Vril: how did a Victorian novel become a Nazi secret society?

The modern version runs roughly like this. A secret society in Berlin, the Vril Gesellschaft, pursued an occult energy called vril. Its members included a psychic medium, Maria Orsic, who received transmissions from the star Aldebaran containing engineering plans. Those plans produced the first flying discs. The society was connected to the Nazi leadership, and what happened to it afterwards is the interesting question.

Every element of that has a first printed appearance, and the appearances can be dated. Put them in order and the story reads backwards.

The timeline

1871 — Vril appears in a novel. 1886 — it becomes a brand of beef extract. Late 1870s onwards — Theosophists begin treating it as a real force. 1947 — one paragraph in an American science-fiction magazine describes a small Berlin group that believed in it. 1960 — a French bestseller expands that paragraph into a Nazi occult order. 1992 — a German book adds Maria Orsic, Aldebaran and the flying discs. From the late 1990s — the internet.

1871: what the novel actually says

The Coming Race was published anonymously in 1871. Its author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was one of the most commercially successful novelists in Britain and a public man: Conservative MP for Hertfordshire from 1852, Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858–59, and by 1866 raised to the peerage as Baron Lytton. The book is a subterranean utopia in the manner of the period: a narrator falls into a cavern world inhabited by an advanced people.

Their power comes from vril, and the novel is precise about what kind of idea that is. Asked to define it, the narrator says there is no exact synonym in any language he knows, and then explains that the underground philosophers regard vril as the unity of all natural energetic agencies — and quotes Michael Faraday on the correlation of physical forces to make the point.

These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation.

The Coming Race — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1871

That is a Victorian scientific-romance conceit, built on the most respectable physics of the day. Faraday’s work on the interconvertibility of forces was real, current and famous. Bulwer-Lytton extended it into a single controllable agent, carried in a hand-held staff, capable of healing, of altering weather, of influencing minds, and of annihilating an army.

1886: the beef extract

The fastest way to see how ordinary the word was in late Victorian Britain is the supermarket shelf.

John Lawson Johnston’s Fluid Beef was renamed Bovril in 1886: bov- from the Latin for ox, and -vril lifted straight from Bulwer-Lytton’s bestseller. The name was trademarked the following year. A manufacturer chose it because the reference would be understood — the way a brand today might allude to a blockbuster film.

Vril was not an esoteric secret in 1886. It was a marketing pun.

The 1870s onwards: Theosophy makes it real

The step that mattered came from occultism rather than fiction. Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society took up vril and treated it not as an invention but as a garbled report of a genuine force, and stories began to circulate that Bulwer-Lytton had been an initiate writing under the cover of a novel.

This is the mechanism worth naming, because it recurs across this whole subject: a piece of fiction is reinterpreted as disguised testimony, and its author is promoted from novelist to insider. Julian Strube’s study of vril traces that move in detail and follows it forward into postwar esoteric neo-Nazism, where the term is eventually joined to the Black Sun.

1947: the one contemporary source, read carefully

Everything in the Nazi half of the story descends from a single article: Willy Ley’s “Pseudoscience in Naziland”, published in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1947. Ley was a German rocket engineer who had left Germany in 1935, and the piece is a sardonic catalogue of the crank beliefs he had watched circulate.

His account of the vril believers is one short passage. He describes a Berlin group calling itself the Wahrheitsgesellschaft — the Society for Truth — which devoted its time to looking for vril, on the strength of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which its members took to be based on fact.

1960: the amplification

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier published Le Matin des magiciens in 1960; it was an enormous seller and appeared in English in 1963 as The Morning of the Magicians. It is the source of a great deal of what the twentieth century believes about Nazi occultism.

The book took Ley’s paragraph and produced from it a Berlin occult order with reach into the German leadership. Ley is cited. The additional material is not, because there was nothing else to cite.

This is the single most consequential step in the chain, and it is a step of literary style rather than research: a dismissive aside by a sceptic becomes a documented organisation because a later book asserts it in a confident voice and is read by millions of people who will never see the 1947 original.

1992: Maria Orsic arrives

The medium, the star and the flying discs are later still. Maria Orsic — sometimes Orsitsch — first appears in Das Vril-Projekt, published in 1992 by Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl, together with the Aldebaran transmissions and the disc programme. German conspiracy publishing of the mid-1990s carried the story to a mass audience, and the internet did the rest.

She is now the face of the subject. Photographs said to be of her circulate widely: a young woman with long hair, in images of the right period. No documented provenance has ever accompanied them, and no wartime record, employment file, registration document or contemporary press mention of her has been produced by anyone.

What the historians say

The academic literature treats vril as a case study in how an occult idea migrates. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s work on postwar esoteric neo-Nazism follows the term into the milieu that produced the flying-disc material, and Strube’s book traces the whole line from Bulwer-Lytton through Theosophy to the modern far right.

What none of it supports is the load-bearing claim: that a Vril Society existed as described, inside the German state, doing what the story says it did.

What we know

That vril is a term coined in a novel published in 1871, presented there as an extension of Faraday’s physics. That it entered ordinary English usage quickly enough to name a beef extract in 1886. That Theosophy recast it as a real force. That a single 1947 magazine article records a small Berlin group that believed in it. That a 1960 bestseller turned that group into a Nazi occult order, and a 1992 book supplied the medium, the star and the aircraft.

What we do not know: what the Wahrheitsgesellschaft actually was, how many members it had, or how long it lasted, because Ley’s paragraph is all we have and he was not writing a history. Whether Ratthofer and Ettl invented Maria Orsic outright or embroidered something they had been told. And where the photographs came from — which is a solvable problem, since they are photographs of somebody, and somebody once knew who.