Theosophy and the Vril Notion?
Sep 20, 2003 04:42 AM
by Vance
Can someone provide more information on these Vril-related
publications?
The magazine Transactions is listed in the New York Public Library
catalog. It is not dated, even to within a decade or before a
specific year, but Transactions was published from London under the
editorship of A. Lovell for the Vril-ya Club. Subject headings in the
library catalog are Vril and Theosophy.
I am currently tracing the notion of Vril and groups devoted to it.
Vril, in capsule, is an ancient energy described first in the 1871
Baron Bulwer Lytton book Vril, the Coming Race. The novel is not so
different from anything Jules Verne had written earlier, but the word
became part of occult language. Today it is most associated, falsely
in my estimate, with Nazi UFOs produced by a German Vri-il
Gesellschaft which had been active in Berlin since 1917 or so under
the patronage of Karl Haushofer and the Thule Society. The rumoured
group is in some places said to have formed in Vienna after a meeting
between several occult masters and mediums. According to the likely
fictitious account, Hitler had the group banned when he came to power
and only began consulting the secret remnants of the order when he
desired to use their knowledge in the war effort. They were said,
among other claims, to have channeled messages from space men
providing information on saucer design.
On the skeptics side, some scholars say there never was any Vril
Society and that Willy Ley, the rocket scientist who gave the English
speaking world the first hint of the society in an American pulp sci-
fi magazine in 1947, made it up.
Somewhere in-between lies the truth, I feel, and the Theosophical
Society plays a role...
Other publications related to Vril as becoming an occult term are:
Rosicrucian Christianity no. 19, The Coming Force, Vril or What? by
Max Heindel ca. 1909.
Vril or Vital Magnetism, Chicago, McClurg 1911.
Vril, a translation to German by Günther Wachsmuth, Kommende Tag
Verlag (Rudolf Steiner, Goetheanum), Stuttgart, 1922.
Bulwer-Lytton as Occultist, by C. Nelson Stewart, Theosophical Publ.
House, London, 1927.
Transactions (serial), A. Lovell editor, Vril-ya Club, London,
subject Theosophy, n.d.
Der Vril Mythos, by Peter Bahn and Heiner Gehring, Omega Verlag,
Düsseldorf, 1997.
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