by Frank Lost
The Vril Society – Louis Jacolliot (1837–1890) was a French consul in Calcutta, India, when he wrote Les fils de Dieu (1873) and Les Traditions indo-européennes (1876). Both books stressed the existence of the Vril that appeared a bit earlier in Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race (1871). Jacolliot is supposed to have met the Vril among the Jains in Mysore, and Gujarat in the country where he lived as a diplomat and judge.
Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, was also impressed by Bulwer-Lytton's book. She found a confirmation of the racial aspects of her theories in respect to the origin of mankind, of which she wrote in her books Isis Unveiled (1877), and again in The Secret Doctrine (1888). The physical and spiritual superiority of the white race was later on mixed with anti-Semitism, and the first studies of the Indo-European peoples by the German nationalists gave thus birth to ariosophy (Aryan + theosophy). It was mostly the works of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels.
Both Louis Jacolliot and Madame Blavatsky supported Bulwer-Lytton's Vril myth so well, and many contemporaries actually believed in the existence of this green force.
According to Joscelyn Godwin (Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival), the only primary source of information on the Vril Society is Willy Ley.
Willy Ley was a German rocket engineer who fled Nazi Germany in 1933. In 1947, he published an article called "Pseudoscience in Naziland" in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He explained that the Nazis did obtain many technical successes because they systematically tried every option possible in all scientific fields and beyond. This included the pseudo-sciences of the Hollow Earth, the Welteislehre (The World Ice Theory) and even magic at the fringe. Among these weird theories there really existed, according to Ley, a group interested in Vril:
"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. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton's The Corning Race. They knew that the book was fiction; Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this "power." The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire. Surely the Romans had had it, enclosed in small metal balls, which guarded their homes and were referred to as Lares. For reasons which I failed to penetrate, the secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves.
(Left to right) Heinz Haber, Wernher von Braun,
and Willy Ley
No, I am not joking, that is what I was told with great solemnity and secrecy. Such a group actually existed, they even got out the first issue of a magazine which was to proclaim their credo (I wish I had kept some of these things, but I had enough books to smuggle out as it was)."
Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, 2002) tells a different and more probable account based on the findings of Dr. Peter Bahn in his 1996 essay, Das Geheimnis der Vril-Energie (The Secret of the Vril energy): "The reality of the Vril Society was a good deal less impressive. Its formal name was Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Das Kommende Deutschland’ (Reich Working Group ‘The Coming Germany’); one of hundreds of little occult societies in Weimer Germany, it was sponsored by the astrological publisher Wilhelm Becker. The group put out a magazine, which apparently folded after one issue.
In 1930 it also published two pamphlets, Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft (Vril: The Primal Cosmic Power) and Weltdynamismus (World Dynamism), claiming to reveal the secrets of Atlantean free energy technology. A section of the latter pamphlet shows a bisected apple as a symbol of the free energy field surrounding the earth. While this confirms Ley’s account, it does nothing to back up the extravagant claims made for the Vril Society’s activities and influence by later writers."
Vril: The Primal Cosmic Power
Last but not least, some went so far as to claim that the Nazis wanted to change Nordic Germans into a super-race, to become equals with the supermen inside the earth. They would have tried to use different methods of meditation to obtain this transformation. These methods were allegedly based on tantric Buddhism and Tibetan Bon Pö pre-Buddhist "black" shamanism as well as on Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual exercises.
The existence of a Vril Society was mentioned for the first time as such in 1960 by Bergier and Pauwels in their best-seller The Morning of the Magicians. It looked like other secret societies that pretended to have existed at that time, like the Thule Society and the Golden Dawn. They quote the excerpt of "Pseudoscience in Naziland" where Dr. Willy Ley wrote about that strange society and link it to the ritual suicide of the Tibetan monks in Berlin’s final days. For the latter, the most likely is that they were Asians from "liberated" Soviet republics enrolled in the Nazi struggle against communism. There were also well known similar cases of Indians serving in German uniforms on the Atlantic Wall bunkers in France.
Van Helsing's Myths of the ‘90s – With German author Jan van Helsing, aka Jan Udo Holey, the Vril myth reaches its climax, but surely not the historical truth. Van Helsing wrote about modern secret Nazi UFO bases in Antarctica as the achievement of a long underground activity that began in the ‘20s among members of secret societies.
Maria Orsitsch (Marija Oršić in Croatian) was allegedly a powerful medium and member of the Vril Society. Her father was a Croatian immigrant from Zagreb, while her mother was Austrian.
She would have met in 1917 with Karl Haushofer, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf (Thule Society), prelate Gernot of the secret Societas Templi Marcioni (The Inheritors of the Knights Templar) in the Schopenhauer café in Vienna. They would have been admirers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and disciples of secret Asian lodges, hence the presence of Tibetan monks in Berlin and Munich. As we already saw, this is pure fantasy, at least as far as Karl Haushofer is concerned.
They studied secret texts of the Knights Templar and were linked to the secret fraternity Die Herren vom schwarzen Stein (“The Lords of the Black Stone”), the existence of which is to be found nowhere else.
Maria would have gotten acquainted in Munich with members of the Thule Gesellschaft, and started her own female medium group called first Alldeutsche Gesellschaft für Metaphysik. They all had long ponytails that they believed acted as cosmic antennas, to receive alien communication.
In 1919 a few members of all these secret societies met at a small alpine lodge close to Berchtesgaden. There, Maria Oršić and another medium by the name of Sigrun claimed to have received telepathic transmissions from Aldebaran star in a secret Templar writing, containing technical blueprints for the construction of flying machines. The language used to code the message would have been nothing less exotic than ancient Sumerian, "that sounded like German" (sic).
Maria Orsitsch aka Marija Oršić
What follows is a series of different Vril UFOs (Vril-7, Haunebu I, II etc.) and the project to reach one day Aldebaran itself by traveling with these. Of course a multidimensional channel, independent from Einstein’s Relativity equations, would lead them to the star of their dreams.
Maria Oršić disappeared in 1945, leaving behind her a letter to all the members of her lodge, where she wrote “niemand bleibt hier” (no one stays here). It is speculated that she and her friends escaped to Aldebaran and if not, at least to Nazi Antarctica, which is much closer indeed!
One can safely say that Vril is at least a controversial subject. It is not necessary to make it ridiculous by inventing unsubstantiated stories, with no references and no hard evidence at all to support them. Truth finders do respect good research work, and dismiss parrots which echo rumors and urban legends. All genuine myth hides a truth, and deserves to be treated seriously and with respect.
Vril is a word that was probably invented by Bulwer-Lytton in his novel, since it is the first time when it w
as mentioned. Nonetheless, the concept of a hidden universal creative force that can be harnessed and mastered is not new. It has predecessors in history of religions, philosophy, occultism, and could possibly be newly interpreted in the light of quantum physics.
The Vril Society was very likely the group called Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft "Das Kommende Deutschland." It surely looked after the Vril and its mastery. It has, however, no proven links with the Thule Society which, based on known evidence, did exist but had already disappeared by then. Karl Haushofer was not a member of the latter, neither was Rudolf Hess, and they most probably never reached the attention of leading Nazis. It is true, though, at least regarding the Thule Society that they were deeply involved in fighting the short-lived Soviet republic of Bavaria after WWI.
On the other hand, the legend of Maria Oršić is based on nothing, since not even her birth certificate could be found. Of course, some will argue that the people of Aldebaran took it with them or, as can be read in fantasy books pretending to hold some truth, that the Vril members erased all tracks behind them for “security purposes.”
EPILOGUE
One may wonder why books, movies and even video games about WWII are still so successful, especially when they tackle Nazism and its dark side. Maybe because WWII was the last historical event of global proportion, and we presently live after the End of History, in a postmodern world controlled by the Empire of the Good. Evil, negation, fights, and ideologies were only necessary when the foundations of our civilization were at stake. It is no more the case since 1945. Everywhere in the world we see people aspiring to achieve the same levels of material comfort, based on the same moral and economical individualistic values. “Evil” is no longer a real threat but one is asked to believe in its present existence more than ever.
In this perspective, occult Nazism is the evil of Evil and Hitler incarnates Lucifer. Postmodern man wants the thrill of past history but in an asepticized version, without the risk and the pain. He wants to be a "rebel," supported by the law, the government, “well-meaning” NGOs and all new moral institutions. A Rebel Without a Real Cause, fighting long-gone ghosts. In other words, modern man pretends to be unique while his billions of clones play the hero at no cost, never putting their lives at stake as they pretend to.
The attraction of occult Nazism comes from these feelings, because no bigger event than WWII ever happened in our post-historical world. Most of the small wars that have occurred after WWII, like the Vietnam War, did have casualties but they were not meant to change the world. They were meant to draw a red line between the West and the communist empire, to make them understand that it should not be trespassed. It was more of a backyard quarrel. No less, no more.
The more evil vanishes away, the more we feel purposeless since it was the very fuel of history, that necessary dialectical "other" that we could fight. Modern man replaces evil with "mock enemies" and fake events, such as comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler by making up stories of weapons of mass destruction. We like to be scared, knowing that a Hollywood happy ending always waits for us around the corner.
This is the reason why occult Nazism became a myth after WWII. All the ingredients are there: bad guys, witches, magic, esotericism, and the fight against irreconcilable ideologies in an environment of a new history in the making.
That being said, many authors identified a juicy gap in the market and began to write nonsense, or, far more dishonest, to make up stories that would even give birth to urban legends and new myths on the Internet. Spreading like rumors, each myth relied on the previous one and added new fantastic elements. Some are jokes, some are commercial traps but none of them is the truth.
As far as history is concerned, there was a genuine Nazi occultism and many other unknown odd facts that were related to the Third Reich. We dealt with them in this book because they are interesting enough, and they bear a deep meaning that does not require making things up, or creating a fantasy. They are in itself a testimony of no ordinary times. They are, like Nazism, a breach in the fabric of history that left its contemporaries in awe.
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