The Vril Society, the Luminous Lodge
and the Realization of the Great Work

Terry Melanson


 Legendary for his turgid prose ("it was a dark and stormy night...") Bulwer-Lytton's pioneering science fiction novel "Vril" was taken very seriously by 19th Century Atlantis fans. 
Vril is a mysterious energy which is used by Lytton's subterranian race (refugees from the Deluge) to power their advanced civilization; it was later treated as a reality by occultists. The plot of this book was recycled for numerous 'B' pulp science fiction movies and assorted crank theories.

 

The Vril Society or The Luminous Lodge combined the political ideals of the Order of the Illuminati with Hindu mysticism, Theosophy and the Cabbala. It was the first German nationalist groups to use the symbol of the swastika as an emblem linking Eastern and Western occultism. The Vril Society presented the idea of a subterranean matriarchal, socialist utopia ruled by superior beings who had mastered the mysterious energy called the Vril Force.


This secret society was founded, literally, on Bulwer Lytton's novel The Coming Race (1871). The book describes a race of men psychically far in advance of our own. They have acquired powers over themselves and over things that made them almost godlike. For the moment they are in hiding. They are said to live in caves in the center of the Earth. Soon they will emerge to reign over us."

While researching their classic book, Morning of the Magicians, authors Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels were given an account by one of the world's greatest rocket experts, Dr. Willy Ley, who fled Germany in 1933. Dr. Ley said that the Vril Society—which formed shortly before the Nazis came to power—believed they had secret knowledge that would enable them to change their race and become equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the Earth. Methods of concentration, a whole system of internal gymnastics by which they would be transformed. 


These methods of concentration were probably based on Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The Jesuit techniques of concentration and visualization are similar to many occult teachings, especially in shamanic cults and Tibetan Buddhism. The Nazi's revered these Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, which they believed had been handed down from ancient Masters of Atlantis. The occultists of the time knew that Ignatius was a Basque — some claimed that the Basque people were the last remnant of the Atlantean race — and the proper use of these techniques would enable the reactivation of the Vril for the dominance of the Teutonic race over all others.

The Vril Society believed that whoever becomes master of the Vril will be the master of himself, of others around him and of the world. The belief was that the world will change and the "Lords" will emerge from the center of the Earth. Unless we have made an alliance with them and become "Lords" ourselves, we shall find ourselves among the slaves, on the dung-heap that will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise. 


In The Unknown Hitler, Wulf Schwarzwaller says:

 

In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The Lodge's objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of "Vril". Haushofer was a student of the Russian magician and metaphysician George Gurdjieff. Both Gurdjieff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan lodges that possessed the secret of the "Superman." The Lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Göring and Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler. Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan lamas and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.

The Vril Force and the Black Sun

In Lytton's The Coming Race, the subterranean people use the Vril Force to operate and govern the world (a few children armed with vril-powered rods are said capable of exterminating a race of over 22 million threatening barbarians). Served by robots and able to fly on vril-powered wings, the vegetarian Vril-ya are — by their own reckoning — racially and culturally superior to everyone else on Earth, above or below the ground. At one point the narrator concludes (from linguistic evidence) that the Vril-ya are "descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world."

The Vril Force or Vril Energy was said to be derived from the Black Sun, a big ball of "Prima Materia" which supposedly exists in the center of the Earth, giving light to the Vril-ya and putting out radiation in the form of Vril. The Vril Society believed that Aryans were the actual biological ancestors of the Black Sun.

This force was known to the ancients under many names, and it has been called Chi, Ojas, Vril, Astral Light, Odic Forces and Orgone. In a discussion of the 28th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry—called Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept— Albert Pike said, "There is in nature one most potent force, by means whereof a single man, who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could revolutionize and change the face of the world."

This is the force that the Nazis and their inner occult circle were so desperately trying to unleash upon the world, for which the Vril Society had apparently groomed Hitler. A manifestation of the "Great Work" promulgated by the Adepts of secret societies throughout the ages. The Vril Society latched on to a very old archetype already in the minds of alchemists and magicians, which was only re-interpreted, by Lytton, in light of that age of occult revival and scientific progress.

The idea of mutation and transformation into a higher form of a "god-man" was envisioned, through the Vril-ya, in Buller-Lytton's The Coming Race. Lytton, himself, was an initiate of the Rosicrucians and was well versed in the arcane-esoteric philosophies (and of course the greatest advances in the sciences of his day). "Through his romantic works of fiction he expressed the conviction that there are beings endowed with superhuman powers. These beings will supplant us and bring about a formidable mutation in the elect of the human race."(J. Bergier)

This is where the philosophy turns dangerous. The moment we speak of an elect and "illumined" class which is above the general populace, you inevitably encounter racism and classicism — with fascism in due course. "We must beware of this notion of a mutation," Bergier warns. "It crops up again with Hitler, and is not extinct today."

Bergier and Pauwels were writing in 1960, but today this philosophy is, sadly, once again in the forefront of popular culture. The New World Order, so vehemently opposed, is under the direct influence and guidance of the New Age Movement. A hodgepodge of occult doctrines and dangerous socialism, which hides under a cover of "spiritual enlightenment." Theosophy is considered the main foundation, and its founder, Mme. Blavatsky, was a great admirer of Lytton's. In The Occult Conspiracy, the excellent researcher, Michael Howard, writes about the compatibility of the two philosophies:

 

Blavatsky had read Bulwer Lytton's novels and was very impressed by their occult content, especially 'Last Days of Pompeii'. The latter was published in 1834 and dealt with the time between early Christianity and the Mysteries of Isis in Italy in the first century A.D.

 

Blavatsky's esotericism was virulently anti-Christian...The racial ideas of Madame Blavatsky, concerning root races and the emergence of a spiritually-developed type of human being in the Aquarian Age, were avidly accepted by the nineteenth-century German nationalists who mixed Theosophical occultism with anti-Semitism and the doctrine of the racial supremacy of the Aryan or Indo-European peoples.

Vril Powered Nazi UFOs?

 

Perhaps the most wild claims still circulating about the Vril Society, and its offshoot The Thule Society, is the legends of a secret Nazi UFO program. Presumably the Vril Society established contact with the "Secret Chiefs" or the Vril-ya themselves, and secretly began cooperating with certain German scientists in the late 20's.

As early as 1936 Hitler was sending teams of "Spelunkers" into caves and mines all over Europe searching for the Vril-ya. The Nazi's had also explored Antarctica extensively during the years 1937-38. In search of the fabled hole of the South Pole they apparently had success, like Admiral Byrd, in discovering these entrances. It was here that some say they made contact with the "Unknown Superman" who lived in the fabled "Rainbow City".

In his controversial presentation UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, Vladimir Terziski draws a connection between alien beings and such German secret societies as the Tempelhof, the Thule, the Vril, and the Black Sun. Terziski tells of an "alien tutor race" that secretly began cooperating with certain German scientists in the late 1920's in underground bases and began to introduce their concepts of philosophical, cultural, and technological progress." (The Rainbow Conspiracy).

With help from extraterrestrial intelligences, Terziski postulates, the Nazis mastered antigravity space flight, established space stations, accomplished time travel, and developed their spacecraft to warp speeds. At the same time the aliens "spread their Mephistophelean ideas" into the wider German population through the Thule and Vril Societies."

Terziski maintains that antigravity research began in Germany in the 1920's with the first hybrid antigravity circular craft, the RFZ-1, constructed by the Vril Society. In 1942-43 a series of antigravity machines culminated in the giant 350-foot long, cigar-shaped Andromeda space station, which was constructed in old Zeppelin hangars near Berlin by E4, the research and development arm of the SS.

 Black Sun and the
Vril Society

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A familiar tune by now for those familiar with UFOlore. Many books have claimed this as well — although none of them seem to agree on one particular scenario. Many photographs have also turned up as would be expected. Some have been exposed as hoaxes while others remain "unknowns". The Allies confiscated every scrap of Nazi documents, and most are still classified to this day. It is well known that the Germans had some out-of-this-world research for the time. Incidentally, the Vril Society's existence was verified in the pilfered records and is in the possession of the British.

If in fact the Vril-Ya do exist and the Nazis did indeed establish contact with this superior race, then we could assume that this antigravity propulsion worked on the principles of Vril force. On the other hand, the Nazis, it has already been established, were driven by occult groups, like the Vril society, whose workings extended into the reaches of just such a force that would lead to the discovery Vril. So whether the tale of the Vril-Ya is for real or not is besides the point. Many have discovered this force independently of Lytton's work. It will continue to be suppressed. And for exactly the reasons that Lytton warned about in his book.


 

 


The term "Vril" came to the attention of the Western world through the writings of a not well known French author, Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890).

 

Jacolliot was an avid reader of occult literature, and was familiar with the work of Swedenborg, of the theosophist Jacob Böhme and of Louis Claude de Saint Martin. In the course of his professional career Jacolliot had been president of the tribunal at Chandernagor, India, and afterwards French consul in Calcutta.

 

The works of Jacolliot have inspired several writers and occultists, among them Rudyard Kipling and H. P. Blavatsky. Among Jacolliot's many books are: La Bible dans l'Inde ou la Vie de Iezeus Christna (1859); Les Fils de Dieu (1873); Christna et le Christ (1874); Les Traditions indo-européennes (1876); La Genèse de l'humanité (1879); and L'Olympe brahmanique (1881).

 

The main theme in his books is that modern civilizations were originated from a single, primordial nucleus, which was the same for India, western Asia, and Europe. The Semitic and indo-European races were not different at the beginning, but the Semitic races degenerated in the process, while the Aryans remained pure. A code of law rules civilized people, the Code of Manu, name of the divine ruler in India, while in Egypt he was called Menes, Mosses among the Hebrews, and Minos in Crete.

 

According to Jacolliot, Jesus Christ is but a recent reconstruction of an old indo-aryan tradition, that of Iezeus-Christna. Jesus of Nazareth is only a different characterization of the same personage.

 

North of Europe a magic civilization has existed for millennia and its name is Thule. The superior beings of Thule live in huge caverns in the entrails of the earth. They possess an extraordinary source of magic energy: the Vril. The theme of the Vril is exalted in most of Jacolliot's writings. Vril is an energy latent in man, but he utilizes only a fraction of it. It is the source of divinity, the source of the coming superman. He who discovers it and masters its use acquires great powers. He can become a master of men.

 

In many of his works, particularly in Les Fils de Dieu, and in Les Traditions indo-européenes , Jacolliot affirms that he discovered the existence of Vril among an Indian sect: the Jains, still active in the regions of Mysore and Gujerat, and counting millions of adepts.

 

The discovery of Vril by Jacolliot created extraordinary interest among European intellectuals, avid of knowledge about traditional oriental wisdom. Inspired by his writings a group of Rosicrucians from Berlin founded, by the end of the 19th century, the Vril Society to divulge the writings of the French master. Jacolliot's ideas were introduced in England by S. L. Matthews at the Golden Dawn Society, of which he was the Great Master.

 

With the passage of time, apparently the term Vril fell in disuse. Interest on Vril was renewed after it was used again in a novel with occult and prophetic overtones, The Coming Race , written by the Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton.


Vril Power


1871 saw the publication of The Coming Race by the English Rosicrucian, member of the House of Lords and minister of the state Edward Bulwer Lord Lytton, who personally knew one of the leading occultists of his epoch, Eliphas Levi. In this novel a young American somehow is led ever deeper into chasms in the earth until he reaches a subterranean realm in which live tall and highly educated people who had mastered a mysterious power they called "VRIL", the vital energy of the shooting grain that anyone could concentrate through his or her so-called VRIL Staff and individually apply both healingly as well as destructively. Thought transfer and telekinesis were also possible, but VRIL could also serve as a weapon.

Helena Blavatski, the foundress of the Theosophical Society, describes this force as an aether stream that in 1872 could be transformed into a physical force only by the Englishman John W. Keely, an initiate of Nature, through a mechanical device, an ability that apparently had been rescinded by the spirit side due to the threatened abuse of it on Earth.

Rudolf Steiner, the initiator of the Anthroposophical Movement, at the beginning of the 20th century describes this VRIL power as aether of life and named its abuse as the cause of the destruction of Atlantis. In his mystery plays Rudolf Steiner recalls the fate of John W. Keely in the figure of Dr. Strader. In the last scene of the last play Dr. Strader becomes the fulcrum for the New Age. To whit: Only when the laboratory table becomes the altar, when from the fruits of the materialistically dominated natural science evolves a moral Science for Nature, the New Age may unfold.

It is said that in the 1920s the Austrian Karl Schapeller had conducted successful experiments with VRIL that he called “fiery aether“, but had remained without success due to the danger of economical misuse. – This VRIL Technology apparently was taken over and further developed in secret up to operability by the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Das kommende Deutschland’ (The Reich’s Study Group ‘The Coming Germany’) that some think is the legendary VRIL-Gesellschaft (VRIL Society). In the war years after 1940 names like V7 or V9 and the technical documents still available indicate that German flying disks were equipped with a kind of VRIL technology via an electrostatic propulsion system enabling those flying manoeuvres that we know today from original films and science fiction representations.

 

 

Excerpts from: The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwells & Jacques Bergier

1st published in France under the title "Le Matin des Magiciens" 1960 by Editions Gallimard, Paris, translated from the French by Rollo Myers, Anthony Gibbs & Phillips. Ltd.

 

The same forces that were behind Adolf Hitler, are behind George Bush and the Neocons. Dubya claims that God speaks to him. Hitler made the same claim. Here we get a glimpse of exactly what that means.

 

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Let no one deceive or beguile you in any way, for that day will not come except the apostasy comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, who is the son of doom... For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work in the world, restrained only until he who restrains is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and bring him to an end by His appearing at his coming.

The coming is through the activity and working of Satan, and will be attended by great power and with all sorts of miracles and signs and delusive marvels - lying wonders - and by unlimited seduction to evil and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing because they did not welcome the Truth but refused to love it that they might be saved.

Therefore, God sends upon them a misleading influence, a working of error and a strong delusion to make them believe what is false, in order that all may be judged and condemend who did not believe the Truth, but instead took pleasure in unrighteousness.

 [II Thessalonians, 3 - 12, excerpts]

 

Adolf und die Übermen von der Golden Dawn

 

In the history of Hitlerism, or rather in certain aspects of this history, everything happens as if the whole conception on which it was based has baffled the ordinary historian so that, if we want to understand, we shall have to abandon our positive way of looking at things and try to enter a Universe where Cartesian reason and reality are no longer valid.

 

We have been concerned to describe these aspects of Hitlerism because, as M. Marcel Ray pointed out in I939, the war that Hitler imposed on the world was a "Manichaean war," or as the Bible says, "a struggle between gods." It is not, of course, a question of a struggle between Fascism and Democracy, or between a liberal and an authoritarian conception of society. That is the exoteric side of the conflict; but there is an esoteric side as well. This struggle between gods, which has been going on behind visible events, is not yet over on this planet, but the formidable progress in human knowledge made in the last few years is about to give it another form. Now that the gates of knowledge are beginning to open on to the infinite, it is important to understand what this struggle is about. If we consciously want to be men of today, that is to say, the contemporaries of tomorrow, we must have an exact and clear picture of the moment when the fantastic first invaded the realm of reality. This is what we are now going to examine.

 

Magick Socialis

 

"At bottom," said Rauschning, "every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better Fatherland and a better patrimony. This double nature of the Germans, this faculty they have of splitting their personality which enables them to live in the real world and at the same time to project themselves into an imaginary world, is especially noticeable in Hitler and provides the key to his magic socialism."

 

And Rauschning in an attempt to explain the rise to power of this "high priest of a secret religion," tried to convince himself that several times in history "whole nations have fallen into a state of inexplicable agitation. They follow the flagellants' procession, or are seized by St. Vitus's Dance.... National-Socialism is the St. Vitus's Dance of the twentieth century."

 

But where does this strange malady come from? To this question he failed to find a satisfactory answer. "Its deepest roots are hidden in secret places."

 

It is these secret places that we feel we ought to explore. And it is not a historian, but a poet who will be our guide.

 

P.J. Toulet and Arthur Machen

 

Two men who have read Paul-Jean Toulet and who meet (probably in a bar) imagine that that means they belong to an aristocracy.

Toulet himself wrote that. It happens sometimes that important things are suspended on a pin's head. It is thanks to a minor but charming writer, unknown despite the efforts of a few admirers, that I first heard the name of Arthur Machen, practically unknown in
France.

 

After some study, we discovered that Machen's works (there are some thirty volumes in all) are, from a "spiritual" point of view, more important than those of H.G. Wells.

 

Pursuing our researches on Machen, we discovered an English Society of Initiates with a very distinguished membership. This society, to which Machen was indebted for an experience that had a decisive influence on his inner development and which was a great source of inspiration, is unknown even to specialists. Finally, some of Machen's writings, in particular the text we shall be quoting, throw into clear relief an uncommon notion of the nature of Evil, which is quite indispensable for an understanding of those aspects of contemporary history we are examining in this part of our book. Before entering into the heart of our subject we would therefore like to say a few words about this curious man, beginning with a little literary digression concerning a minor Parisian author, P.J. Toulet, and ending with a vision of a great subterranean gateway behind which lie, still smoking, the remains of the martyrs and the ruins of the Nazi tragedy which disrupted the whole world. The paths of "fantastic realism," as we shall see once again, do not resemble the ordinary paths of knowledge.

 

A Great Neglected Genius

 

In November 1897 a friend, "somewhat given to the occult sciences," brought to the notice of Paul-Jean Toulet a novel by an unknown thirty-four-year-old author entitled The Great God Pan. This book, which evokes a primitive pagan world, not entirely submerged but still cautiously surviving and occasionally releasing among us its God of Evil and his cloven- hoofed angels, made a profound impression on Toulet and started him on his literary career. He began translating The Great God Pan and, borrowing from Machen his nightmarish decor with the Great Pan lurking in the thickets of our countryside, wrote his first novel: Monsieur du Paur, homme public.

 

Monsieur du Paur was published towards the end of 1898, and met with no success. It is not an important work, and might never have been heard of had not M. Henri Martineau, a great Stendhalian and a friend of Toulet, taken it upon himself, twenty years later, to republish the book at his own expense in the Editions du Divan. M. Martineau was determined to show that Monsieur du Paur was inspired by Machen's book, but was nevertheless an original work, so that it was through him that the attention of a few literary people was drawn to Arthur Machen and his Great God Pan and some correspondence between Toulet and Machen was brought to light.

 

[...]

 

For Machen, as is apparent in all his works, "man is made of mystery and exists for mysteries and visions." Reality is the supernatural. The external world can teach us little, unless we look upon it as a reservoir of symbols and hidden meanings. The only works which have some chance of being real and serving some useful. purpose are works of imagination produced by a mind in search of eternal verities. As the critic Philip van Doren Stern has pointed out: "The fantastic stories of Arthur Machen perhaps contain more essential truths than all the graphs and statistics in the world."

 

It was a strange adventure that brought Machen back to literature. It made his name famous in a few weeks, and the shock this gave him decided him to devote the rest of his life to writing.

 

He found journalism irksome, and no longer wanted to write for his own satisfaction. War had just broken out. There was a demand for "heroic" literature. This was hardly his line. The Evening News, however, asked him for a story. He wrote it straight off, but in his own individual style, calling it The Bowmen. The newspaper published this story on 29th September, 1914, the day after the retreat from Mons. Machen had imagined an incident in this battle: St. George in shining armour, at the head of his angels in the guise of the old archers of the battle of Agincourt, comes to the rescue of the British Army.

The next thing that happened was that scores of soldiers wrote into the newspaper to say that this Mr. Machen had invented nothing. They had seen with their own eyes on the Mons front the angels of St. George mingling in their ranks. This they could swear to on their honour. Many of these letters were published. England, anxious for a miracle in her hour of peril, was profoundly stirred. Machen had been hurt when no notice was taken of him when he had tried to reveal the secrets of reality. Now, with a cheap kind of fantasy, he had aroused the whole country. Or could it be that hidden forces rose up, in one form or another, summoned by his imagination that had so often been concerned with essential truths and was now, perhaps unconsciously, at work deep down within him? Dozens of times Machen insisted in the Press that his story was pure invention. No one ever believed it. Right up to his death, thirty years later, Machen, now an old man, often reverted in conversation to this fantastic story of the Angels of Mons.

 How We Discovered an English Secret Society

 

About the year 1880, in France, in England and in Germany some secret societies of Initiates and members of hermetic orders were founded to which a number of very influential people belonged. The story of this mystical post-romantic crisis has not yet been written. It deserves to be, as it might throw light upon the origin of several important trends of thought which have determined certain political tendencies.

 

In two letters written by Arthur Machen to Toulet we find the following remarkable passages. In the first, written in 1899, he says: "When I was writing Pan and The White Powder I did not believe that such strange things had ever happened in real life, or could ever have happened. Since then, and quite recently, I have had certain experiences in my own life which have entirely changed my point of view in these matters....Henceforward I am quite convinced that nothing is impossible on this Earth. I need scarcely add, I suppose, that none of the experiences I have had has any connection whatever with such impostures as spiritualism or theosophy. But I believe that we are living in a world of the greatest mystery full of unsuspected and quite astonishing things."

 

In 1900 he wrote as follows:

It may amuse you to know that I sent a copy of my 'Great God Pan to an adept, an advanced 'occultist' whom I met in secret, and this is what he wrote me: 'The book amply proves that by thought and meditation rather than through reading, you have attained a certain degree of initiation independently of orders or organizations.'

 

Who was this "adept?" And what were Machen's "experiences?"

 

In another letter, after Toulet had been to London, he wrote: "Mr. Waite, who likes you very much, asks me to send you his best regards."

 

We were interested to learn the name of this friend of Machen and to discover that he was one of the best authorities on alchemy and a Rosicrucian specialist.

 

We had reached this point in our researches into the intellectual interests of Arthur Machen, when a friend revealed to us the existence in England, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, of a secret "initiatory" society of Rosicrucian inspiration. [See Nos. 2 and 3 of the review La Tour Saint-Jacques, 1956: 'L'ordre hermetique de la Golden Dawn' by Pierre Victor.]

 

The Golden Dawn

 

This society was called the Golden Dawn, and its members included some of the most brilliant minds in the country. Arthur Machen was himself a member.

 

The Golden Dawn, founded in 1887, was an offshoot of the English Rosicrucian Society created twenty years earlier by Robert Wentworth Little, and consisted largely of leading Freemasons. The latter society had about 144 members, including Bulwer Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii.

 

The Golden Dawn, with a smaller membership, was formed for the practice of ceremonial magic and the acquisition of initiatory knowledge and powers. Its leaders were Woodman, Mathers and Wynn Westcott (the "occultist" mentioned by Toulet in his letter of 1900).

 

It was in contact with similar German societies, some of whose members were later associated with Rudolf Steiner's famous anthroposophical movement and other influential sects during the pre-Nazi period. Later on it came under the leadership of Aleister Crowley, an altogether extraordinary man who was certainly one of the greatest exponents of the neo-paganism whose development in Germany we have noted.

 

S.L. Mathers, after the death of Woodman and the resignation of Westcott, was the Grand Master of the Golden Dawn, which he directed for some time from Paris, where he had just married Henri Bergson's daughter.

 

A Nobel-Prize Winner in a Black Mask

 

Mathers was succeeded in his office by the celebrated poet W.B. Yeats, who was later to become a Nobel Prize-winner.

 

Yeats took the name of "Frere Demon est Deus Inversus." He used to preside over the meetings dressed in a kilt, wearing a black mask and a golden dagger in his belt.

 

Arthur Machen took the name of "Filus Aquarti." The Golden Dawn had one woman member [no mention of Fräulien Sprengel...? -B:.B:.] lorence Farr, Director of the Abbey Theatre and an intimate friend of Bernard Shaw. Other members included: Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula), Sax Rohmer, Peck, the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, the celebrated engineer Allan Bennett, and Sir Gerald Kelly, President of the Royal Academy. It seems that on these exceptional people the Golden Dawn exercised a lasting influence, and they themselves admitted that their outlook on the world was changed, while the activities they indulged in never failed to prove both efficacious and uplifting.

 

A Hollow Earth, A Frozen World, A New Man

 

The Earth is hollow. We are living inside it. The stars are blocks of ice. Several Moons have already fallen on the Earth. The whole history of humanity is contained in the struggle between ice and fire.

 

Man is not finished. He is on the brink of a formidable mutation ["alien hybridisation" -B:.B:.]  which will confer on him the powers the ancients attributed to the gods. A few specimens of the New Man exist in the world, who have perhaps come here from beyond the frontiers of time and space.

 

Alliances could be formed with the Master of the World or the King of Fear who reigns over a city hidden somewhere in the East. Those who conclude a pact will change the surface of the Earth and endow the human adventure with a new meaning for many thousands of years.

 

Such are the "scientific" theories and "religious" conceptions on which Nazism was originally based and in which Hitler and the members of his group believed -- theories which, to a large extent, have dominated social and political trends in recent history. This may seem extravagant. Any explanation, even partial, of contemporary history based on ideas and beliefs of this kind may seem repugnant. In our view, nothing is repugnant that is in the interests of the truth.

 

Against Nature and Against God

 

It is well known that the Nazi party was openly, and even flamboyantly anti-intellectual; that it burnt books and relegated the theoretical physicists among its "Judaeo-Marxist" enemies. Less is known about the reasons which led it to reject official Western science, and still less with regard to the basic conception of the nature of man on which Nazism was founded -- at any rate in the minds of some of its leaders. If we knew this it would be easier to place the last World War within the category of great spiritual conflicts: history animated once again by the spirit of La Legende des Siecles.

 

Hitler used to say:

We are often abused for being the enemies of the mind and spirit. Well, that is what we are, but in a far deeper sense than bourgeois science, in its idiotic pride, could ever imagine[...]

 

Dr. Willy Ley, one of the world's greatest rocket experts, fled from Germany in 1933. It was from him that we learned of the existence in Berlin shortly before the Nazis came to power, of a little spiritual community that is of great interest to us.

 

Haushofer and the Vril

 

This secret community was founded, literally, on Bulwer Lytton's novel The Coming Race. The book describes a race of men psychically far in advance of ours. They have acquired powers over themselves and over things that make them almost godlike. For the moment they are in hiding. They live in caves in the centre of the Earth. Soon they will emerge to reign over us.

 

This appears to be as much as Dr. Ley could tell us. He added with a smile that the disciples believed they had secret knowledge that would enable them to change their race and become the equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the Earth. Methods of concentration, a whole system of internal gymnastics by which they would be transformed. They began their exercises by staring fixedly at an apple cut in half.... We continued our researches.

 

This Berlin group called itself The Luminous Lodge, or The Vril Society. The vril [the notion of the 'vril' is mentioned for the first time in the works of the French writer Jacolliot, French Consul in Calcutta under the Second Empire. ] is the enormous energy of which we only use a minute proportion in our daily life, the nerve-centre of our potential divinity. Whoever becomes master of the vril will be the master of himself, of others round him and of the world.

 

This should be the only object of our desires, and all our efforts should be directed to that end. All the rest belongs to official psychology, morality, and religions and is worthless.

 

The world will change: the Lords will emerge from the centre of the Earth. Unless we have made an alliance with them and become Lords ourselves, we shall find ourselves among the slaves, on the dung-heap that will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise.

 

The Luminous Lodge had associations with the theosophical and Rosicrucian groups. According to Jack Fishman, author of a curious book entitled The Seven Men of Spandau, Karl Haushofer was a member of this lodge. We shall have more to say about him later, when it will be seen that his association with this Vril Society helps to explain certain things.

 

The Idea of the Mutation of Man

 

The reader will recall that the writer, Arthur Machen, we discovered was connected with an English society of Initiates, the Golden Dawn. This neo-pagan society, which had a distinguished membership, was an offshoot of the English Rosicrucian Society, founded by Wentworth Little in 1867. Little was in contact with the German Rosicrucians. He recruited his followers, to the number of 144, from the ranks of the higher-ranking Freemasons. One of his disciples was Bulwer Lytton.

 

Bulwer Lytton, a learned man of genius, celebrated throughout the world for his novel The Last Days of Pompeii, little thought that one of his books, in some ten years' time, would inspire a mystical pre-Nazi group in Germany. Yet in works like The Coming Race or Zanoni, he set out to emphasize the realities of the spiritual world, and more especially, the infernal world. He considered himself an Initiate. Through his romantic works of fiction he expressed the conviction that there are beings endowed with superhuman powers. These beings will supplant us and bring about a formidable mutation in the elect of the human race.

 

We must beware of this notion of a mutation. It crops up again with Hitler, and is not yet extinct today.

 

Hitler's aim was neither the founding of a race of supermen, nor the conquest of the world; these were only means towards the realization of the great work he dreamed of. His real aim was to perform an act of creation, a divine operation, the goal of a biological mutation which would result in an unprecedented exaltation of the human race and the "apparition of a new race of heroes and demigods and god-men." (Dr. Achille Delmas.) [perhaps these same neo-Nephilim Nazi "übermen" are today clothed in the time and culture-appropriate sci-fi regalia of "alien"/human "hybrids" a la Whit Strieber, Harvard's Dr. John Mack, and a veritable cornucopia of other associated -- often Rockefeller-financed -- socio-cultural metaprogrammers. -B:.B:.]

 

We must also beware of the notion of the "Unknown Supermen." It is found in all the "black" mystical writings both in the West and in the East. Whether they live under the Earth or came from other planets, whether in the form of giants like those which are said to lie encased in cloth of gold in the crypts of Thibetan monasteries, or of shapeless and terrifying beings such as Lovecraft describes, do these "Unknown Supermen," evoked in pagan and Satanic rites, actually exist? When Machen speaks of the World of Evil, "full of caverns and crepuscular beings dwelling therein," he is referring, as an adept of the Golden Dawn, to that other world in which man comes into contact with the "Unknown Supermen." It seems certain that Hitler shared this belief, and even claimed to have been in touch with these "Supermen."

 

G.'. D.'. Mathers Meets the "Great Terrorists"

 

We have already mentioned the Golden Dawn and the German Vril Society. We shall have something to say later about the Thule Group. We are not so foolish as to try to explain history in the light of secret societies. What we shall see, curiously enough, is that it all "ties up," and that with the coming of Nazism it was the "other world" which ruled over us for a number of years. That world has been defeated, but it is not dead, either on the Rhine or elsewhere. And there is nothing alarming about it: only our ignorance is alarming. [Indeed, those who forget history, etc. -B:.B:.]

 

We pointed out that Samuel Mathers was the founder of the Golden Dawn. Mathers claimed to be in communication with these "Unknown Supermen" and to have established contact with them in the company of his wife, the sister of Henri Bergson. Here follows a page of the manifesto addressed to "Members of the Second Order" in 1896:

 

As to the Secret Chiefs with whom I am in touch and from whom I have received the wisdom of the Second Order which I communicated to you, I  can tell you nothing. I do not even know their Earthly names, and I have very seldom seen them in their physical bodies....They used to meet me physically at a time and place fixed in advance. For my part, I believe they are human beings living on this Earth, but possessed of terrible and superhuman powers... My physical encounters with them have shown me how difficult it is for a mortal, however "advanced," to support their presence.... I do not mean that during my rare meetings with them I experienced the same feeling of intense physical depression that accompanies the loss of magnetism. On the contrary, I felt I was in contact with a force so terrible that I can only compare it to the shock one would receive from being near a flash of lightning during a great thunder-storm, experiencing at the same time great difficulty in breathing.... The nervous prostration I spoke of was accompanied by cold sweats and bleeding from the nose, mouth and sometimes the ears.

 

Hitler Claims to Have Met Them Too

 

Hitler was talking one day to Rauschning, the Governor of Danzig, about the problem of a mutation of the human race. Rauschning, not possessing the key to such strange preoccupations, interpreted Hitler's remarks in terms of a stock-breeder interested in the amelioration of German blood.

 

"But all you can do," he replied, "is to assist Nature and shorten the road to be followed! It is Nature herself who must create for you a new species. Up till now the breeder has only rarely succeeded in developing mutations in animals -- that is to say, creating himself new characteristics."

 

"The new man is living amongst us now! He is here!" exclaimed Hitler, triumphantly. "Isn't that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid of him."

 

"In uttering these words," added Rauschning, "Hitler was trembling in a kind of ecstasy."

 

It was Rauschning, too, who related the following strange episode, about which Dr. Achille Delmas, a specialist in applied psychology, questioned him in vain: It is true that in a case like this psychology does not apply:

 

A person close to Hitler told me that he wakes up in the night screaming and in convulsions. He calls for help, and appears to be half paralysed. He is seized with a panic that makes him tremble until the bed shakes. He utters confused and unintelligible sounds, gasping, as if on the point of suffocation. The same person described to me one of these fits, with details that I would refuse to believe had I not complete confidence in my informant.

 

"Hitler was standing up in his room, swaying and looking all round him as if he were lost. 'It's he, it's he,' he groaned, 'he's come for me!' His lips were white; he was sweating profusely. Suddenly he uttered a string of meaningless figures, then words and scraps of sentences. It was terrifying. He used strange expressions strung together in bizarre disorder. Then he relapsed again into silence, but his lips still continued to move. He was then given a friction and something to drink. Then suddenly he screamed: 'There! there! Over in the corner! He is there!' -- all the time stamping with his feet and shouting. To quieten him he was assured that nothing extraordinary had happened, and finally he gradually calmed down. After that he slept for a long time and became normal again...

~
Hermann Rauschning: Hitler m'a dit. Ed. Cooperation,
Paris, 1939. Dr. Achille Delmas: Hitler, essai de biographie psychopathologique. Lib. Marcel Rivimere, Paris, 1946.

 

We leave it to the reader to compare the statement of Mathers, head of a small neo-pagan society at the end of the nineteenth century, and the utterances of a man who, at the time Rauschning recorded them, was preparing to launch the world into an adventure which caused the death of sixty million human beings. We beg him not to ignore this comparison and the lesson to be drawn from it on the grounds that the Golden Dawn and Nazism, in the eyes of a "reasonable" historian, have nothing in common. The historian may be reasonable, but history is not. These two men shared the same beliefs: their fundamental experiences were the same, and they were guided by the same force. They belong to the same trend of thought and to the same religion. This religion has never up to now been seriously studied. Neither the Church nor the Rationalists -- that other Church -- have ever allowed it. We are now entering an epoch in the history of knowledge when such studies will become possible because now that reality is revealing its fantastic side, ideas and techniques which seem abnormal, contemptible or repellent will be found useful in so far as they enable us to understand a "reality" that becomes more and more disquieting.

 

[...]

 

The Golden Dawn is not enough to explain the Thule Group, or the Luminous Lodge, the Ahnenherbe. Naturally there are cross- currents and secret or apparent links between the various groups, which we shall not fail to point out. Like all "little" history, that is an absorbing pastime. But our concern is with "big" history.

 

We believe that these societies, great or small, related or unrelated, with or without ramifications, are manifestations, more or less apparent and more or less important, of a world other than the one in which we live. Let us call it the world of Evil, in Machen's sense of the word. The truth is, we know just as little about the world of Good. We are living between two worlds, and pretending that this "no-man's-land" is identical with our whole planet. The rise of Nazism was one of those rare moments in the history of our civilization, when a door was noisily and ostentatiously opened on to something "Other." What is strange is that people pretend not to have seen or heard anything apart from the sights and sounds inseparable from war and political strife.


All these movements: the modern Rosy-Cross, Golden Dawn, the German Vril Society (which will bring us to the Thule Group where we shall find Haushofer, Hess and Hitler) were more or less closely associated with the powerful and well organized Theosophical Society. Theosophy added to neo-pagan magic an oriental setting and a Hindu terminology. Or, rather, it provided a link between a certain oriental Satanism and the West.

 

Theosophy was the name finally given to the whole vast renaissance in the world of magic that affected many thinkers so profoundly at the beginning of the century.

 

In his study Le Thiosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo-religion, published in 1921, the philosopher Rene Guenon foresaw what was likely to occur. He realized the dangers lurking behind theosophy and the neo-pagan Initiatory groups that were more or less connected with Mme Blavatsky and her sect.

 

This is what he wrote:

 

The false Messiahs we have seen so far have only performed very inferior miracles, and their disciples were probably not very difficult to convert. But who knows what the future has in store? When you reflect that these false Messiahs have never been anything but the more or less unconscious tools of those who conjured them up, and when one thinks more particularly of the series of attempts made in succession by the theosophists, one is forced to the conclusion that these were only trials, experiments as it were, which will be renewed in various forms until success is achieved, and which in the meantime invariably produce a somewhat disquieting effect. Not that we believe that the theosophists, any more than the occultists and the spiritualists, are strong enough by themselves to carry out successfully an enterprise of this nature. But might there not be, behind all these movements, something far more dangerous which their leaders perhaps know nothing about, being themselves in turn the unconscious tools of a higher power?

 





The Vril Society, was founded as "The All German Society for Metaphysics" in 1921 to explore the origins of the Aryan race. 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.


The Society allegedly taught concentration exercises designed to awaken the forces of Vril, and their main goal was to achieve Raumflug (Spaceflight) to reach Aldebaran. To achieve this, the Vril Society joined the Thule Gesellschaft and DHvSS (Men 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 Arbeiter Partei) 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.

After 1941 Hitler forbade secret societies, so both Thule and Vril were documented under the SS E-IV unit. Vril also became secretly known as "Die Kette" - "The Chain", which refers to the mental links between their members. Vril had strong contacts with Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr, the Ahnenerbe (SS occult bureau), and worked with the engineers at Arado.

Historical records of the existence of the Vril society in the Third Reich or Weimar Republic are in doubt due to the fact that Allied Technical Intelligence teams in 1945 were ordered to recover all Vril documentation and hardware left behind and then systematically destroy all remaining traces of both the Vril and Thule Gesellschaften. Their SS E-IV unit counterpart material was also confiscated by the Western Allies but is classified and compartmentalized separately under the military file classification system. Since both Vril and Thule predate the military SS Technical Branch, their existence and historical personage records had to be destroyed under Allied occupation since the occult societies represented an extreme threat to de-Nazification if they were allowed to reform as societies.

Outlawed in Germany, Vril has recently re-emerged as CAUSA NOSTRA VRIL operating out of Milan and Venice, Italy. "Causa Nostra" means "Our Cause" and the Vril membership is composed of entirely females, just as the original Gesellschaft was. A current member of Causa Nostra is Reinhard Heydrich's former secretary who is over 90 yrs old. This group claims DIRECT descent from the original Vril Gesellschaft and shows the line of succession after the original Vril Chefin  Maria Orsic, Sigrun, and Traute. Gudrun and Heike followed postwar. This group advocates everything the old Vril Gesellschaft did and looks forward to a new Reich (a German/Roman Empire restoration) and claims knowledge of secret technology, especially flight discs and channeled spaceflight. The group has emerged after 60 years to promote Vril's original "Z-Plan" (Zukunft, Future Plan) that was prophesied in 1945. Back in March 1945 Vril prophesied they would return in either 1992/93 or 2004/05. In January 2005 Causa Nostra Vril came back to publically promote their ideas and distribute their story in book form. It is highly significant to note that although they operate out of Italy and have members in the US... their online site and e-mail originate out of Munich where the old Vril Gesellschaft originated from.