destruction to a healing substance. According to Zee, the daughter of the narrator's host, Vril can be changed into the mightiest agency over all types of matter, both animate and inanimate. It can destroy like lightning or replenish life, heal, or cure. It is used to rend ways through solid matter. Its light is said to be steadier, softer and healthier than that from any flammable material. It can also be used as a power source for animating mechanisms. Vril can be harnessed by use of the Vril staff or mental concentration.

A Vril staff is an object in the shape of a wand or a staff which is used as a channel for Vril. The narrator describes it as hollow with 'stops', 'keys', or 'springs' in which Vril can be altered, modified or directed to either destroy or heal. The staff is about the size of a walking stick but can be lengthened or shortened according to the user's preferences. The appearance and function of the Vril staff differs according to gender, age, etc. Some staffs are more potent for destruction, others for healing. The staffs of children are said to be much simpler than those of sages; in those of wives and mothers the destructive part is removed while the healing aspects are emphasized. The destructive force is so great that the fire lodged in the hollow of a rod directed by the hand of a child could cleave the strongest fortress or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. It is also said that if army met army and both had command of the vril-force, both sides would be annihilated.

Interestingly, the Vril-ya also use Vril to take baths: It is their custom also, at stated but rare periods, perhaps four times a-year when in health, to use a bath charged with vril. They consider that this fluid, sparingly used, is a great sustainer of life; but used in excess, when in the normal state of health, rather tends to reaction and exhausted vitality. For nearly all their diseases, however, they resort to it as the chief assistant to nature in throwing off the complaint.

Analysis

The "science" of Vril

Bulwer-Lytton seems to have had knowledge of some of the then current scientific disputes. He makes many references to the scientists of his time and few if any to either mystics or religious spokesmen of any time. The source of his ideas seems to have been faulty middle 19th century science rather than the mystic teachers some have claimed for them.

Vril is apparently some sort of an early attempt to explain electromagnetic fields or forces. In Chapter VII, Vril is defined as what Michael Faraday had been experimenting with:

Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:--

Faraday is then quoted:

"I have long held an opinion," says that illustrious experimentalist, "almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action."

Again in ChapterXVI, we are told that Faraday would understand the "science" of Vril:

Though I had a secret persuasion that whatever the real effects of vril upon matter Mr. Faraday could have proved her a very shallow philosopher as to its extent or its causes, I had no doubt that Zee could have brained all the Fellows of the Royal Society, one after the other, with a blow of her fist. Every sensible man knows that it is useless to argue with any ordinary female upon matters he comprehends; but to argue with a Gy seven feet high upon the mysteries of vril,--as well argue in a desert, and with a simoom!

The book was written during the time that James Clerk Maxwell was publishing the correct interpretation of Faraday's experiments; however, while Bulwer-Lytton is apparently aware of Faraday's experiments, he is apparently unaware of Maxwell's work.

Bulwer-Lytton was also apparently aware of the then current, but now disproved, theory of universal luminiferous aether, which it was thought was required to allow the propagation of wave energy. The book goes on to say in Chapter XI:

"She described a subtle and life-giving medium called Lai, which I suspect to be identical with the ethereal oxygen of Dr. Lewins, wherein work all the correlative forces united under the name of Vril; and contended that wherever this medium could be expanded, as it agencies of Vril to have ample play, a temperature congenial to the highest forms of life could be secured."

Bulwer-Lytton also quotes zoologist Louis Agassiz at length in Chapter XIV a part of an examination of the religious beliefs of the Vril-ya. Agassiz is remembered today as the first scientist to propose that there had been an Ice Age. However, at the time of the book's writing he was well known as a biologist opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution and an advocate of "scientific" justifications for racism.

In chapter XV Bulwer-Lytton uses ideas from the geologist Charles Lyell to introduce an examination of the phrenology of the Vril-ya. Where Lyell is still considered an important contributor to the development of geology, phrenology is now considered a discredited science. It claimed to be able to understanding human personality by examining the shape of the skull.

Lyell was a friend of Darwin's and the story Zee later tells of how the ancestors of Vril-ya in their ignorant past had a major debate over whether they descended from frogs or did frogs descend from them is clearly meant to be a parody of the very heated debate over Darwinism taking place in Bulwer-Lytton's time. However, there seems to be at least some evidence that Bulwer-Lytton didn't know the difference between Darwinism and the already discredited Lamarckism. He explains that the palm nerve necessary to control Vril was developed by generations of exercising this nerve.

"It has been slowly developed in the course of generations, commencing in the early achievements, and increasing with the continuous exercise, of the vril power; therefore, in the course of one or two thousand years, such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by vril"

The Vril-ya as an Aryan Race

According to the book:

"I arrived at the conviction that this people—though originally not only of our human race, but, as seems to me clear by the roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world; and having, according to their myths and their history, passed through phases of society familiar to ourselves,--had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it was impossible that any community in the upper world could amalgamate: And that if they ever emerged from these nether recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of man."

In essence, the narrator believes the language of the Vril-ya to be of the same origin as Aryan languages. The passage does not outright affirm the narrator's belief that there is also an ethnic connection between the Vril-ya and the Aryans. In fact, subsequent passages have Zee, a female Vril-ya scientist, explain to the narrator that the Vril-ya are descended from frogs.

Many readers today find the passage quoted above to be thinly veiled admiration for the Vril-ya as Aryan Supermen. However, the modern connotations of these terms are heavily influenced by Nazi and White Supremacist propaganda developed and produced decades after the writing and initial publication of this book.

Therefore, while it is easy to see how fanatical readers were able to, in part, derive their Nazi and Supremacist beliefs and doctrines from this book, it is also important to note that The Coming Race says no more than it does say, and says even that as a work of fiction. Unlike with Zanoni, Edward Bulwer-Lytton made no suggestions about the work being non-fiction. A fact that, of course, did not stop many readers from assuming just that all the same.

The Vril-ya as Descendants of Atlantis

Nowhere does the book contain any statement or even suggestion of such. The Atlantis connection is entirely the work of subsequent occult writers who believed The Coming Race to be a non-fiction work.

Hollow Earth

The legend has received a further layer of elaboration from recent authors like Raymond Bernard who conflate Bulwer-Lytton's "Coming Race" with speculations about interior civilizations which live on the inside of the Hollow Earth. (The concept of a hollow earth was first advanced by Sir Edmund Halley at the end of the seventeenth century.) By contrast, Bulwer-Lytton's subterranean people dwelt in caverns within the crust of a solid earth. The world of the Vril-ya is always described as being underground tunnels, artificially lit (using Vril). The book contains no suggestion of a hollow earth; theories of this kind are only found in subsequent works.

Literary significance and reception

File:The coming race covers.gif

A sample of several modern covers of The Coming Race

The book was quite popular in the late 19th century, and for a time the word "Vril" came to be associated with "life-giving elixirs".

Some readers believe the book is non-fiction, and "Vril" has become associated with theories about Nazi-piloted Flugscheiben ("Flight Discs"), Vril-powered KSK (Kraftstrahlkanone, "force-ray cannon" — transmission rods that produce potent energy rays), Jesuit "spiritual exercises", and Atlanteans to name a few.

The concept of the Vril was given new impetus by the French author Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890), who at one time was the French Consul in Calcutta. In Les Fils de Dieu (1873) and in Les Traditions indo-européennes (1876), Jacolliot claims that he encountered Vril among the Jains in Mysore and Gujerat.

The writings of these two authors, and Bulwer-Lytton's occult background, convinced some commentators that the fictionalised Vril was based on a real magical force. Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, endorsed this view in her book Isis Unveiled (1877) and again in The Secret Doctrine (1888). In Jacolliot and Blavatsky, the Vril power and its attainment by a superhuman elite are worked into a mystical doctrine of race. However, the character of the subterranean people was transformed. Instead of potential conquerors, they were benevolent (if mysterious) spiritual guides, while Blavatsky's theory of racial evolution explicitly repudiated the idea of superior and inferior races.

When the theosophist William Scott-Elliot describes life in Atlantis in The Story of Atlantis & The Lost Lemuria (first published 1896), the aircraft of the Atlanteans are propelled by vril-force. Obviously he did not regard that description as fiction, and his books are still published by the Theosophical Society.

On the other hand, Rosicrucian teachings (which are not directly related to Theosophy) state that like all other such stories this book has never been taken seriously, but regarded only as the fantastic imagination of a clever writer, in same way that Jules Verne's stories met with a like attitude of admiration for this vivid fancy upon the part of the public; yet submarine navigation and 'bird-like flights' are facts today .

Bulwer-Lytton's novel remained little-known [check that], but with the influential works of Jacolliot and Blavatsky in the public arena, the myth of the Aryan superman fell on fertile soil. (It is worth noting that Nietzsche's remotely similar concept of Der Übermensch was not published until 1883 and met with no immediately comparable success.)

George Bernard Shaw read the book and was attracted to the idea of Vril, according to Michael Holroyd's biography of him.

Vril society

Speculation on Vril has not ceased. However, the speculation has not been continued by the Theosophical Society. A German author called Wilhelm Landig has linked Vril with Nazi UFOs and an escape by high Nazis to Antarctica. Most likely one will encounter far-fetched assertion about this in relation to a Vril-Society.

Willy Ley

Willy Ley (right) in a discussion with Heinz Haber and Wernher v. Braun, 1954

Willy Ley was a German rocket engineer who had emigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1947, he published an article entitled "Pseudoscience in Naziland" in the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction. There he attempted to explain to his readers how National Socialism could have fallen on such a fertile ground in Germany. He explained this with the high popularity of irrational convictions in Germany during the time. Among other pseudo-scientific groups he mentions a very peculiar one: "The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft - Society for Truth - and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril."

The article by Ley, and two small pamphlets by a „Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft‚ Das kommende Deutschland'“, that describe a perpetual motion based on vril, are the only real basis for the speculation that set off later. The Society for Truth that Ley describes was conducting 'research' on the existence of Vril. One can assume that it did not succeed, since the existence of Vril would not comply with common physics. However, it was not related in any way to Nazi organisations.

Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels

The existence of a Vril-Society was first alleged in 1960 by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels. In their book Le Matin des Magiciens, which appeared in 1960, they claimed that the Vril-Society was a secret community of occultists in pre-Nazi Berlin. The Berlin Vril Society was in fact a sort of inner circle of the Thule Society. It was also thought to be in close contact with the English group known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Vril information takes up about a tenth of the volume, the remainder of which details other esoteric speculations, but the authors fail to clearly explain whether this section is fact or fiction.

In his book Monsieur Gurdjieff, Louis Pauwels claimed that a Vril Society had been founded by General Karl Haushofer, a student of Russian magician and metaphysician Georges Gurdjieff. Pauwels later recanted many assertions in relation to Gurdjieff.

Obviously belief in the existence of the Vril Society has persisted.

Publications on the Vril Society in English

Supposedly, a historian with the name Michael Fitzgerald has published two books on the Vril society, seeking to establish both the reality of the Vril Society, and Hitler's own membership in it.

• Michael FitzGerald, Storm Troopers of Satan (Robert Hale, 1990)
• Michael FitzGerald, Adolf Hitler: A Portrait (Spellmount, 2006)

Publications on the Vril Society in German

The book of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels was published in German with the title: Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend: von der Zukunft der phantastischen Vernunft in 1969.

New publications appeared in Germany in the 1990s. In 1992 Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl published: Das Vril-Projekt, in which they linked the legend of the Vril-Society with the older myth of the Nazi UFOs. In 1993 the German right-wing author Jan Udo Holey, writing under penname Jan van Helsing, published Geheimgesellschaften und ihre Macht im 20. Jahrhundert which is said to have sold over 100.000 times.

The Conspiracy Theory - Claims in detail

According to these authors, the Vril Society was founded as "The All German Society for Metaphysics" in 1921 to explore the origins of the Aryan race, to seek contact with the "hidden masters" of Ultima Thule, and to practice meditation and other techniques intended to strengthen individual mastery of the divine Vril force itself. It was formed by a group of female psychic mediums led by the Thule Gesellschaft medium Maria Orsitsch (Orsic) of Zagreb, who claimed to have received communication from Aryan aliens living on Alpha Tauri, in the Aldebaran system. Allegedly, these aliens had visited Earth and settled in Sumeria, and the word Vril was formed from the ancient Sumerian word "Vri-Il" ("like god"). A second medium was known only as Sigrun, a name etymologically related to Sigrune, a Valkyrie and one of Wotan's nine daughters in Norse legend. Other sources state that the Vril Society was founded by an ill-defined group of Rosicrucians in Berlin before the end of the 19th century, while still others state that it was founded by Karl Haushofer in Berlin in 1918. Some sources state that the Vril Society was also known as the Luminous Lodge, or the Lodge of Light, though others claim that it was originally called the Brothers of the Light.

The Society allegedly not only taught concentration exercises designed to awaken the forces of Vril, their main goal was to achieve Raumflug (Spaceflight) to reach Aldebaran. To achieve this, the Vril Society joined the Thule Gesellschaft and the alleged DHvSS (Die Herren des schwarzen Steins, The Masters of the Black Stone) to fund an ambitious program involving an inter-dimensional flight machine based on psychic revelations from the Aldebaran aliens.

Members of the Vril Society are said to have included Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. These were original members of the Thule Society which supposedly joined Vril in 1919. The NSDAP (National Sozialistische Deutsche ArbeiterPartei) was created by Thule in 1920, one year later. Dr. Krohn, who helped to create the Nazi flag, was also a Thulist.

With Hitler in power in 1933, both Thule and Vril Gesellschafts allegedly received official state backing for continued disc development programs aimed at both spaceflight and possibly a war machine.

There is no evidence that a functional prototype was ever made. The claim of an ability to travel in some inter-dimensional mode is similar to Vril claims of channeled flight with the Jenseitsflugmaschine (Other World Flight Machine) and the Vril Flugscheiben (Flight Discs).

Hidden masters (the members of the Vril society and their antagonist, the Jewish World Conspiracy), an escape by Hitler and other Nazis from Berlin to the South Pole, Flying saucers, secret Nazi inventions, and psychic channeling powers and Aliens from Aldebaran, clearly are the elements of a conspiracy theory. As there yet seems to be no comprehensive scholarly examination of the proponents of this theory (except for some chapters in Goodrick-Clark's Black Sun), their motives remain unclear. It must be said, though, that Secret Societies cannot be held responsible for the Holocaust and the Third Reich.

Occultism and Nazism

Main article: Nazi occultism

Historians agree that the Vril Society, as described by the later authors, never existed. Verifiable evidence of the Vril Society's existence has never been published.

A society that took the book by Edward Bulwer-Lytton seriously and devoted its spare time looking for vril, but did not have any impact on Nazism, could of course have existed.

When Alan Bullock freely admits that Hitler was influenced by a range of occult ideas, and when other historians (Hugh Trevor-Roper, James Webb, Joachim Fest) also mention the extensive influence of occult ideas upon Hitler, they are referring to the Ariosophy that was en vogue in Vienna and Munich during that time. Those esoteric 'societies' that did exist in this context, such as the Order of the New Templars and the Germanenorden, were by far not powerful enough to influence Nazi politics, although they shared a similar world view. After 1941, at latest, these 'societies' were officially dissolved by the Gestapo. These measures were most probably the result of the general Nazi policy of suppressing lodge organizations and esoteric groups.

Allusions and references

Allusions in popular culture

• The still-popular English drink Bovril takes its name from the combination of the words "Bovine" and "Vril".

• The story may have inspired Nikola Tesla when he invented remote control. While Tesla denied this, biographer Marc J. Seifer says the inventor probably knew the story given Bulwer-Lytton's popularity at the time.

• The book is mentioned in the song by David Bowie "Oh! You Pretty Things": "Look out at your children / See their faces in golden rays / Don't kid yourself they belong to you / They're the start of the coming race".

• "Vril" is also mentioned in the book "HACKERS" by Steven Levy.

• The English thrash metal band Sabbat refers to Vril in their song "Behind the Crooked Cross".

• The Swedish symphonic metal band Therion has a song titled "Enter Vril-ya".

• English post-punk band Killing Joke sing "I'm in love with the coming race" in their hit "Eighties".

• The backstory of Iron Sky mentions a Nazi base in Antarctica, from where the Nazis establish a lunar outpost as part of their Vril-program.

• The Japanese television show GoGo Sentai Boukenger of the Super Sentai franchise has an episode in which the Boukengers find Vril and mistakenly think they've found Oricalcos.

• In the final issues of Marvel Comics' "Cloak and Dagger" (1992), a white supremacist was duped into summoning an extradimensional race of creatures called "the Vril," which he assumed to be part of the Aryan "master race."

• The band "Vril" is comprised of Bob Drake (Bass), Chris Cutler (Drums) and Lukas Simonis (Guitar). They released an album called "Effigies in Cork" in 2004. According to the liner notes of that album, the band name was inspired by Edward Bulwer Lytton's novel

• The fictional "Illuminatus Trilogy" mentions the Vril Society in a conversation between the characters Robert Putney Drake and H. P. Lovecraft.

• The first issue of the Red 5 Comics series "Atomic Robo" by 8-Bit Theater creator Brian Clevinger involves a Nazi scientist's experiments with a "Vril organ" that gives superhuman powers to the subject it is implanted in.

• The comic series "Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus" by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola deals with a scientist's experiments with Vril, including its use as a power source for a "Vril Energy Suit".

• The song "Hail And Kill" by the Heavy Metal band "Manowar" contains the lyric "Power and dominion are taken by the will, / By divine right hail and kill". This has probable reference to Gurdjieff / Nietzsche / Vril.

• The Book "In Fluid Silence" from G.W. Tirpa is set in the Dark•Matter part of the Alternity RPG world and has Vrill a major part of the plot (Dark Matter is X-Filesesque). The substance is used by a secret society that is run by a 100 year old ex-Nazi and allows the members to heal critical wounds, regenerate limbs, enhanced strength and speed as well as some mental abilities.

• The Vril-ya are mentioned in the first chapter of the "New Traveller's Almanac" in Alan Moore's The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2. In this almanac, the Vril-ya Country is supposed to be located under Newcastle, and the editors of the almanac allude to connections between the Vril-ya, Wonderland, and Narnia

• Hip-hop artist Canibus makes an allusion to a "final battle with Vril" on the album "C of Tranquility."

• It can be interpreted that the character "Vrael" (from the Inheritance Trilogy by Christopher Paolini) had his name based on Vril, as he was able to manipulate magic and Vril can be seen as such.

• Author Max McCoy mentions Vril in one of his Indiana Jones novels.

See also

• Aether theories
• Aether (classical element)
• Etheric body (Spirituality)
• Etheric plane (Spirituality)
• Odic fluid, Prana, Qi
• Jules Verne
• Bovril

• Nazi mysticism
• Reptilian humanoid
• The Nexus (journal)
• Nazi UFOs
• Thule
• Vrillon

References

• Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1870). Vril, The Power of the Coming Race. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
• The Coming Race at Project Gutenberg
• HTML version of the book.

External links

• From Vril to Ahnenerbe
• Secret Flying Discs of the Third Reich
• The German Cylindrical UFO - Interview with a CIC Veteran
• Conspiracy archive, on the vril society
• The Development Of The German UFOs From Before WW2
• The Nazi Connection with Shambhala and Tibet
• A video presentation on the Vril and Thule Societies Runtime 57 minutes 21 seconds in Real media format.
• "Article Abstracts: #60 (Special Section: Hard Science Fiction)". Retrieved 2008-10-03. Enthusiasm for The Coming Race and its substantial influence on subsequent SF are attributable to the fact that it presents its psi powers not as magical or supernatural but in terms of biological evolution and in conjunction with novel developments in technology and social organization. Its psi powers have a technological component, which makes them more tolerable to those who regard the depiction of extraordinary psychic powers as puerile but are fascinated by the depiction of extraordinary weapons.

Editions Currently In Print

• Hesperus Press, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 'The Coming Race', with a foreword by Matthew Sweet, April 2007, £6.99, ISBN 9781843911500