Theos-Talk Archives (September 2003 Message tt00161)

Hello Vance,

It may interest you that in October, in the French language publication
Gazette Forteenne, my 16,000 word paper on Vril and the Vril Society will be
published. The paper is the momentarily result of quite a few years of
research. It is illustrated and is fully referenced. It has - amongst others,
all the references you cite (including a nice illustration of the front cover
of the 1911 McClurg Vril, or Vital Magnetism book). By the way, I have been
in personal contact with Peter Bahn, author of the Vril Mythos, for the last
7 years or so. Contact me off-list to enquire further.

Kind regards,

Theo Paijmans

Vance wrote:

> 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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