The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  THE MYSTERY OF VRIL POWER

  There is little doubt that the single most curious factor associated with the legend of Agharti is the strange force known as Vril Power. Ever since this mysterious element was first described in Bulwer Lytton’s novel, The Coming Race, and the possibility of its existence cited in later reports about the secret underground kingdom, there has been mounting confusion as to just what it might be. And, more particularly, whether it really exists at all, or was just an invention of that ingenious Victorian novelist.

  Perhaps before studying the facts that we have about Vril Power, it would be as well to remind ourselves of some of the things Bulwer Lytton told us about its capabilities. It is first mentioned almost immediately after the book’s narrator arrives in the underground world and meets some of the inhabitants, known as the Vril-ya. They leave him in no doubt as to its importance in their lives.

  Says our narrator:

  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, etc. 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:

  ‘I have long held the 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.’

  These subterranean philosophers assert that, by one operation of Vril, which Faraday would perhaps call ‘atmospheric magnetism’, they can influence the variations of temperature – in plain words, the weather; that by other operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electrobiology, odic force, etc., but applied scientifically through Vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of Vril.

  Through the medium of his narrator, Bulwer Lytton then explains more specifically the powers of Vril. He says that it can be used for expanding the consciousness of the mind, and allowing the transference of thoughts from one person to another by means of trance or vision. It was through the agency of Vril, he says ‘while I had been placed in the state of trance, that I had been made acquainted with the rudiments of the Vril-ya’s language’. (It should, of course, not be forgotten in this context that Bulwer Lytton was fascinated by mesmerism and had developed his own powers of telekinesis.)

  Next, in discussing the rise of the Vril-ya civilization, he describes how this was achieved through harnessing all the latent powers of this ‘all-permeating fluid’. It can, he says, ‘be raised and disciplined into the mightiest agency over all forms of matter, animate or inanimate. It can destroy like a flash of lightning; yet, differently applied, it can replenish or invigorate life, heal and preserve.’ The narrator explains that the underground people depend on it for the cure of disease, or rather – as he puts it – ‘for enabling the physical organisation to re-establish the due equilibrium of its natural powers, and thereby to cure itself.’

  Bulwer Lytton’s young American is told that the force can also be harnessed to cut through solid rock as well as being directed as a destructive power against enemies. He is shown a Vril Staff and learns that ‘the fire lodged in the hollow of the rod directed by the hand of a child could shatter the strongest fortress or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host.’ (Whether such a force can or cannot ultimately be attributed to Vril Power, is this not a remarkably prophetic description of the modern laser-beam, almost a century before it was fully developed?)

  Further uses of the force include the motive power for robots, the propulsion of land vehicles and flying contrivances, and for supplying the light which illuminates the subterranean world and nourishes all the life-forms therein, says the narrator. Taken in total, Vril is seen as an enormous reservoir of universal power, some parts of which can be concentrated in the human body.

  Is it any surprise, then, that people ever since have wondered what truth there is in this amazing Vril Power?

  Some of these attributes are, I am sure, clearly inventions of Bulwer Lytton’s fertile brain. But according to most commentators there seems to be an underlying truth, a feeling that a force such as he describes does exist, and might not necessarily be confined to the nether regions of the Earth.

  I have, I believe, established earlier in this book in the chapter devoted to Bulwer Lytton and The Coming Race, that the author was a man of profound mystical knowledge who drew on this secret information for his work. However, he revealed little of his sources and was suitably enigmatic when pressed to explain what Vril Power was. Writing to a close friend shortly after the publication of the book, in his only known comment on the subject, he said: ‘I did not mean Vril for mesmerism, which I hold to be a mere branch current of this one great fluid pervading all nature.’

  I find this explanation intriguing, though abstruse, as if the usually precise Bulwer Lytton was regretful at already having revealed too much. The Rosicrucian Brotherhood to which he belonged took great pride in their oaths of secrecy, and it seems likely to me that the author of The Coming Race, in his straitened circumstances at the time, and urgent need of money, employed information he had easily to hand in order to complete his story quickly and also give to it the authenticity that marked all his work. Although he would not discuss the book further, he left a growing conviction that it concealed certain basic truths – a conviction which, as I have shown, gained its greatest support during the years that Adolf Hitler was in power.

  In an interesting article, ‘UFO’s and the Mystery of Agharti’, which confirms my belief about Bulwer Lytton, Nadine Smyth has written:

  Certain highly-placed members of Hitler’s Third Reich believed in Agharti and Vril Power, and it is their interest that has given the whole subject a sinister connotation which is largely undeserved. Occultism undoubtedly did play a part in the Nazi movement; but Hitler and his close followers twisted and perverted it to their own ends, and it may ultimately have rebounded upon them and destroyed them.

  The Nazis were not, however, the first people to believe in Vril Power or to set out to learn its secrets. That credit goes to Madame Blavatsky, the Russian émigréé and Theosophist who had evidently read The Coming Race and been much influenced by it, for she mentions it in her first book, Isis Unveiled, published six years afterwards in 1877. In a section dealing with ‘The Force that Moves Atoms’ in which she expounds one of her persisting obsessions that ‘every exertion of will results in a force’, she writes:

  There is a force in existence whose secret powers were thoroughly familiar to the ancient theurgists but which is denied by modern sceptics. The antediluvian children – who perhaps played with it, using it as the boys in Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race use the tremendous Vril – called it the ‘Water of Phtha’; their descendants named it the Anima Mundi, the soul of the universe; and still later the mediaeval hermetists termed it ‘sidereal light’, or the ‘Milk of the Celestial Virgin’, the ‘Magnes’, and many other names. But our modern learned men will neither accept nor recognize it under such appellations; for it pertains to magic, and magic is, in their conception, a disgraceful superstition.

  Having stated her conviction, Madame Blavatsky goes on to enlarge her argument:

  There has been an infinite confusion of names to express one and the same thing. The chaos of the ancients; the Zoroastrian sacred fire, or the Antusbyrum of the Parsees; the Elmes-fire of the ancient Germans; the lightning of C
ybelê; the burning torch of Apollo; the flame on the altar of Pan; the inextinguishable fire in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the fire-flame of Pluto’s helm; the brilliant sparks on the hats of the Dioscuri, on the Gorgon’s head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff of Mercury; the Egyptian Phtha, or Ra; the Grecian Zeus Cataibates (the descending); the pentecostal fire-tongues; the burning bush of Moses; the pillar of fire of the Exodus, and the ‘burning lamp’ of Abram; the eternal fire of the ‘bottomless pit’, the Delphic oracular vapors; the Sidereal light of the Rosicrucians; the Akasa of the Hindu adepts; the Astral light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of Reichenbach; the fire-globe, or meteor-cat of Babinet; the Psychod and ectenic force of Thury; the atmospheric magnetism of some naturalists; galvanism; and finally, electricity, are but various names for many different manifestations, or effects of the same mysterious, all-pervading cause – the Greek Archeus. Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, in his Coming Race, describes it as the Vril, used by the subterranean populations, and allowed his reader to take it for a fiction. ‘These people,’ he says, ‘consider that in the Vril they had arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies’; and proceeds to show that Faraday intimated them ‘under the more cautious term of correlation’.

  Pausing briefly to give the quote from Faraday which I repeated at the start of this chapter, the authoress speculates that Bulwer Lytton ‘coined his curious names by contracting words in classical language. Gy would come from gune; Vril from virile.’ Then she continues:

  Absurd and unscientific as may appear our comparison of a fictitious Vril invented by the great novelist, and the primal force of the equally great experimentalist, with the kabalistic astral light, it is nevertheless the true definition of this force. Discoveries are constantly being made to corroborate the statement thus boldly put forth.

  Her conviction about the existence of Vril Power emerged again in her second book, The Secret Doctrine (1888). Here she wrote about its other powers, those of destruction, in a Chapter entitled, ‘The Coming Force’:

  There is a terrible sidereal Force known to, and named by the Atlanteans Mash-Mak, and by the Aryan Rishis in their Ashtar Vidya by a name that we do not like to give. It is the Vril of Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Coming Race’, and of the coming races of our mankind. The name Vril may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.

  It is this vibratory Force, which, when aimed at an army from an Agni Rath fixed on a flying vessel, a balloon, according to the instructions found in Ashtar Vidya, reduced to ashes 100,000 men and elephants, as easily as it would a dead rat. It is allegorised in the Vishnu Purana, in the Ramayana and other works, in the fable about the sage Kapilla whose glance made a mountain of ashes of King Sagara’s 60,000 sons, and which is explained in the esoteric works, and referred to as the Kapilaksha – ‘Kapila’s Eye’.

  And is it this Satanic Force that our generations were to be allowed to add to their stock of Anarchist’s baby-toys, known as melenite, dynamite clockworks, explosive oranges, ‘flower baskets’, and such other innocent names? Is it this destructive agency, which, once in the hands of some modern Attila, e.g., a blood-thirsty anarchist, would reduce Europe in a few days to its primitive chaotic state with no man left alive to tell the tale – is this force to become the common property of all men alike?

  As is the case in so much of Madame Blavatsky’s work, she is all allusion and suggestion. She gives few exact details, but cites enough sources here to be considered reasonably factual, if over-sensational at times. However, there can be no denying how prophetic are those closing words from The Secret Doctrine. For what more fitting epithet could there be than ‘a modern Attila’ for the man who so soon after began earnestly seeking after the secrets of Vril Power, Adolf Hitler?

  We have, of course, already gone into all the ramification of Hitler’s fascination with the occult and mysticism, and his personal belief in a subterranean world where a race of ‘supermen’ dwelt. The subject is also dealt with in fascinating detail in J. H. Brennan’s Occult Reich (1974), in which he discusses the German ‘Luminous Lodge of the Vril Society’ and how they interested the Fuehrer in their beliefs about Vril Power.

  Mr Brennan tells us that Hitler was instructed in three important occult secrets, all of which deepened his belief in this mysterious force:

  1) The control of a subtle energy, like Lytton’s Vril or Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’. Once under conscious control, this force can be used as an aid to mystical enlightenment, as a healing agent or as a means to dominate others, depending on the temperament of the initiate.

  2) The control of events and the creation of desirable situations on the physical plane. This is done by training the initiate’s powers of concentration until he is able to focus his will like a laser. The preternaturally enhanced will-power is then directed by relevant and vivid visualization, usually of the situation that the magician wishes to bring about. The driving force behind the whole operation is heightened emotion. Once again, the type of events and situations created depends on the temperament of the initiate.

  3) The establishment of lines of communication to superhuman and sometimes alien entities held to operate on levels other than the physical (and now generally referred to by occultists as the ‘inner planes’). But the neophyte soon discovers that techniques designed to put him in touch, as it were, with the heavens, can equally well be used to contrast the infernal regions.

  ‘On the evidence before us,’ says Mr Brennan:

  it becomes increasingly likely that Hitler learned all three – and concentrated on the negative aspects of each. We have seen that his control of the subtle energy was of a very high order and survived even the breakdown of his health towards the end of his career. Proof of expertise in the second and most truly ‘magical’ aspect of occult training is obviously more difficult to obtain. But he certainly thought like a magician: his instincts and reactions were those of a man who had undergone the disciplines. His faith in willpower is very well known. Time and again he expressed the belief that all individuals and all situations would yield to a superior will. It should not require pointing out that this is a magical belief, but many historians have missed it.

  There need be no doubt at all that Hitler mastered the third occult science. His lines of communication to the inner planes were well established – although psychologists are perfectly at liberty to conclude that the entities he reached were personifications of forces in his deep unconscious.

  To support this third contention, Mr Brennan correctly cites the evidence we have already discussed from Hermann Rauschning, the Gauleiter of Danzig, who heard from Hitler’s own lips of his experiences with the ‘supermen’.

  It has been suggested in certain quarters that Hitler was not only aware of Vril Power, but actually knew how to use it. It is said his ability to mesmerize huge crowds of people, to manipulate those who came into his presence, and draw ‘mental nourishment’ from the members of his staff like a kind of ‘psychic vampire’, is evidence of this force being operated. Though these qualities are certainly ones that Hitler possessed, that they stemmed from the utilization of Vril Power is not a theory I, personally, can accept. It was more likely the terrible aura of uncontrolled power and fear which surrounded him that bred, unchecked, these capabilities.

  Francis King has perhaps best explained this phenomena in his Satan and the Swastika (1976):

  In psychological terms, Adolf Hitler was one of those rare individuals who have developed the capacity to fill themselves with energy derived from others, to expand emotional force in a physical experience – a public appearance in his case – and yet to end up with a greater charge of emotional energy than they possessed at the beginning of the experience.

  Such a psychological expression of the effects of an audience upon Hitler is more a description of that particular aspect of his character
than an explanation of it. No psychological theory is, in fact, capable at the present time of providing such an explanation, and until it can one should at least consider the interpretation of Hitler’s energization-by-audience put forward by some occultists.

  It seems evident that Hitler, like many of those before him, was frustrated in his desire to unlock the secrets of Vril Power, although I have recently been able to examine copies of certain strange documents which once belonged to initiates of the German Vril Society. These purport to show that the members had pierced the mystery.

  The documents claim that once a person has learned the control of Vril Power, he will have the ability to acquire all other powers. And this ‘control’ can apparently be done in either of two ways.

  The first of these is described as ‘The Scientific Way’. This requires the person seeking Vril Power to chemically isolate the particles of Proton A1 which are contained in lead. Then, says the instructions, they must be ‘captured in the photonic magnetism of Saturn or else in lava which has issued from an active volcano’. Next, under the effect of the radiations obtained from this process, ‘the male sex glands activate all the Korlos, and confirm the ego in its physical centre of gravity.’ Vril Power is now at the adept’s fingertips, according to the documents.

  The second method, described as ‘The Mystic Way’, is equally peculiar and baffling. It is apparently derived from a ‘Higher Magic Ritual’ performed before a mandala (or symbol) representing Shamballah, as the world-centre of Agharti. The adept should be bathed in a violet-coloured light made by an amethyst with ‘the sound vibrations of the letter K endlessly repeated’. The documents indicate that the power can be more easily obtained if the sign of Saturn is present as well as the Ankh the Egyptian ansate cross – a T-shaped cross with a loop above the horizontal bar – symbolizing life. During the ritual the initiate will ‘effect a symbolic regression of life’ before finding himself possessed of the miraculous powers of Vril the documents end.