Case file · High strangeness
Bulwer-Lytton's 'The Coming Race' and Vril
Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel 'The Coming Race' (1871) imagined a superior race, the Vril-ya, living in caverns beneath the Earth and wielding a mysterious energy called vril; some readers took it as occult truth.
1871 CE · 51.51, -0.13 · status: claim
The account
Theosophists and later occult writers treated vril as real. The 1960 book 'The Morning of the Magicians' claimed a secret Vril Society existed in Weimar Berlin, feeding Nazi-occult mythology. The word survives in the brand name Bovril.
The sceptical view
A satirical novel; the 'Vril Society' is not documented in contemporary sources.
Connections in the atlas
- 'Etidorhpa': through a Kentucky cave to the Earth's core
- The Shaver Mystery: deros in the caves
- Agartha, the kingdom inside the Earth