“The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft — Society for Truth — and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race. They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this ‘power.’”
– Willy Ley, 1947
November 18 is the date of the ancient Aryan festival Ardvi Sura, the holy day of the Persian goddess Anahita, the “Mother of Stars.” On that date in 1925, Rudolf Hess and Rudolf von Sebottendorff met at Hess’ apartment in Munich. Around a table draped in black they, along with the astrologer Ernst Schulte-Strathaus and a young Germanenorden recruit named Conrad Buch, clasped hands. With the lights lowered, they concentrated on the Outside realms. The goal of their séance: to contact the spirit of Dietrich Eckart. Eckart, weakened by morphine and the rigors of channeling spirits with Hitler, had sickened in prison after the putsch and died shortly after his compassionate release.
The medium was a beautiful blonde named Maria Orsic, a Croatian clairvoyant who had left Vienna in 1919. In Munich she ran a circle of völkisch young women, the Alldeutsche Gesellschaft für Metaphysik (All German Society for Metaphysics), who wore their hair unfashionably long as a solar rite. She had selected the date and designed the ritual based on her own insights into Aryan lore. This time come around, her head lolled back and the familiar, coarse voice of Dietrich Eckart boomed from her throat: “Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune. I have initiated him into the ‘Secret Doctrine,’ opened his centers in vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other German.”
Then he announced that he was obliged to open the way for another entity. A strange, inhuman piping filled the room, and Orsic began scribbling frantically on sheet after sheet of paper. When she fainted at last, breaking the contact, the group examined the writing. Some of it was in a Templar code that Sebottendorff recognized; that portion implied a stellar connection (to Aldebaran or the Pleiades) for the material. The rest was in an unknown script of vaguely Near Eastern appearance. Hess knew reliable scholars among Germany’s archaeological and Orientalist community: the “Panbabylonians” who argued that the Jewish scriptures were debased versions of Babylonian and Assyrian stellar chronicles. Hess showed Orsic’s manuscript to three Panbabylonian scholars: the Grail poet and philologist Eduard Stucken, the linguist Wolfgang Schultz, and the pan-Germanist, völkisch philosopher Paul Schnabel.1 They confirmed that the language was Sumerian, the earliest known writing, and thus quite possibly related to Aryan runes. Oblique and elliptical, it nevertheless described the fundamental electrical-occult force of the universe: vril.
That 1925 séance became the founding event of a group that went by many names: the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft “Das kommende Deutschland” (National Working Group for the Coming Germany), the Wahrheitsgesellschaft (Society for Truth), and the Leuchtendeloge (Luminous Lodge) are only some of the ones known to us. (Later writers, simplifying matters, called it the Vril-Gesellschaft, or Vril Society.) The Lodge’s public head called himself “Johannes Täufer” (John the Baptist), implying someone close to the Aryan Messiah, Hitler. Using the occult publishers Wilhelm Becker and Otto Wilhelm Barth as cutouts, the group released two brief pamphlets on the nature of the vril in 1930. Apparently they didn’t get the response they wanted; the subject dropped out of Nazi discourse.
This may have been because, as anti-Nazi rocket expert Willy Ley pointed out, the word vril first appeared in a novel. The Rosicrucian Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote Vril, the Power of the Coming Race in 1871. In it, his protagonists uncover the Ana, a hidden race of supermen inside the Earth. A caste of Ana called the Vril-ya were masters of the “Vril force,” an omnipresent cosmic energy combining electricity and telepathy; later readers noticed parallels to nuclear forces also. Soon, the novel hints, the Vril-ya will expand onto the surface world and conquer the Earth using their vril staves, the least of which can level a city. Bulwer-Lytton’s extensive occult contacts led many, including H.P. Blavatsky, to speculate that he had uncovered a genuine truth disguised as fiction. The French occultist Louis Jacolliot claimed he had encountered the vril force in India; the English theosophist William Scott-Elliot revealed that the Atlanteans had flying craft powered by vril.
The Orsic manuscript contradicted Bulwer-Lytton on one point at least. Rather than his “vril staff” device, vril containment and control was more reliable with a spherical shape, or better yet one using cardioid curves. A cardioid curve is best described as the cross-section of an apple without the stem: Emmanuel Swedenborg’s angelic devotions, Rudolf Steiner’s “anthroposophic” mysticism, and even the original magical mathematician Pythagoras all focused on the apple as a cosmic symbol. Pythagorean magic also stressed the role of sound energy, a topic well-explored by the Ariosophist rune scholars. Acoustic energy-magic, according to some theosophists, had raised the Pyramids and hollowed out the temples at Petra.
Privately published in 1932, Friedrich Wilhelm Raub’s Lebende Elektrogeist (The Living Electrical Spirit) presents another variation on the vril lore disseminated by the Wahrheitgesellschaft. Raub’s book claims the Elektrogeist, hidden inside the Earth and radiating throughout the cosmos, is the secret behind Christ’s miracles, and the hidden wellspring of Hitler’s power. (Mel Gordon Archive)
Furthermore, according to a 1931 book by the theosophist writer H. Spencer Lewis, a sub-race of Blavatsky’s Lemurians called the Yaktavians had mastered acoustic energy and used it to hollow out a kingdom underneath Mt. Shasta in California. Their tools were special bells, which the Leuchtendeloge had already determined would fit the cardioid curve of the vril. (Turn an apple upside-down: the result is a bell shape.) Lewis’ source for this lore was almost certainly the head of the American “I AM” cult, Guy Ballard, who met with an Aryan secret master identifying himself as “Count St. Germain” (after the legendary 18th-century alchemist) on the slopes of Mt. Shasta in 1930. Ballard was well-connected to the burgeoning American fascist movement of William Dudley Pelley: whether a Yaktavian bell made its way from Mt. Shasta to the Luminous Lodge at this time or not remains unknown. But the Vril-Gesellschaft now knew what to look for. Or, if necessary, what to build.
In 1926, the Vril-Gesellschaft recruited the dowser Karl Schappeller. An Ariosophist and amateur engineer, Schappeller had been experimenting with occult magnetism to draw buried metals toward the Earth’s surface and to locate the tomb of Attila the Hun. They shared portions of the translated Orsic manuscript with him, and he began research on what he called Raumenergie (space energy), the energy field suffusing all space-time. Schappeller’s version of vril had much in common with the 19th-century physics of the ether, as well as the theory of “zero-point energy” first promulgated by Albert Einstein and Otto Stern in 1913.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler met with Schappeller in Vienna in 1933, and was soon convinced of the military and strategic utility of Raumenergie, which could not only power various wonder-weapons but also make Germany independent of outside energy sources. He soon attached Schappeller to the SS Entwicklungsstelle-IV (Development Office IV; SS E-IV), a top-secret program to investigate alternative energy, especially including occult energy production. (Hans Coler’s “magnetromapparatus” worked on similar principles, but Coler was snapped up by the Kriegsmarine instead.) SS E-IV continued Frenzolf Schmid’s “tripartite ray” experiments in radiesthesia, and also moved forward on Nobel laureate Walter Gerlach’s theory that placing mercury under magnetic stress could alter its fundamental nature and unleash cosmic power, a kind of diesel-driven alchemy.
Based on Polish Resistance reports, this modern reconstruction depicts “die Glocke,” the full-scale (9ft x 15ft) beryllium-steel Bell (replicating Lemurian technology) was built underneath the Wenceslas Mine in Silesia. The violet glow comes from Xerum 525, a radioactive mercury fuel used in two counter-rotating cylinders to jump-start the vril reaction. There is no basis for the reports that the Bell mounted a concave mirror that reflected the past. A UFO that crashed near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965 resembled die Glocke, but was immediately recovered by the U.S. Army before it could be examined by outside scientists. (Artwork by David Winship)
Upon the outbreak of war in 1939, Himmler placed SS E-IV under the physicist Pascual Jordan, at the time languishing in Wernher von Braun’s shadow in the Luftwaffe. By 1942 Himmler and Jordan had decided, most likely after considerable behind-the-scenes manipulation by the Vril-Gesellschaft, to attempt the creation of a full-scale Yaktavian Bell, one capable of powering the entire Third Reich. In autumn 1943 construction on Das Laternenträger Projekt (Project Lantern-Bearer) began at the Wenceslas Mine, a site in Silesia near the Czech border. The SS invented a cover, Projekt Riese (Project Giant), ostensibly the building of a new bomb-proof armaments factory in the mountains, to explain the vast diversion of concrete, steel, and chemicals to the Bell facility.
In 1894, the engineer Hanns Hörbiger had two visions that explained the universe to him: he saw blocks of ice stacked on the moon’s surface, and he saw a gigantic pendulum extending out to Neptune. From this epiphany came his Welteislehre (World Ice Theory), explaining the cosmos in terms of the eternal struggle between fire and ice. He published his theory in a 1912 tome explaining that ice spiraling inward from outer space created the moon, planets, other solar systems, and the Milky Way. Some planets were back-blasts from ice worlds hitting the hot metallic sun and exploding into steam; others were outer worlds pushed relentlessly toward the sun by the pressure of interstellar hydrogen. The Earth, Hörbiger explained, had captured many icy moons, each of which spiraled toward the planet’s surface, broke up, and bombarded the Earth with catastrophic hail. At such times, life retreated to the mountain peaks to be reborn again in the Edenic time before the next moon’s approach.
The Welteislehre had an instant appeal to the Ariosophists: it explained history in terms of mighty catastrophes and cycles like theosophy, it accounted for the loss of Thule under water or ice or both, its cosmology recalled Norse myth, and it was the product of German thought rather than of the new Jewish physics of Einstein. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theories had caught fire with Himmler, who added a Hörbigerian meteorology bureau to the Ahnenerbe (see Glossary). Occult archaeologist Edmund Kiss was an avid Hörbigerian; the Tibet expedition (see below) took Hörbigerian samples from Himalayan glaciers. Even Hitler praised Hörbiger, and planned to construct a Hörbigerian observatory in Linz after the war. In 1936, Himmler mediated the Pyrmont Protocol, making Hörbigerian science the official position of the Party.
1 Stucken and Schultz died mysteriously in 1936; Schnabel had a breakdown in 1937 after contracting an inexplicable case of “malaria.”