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wouterjhanegraaff.blogspot.nl
2 May 2013
©W.J.Hanegraaff

Superpower

Julian Strube, who is presently working on his Ph.D. at Heidelberg University,1
recently published a revised version of his M.A. thesis under the title Vril: Eine
okkulte Urkraft in Theosophie und esoterischem Neonazismus (Vril: An Occult Ur-
Power in Theosophy and Esoteric Neonazism). 2 It is an extremely well-
documented and well-written piece of reception history that holds valuable
lessons not just for readers who might be tempted to believe in the popular
mythology of “Nazi occultism” but, in fact, for anybody interested in the relation
between myth and history. The amazing story of Vril begins with The Coming
Race, a novel published in 1871 by the Victorian author Edward Bulwer-Lytton
(1803-1873). This pioneering piece of science fiction writing describes a
subterranean world inhabited by a superhuman race, the Vril-ya, whose superior
technology is based upon a mysterious natural force of unlimited potency. This
primal super-power known as Vril became a topic of fascination for many
readers who suspected, or believed, that Bulwer-Lytton – the author of Zanoni
(1842), the most famous occult novel of the nineteenth century – was in fact a
Rosicrucian “initiate” revealing true mysteries of the occult under the guise of
fiction. The mnemohistorical fiction of Bulwer-Lytton as a kind of occultist avant-
la-lettre seems to have originated in the milieu around John Yarker and the
Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, and its influence can be traced up even to recent
works of scholarship such as Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment
(1994).

Strube makes clear in precise detail that it has no historical foundation. He
continues by describing how the Vril mythology travelled through time and got

1 In the meantime the dissertation has appeared in print: Julian Strube,
Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts : Die
Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi, De Gruyter: Berlin / Boston 2016.
2 Julian Strube, Vril: Eine okkulte Urkraft in Theosophie und Esoterischem
Neonazismus, Wilhelm Fink: Munich 2013.
embellished with ever new and ever more fantastic elements, by Theosophists
such as H.P. Blavatsky and William Scott-Elliot to the founder of Anthroposophy
Rudolf Steiner and, most importantly in view of later developments, two
pamphlets published in 1930 by an organization known as the
Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft “Das kommende Deutschland” (“The Future
Germany”).3 In the final years of the Weimar Republic, these enthusiasts imbued
with popular esoteric lore and somewhat influenced by völkisch-nationalist and
ariosophical ideas believed they were on the verge of great things: “The Vril
power has been re-discovered, the emerald tablets of the great Hermes
Trismegistus radiate in the green-blue light of the approaching dawn of
uranidian nature-control.”4

And then, after World War II, the Vril-mythology was disseminated among a
mass audience due to Louis Pauwels’ and Jacques Bergier’s bestseller Le matin
des magiciens (“The Morning of the Magicians”, 1960), which introduced the idea
of a secret “Vril Society,” largely inspired by an article of the German rocket
scientist Willy Ley 5 : “Pseudo-Science in Naziland,” published in Astounding
Science Fiction in 1947, and apparently inspired in turn by those 1930 pamphlets
of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft “Das kommende Deutschland”. Building further
on a whole series of French and English authors who, already during the 1930s
and 1940s, had published sensationalist books about Hitler as an “adept” and
Master of a magical Order, or a medium possessed by demonic forces, Le matin
des magiciens laid the foundations for countless conspiracy theories about “Nazi
occultism” that have flourished in popular literature and on the Internet ever
since. In this remarkably popular genre, the fictional “Vril Society” came to be
associated with Rudolf von Sebottendorff’s “Thule Society,” which was now
interpreted as a sinister occultist organization that used Hitler as a medium and
was searching for the supreme Superpower of Vril believed to be hidden
somewhere in the Orient. Eventually, one finds this Nazism-occultism mythology
even in mainstream movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series, the
Hellboy series, or computer animation games such as Wolfenstein.

3 Strube, Vril, 98ff.
4 Ibid., 103.
5 Ibid., 131ff.

In the final parts of his book, Strube does a very good job documenting and
analyzing the dissemination and further transformation of these ideas in the
context of contemporary far right and neonazi subcultures. One thing the book
did for me was making it somewhat more understandable why German
academics and intellectuals tend to associate Esoterik so strongly with fascism
and antisemitism: the reasons for this connection are complex – among other
things, it has much to do with the influence of the Frankfurt School – but Strube’s
discussions made me realize that the Esotericism-Nazism link in the wake of
Pauwels/Bergier may also have a higher profile in Germany than in most other
European countries simply because there is so much popular stuff around that
highlights that connection. If so, the irony is that if German intellectuals reject
Esoterik as tainted with dangerous political connotations, they may in fact be
doing so because they are buying too uncritically into the claims of occultist
mythology.

My only regret about Strube’s work is that it remains entirely on the level of
descriptive historiography: he traces the reception history of Vril mythology
from Bulwer-Lytton to the present, but makes no attempt to reflect a bit more
about the theoretical implications of this strange story, or the lessons that may
be drawn from it. The Vril story does, however, provide us with much food for
thought. Personally, for instance, I would see it as a perfect object lesson about
the socio-political implications of Jan Assmann’s opposition of history versus
mnemohistory. As I have pointed out in another context,6 it is a worrying fact
that attractive stories about what is supposed to have happened although it
never did (i.e. artificially constructed collective memories about the past) may
often have a much greater impact on people’s thinking and behaviour than the

6 My earlier observations on this point are now superseded by a more recent
discussion: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Religion and the Historical Imagination: Esoteric
Tradition as Poetic Invention,” in: Christoph Bochinger & Jörg Rüpke, in cooperation
with Elisabeth Begemann (eds.), Dynamics of Religion: Past and Present
(Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten Bd. 67), De
Gruyter : Berlin 2017, 131-153.
carefully documented and much more reliable descriptions that can be offered
by professional historians.

All the more reason for historians to keep trying. By wielding the sharp weapon
of critical historiography, with an excellent command of the primary sources,
Strube succeeds in deconstructing a whole series of popular mnemohistorical
fictions: for anybody who has read his analysis carefully, it will henceforth be
hard if not impossible to keep entertaining the possibility that Bulwer-Lytton
was an “initiate,” Vril might be a really existing occult superpower, the Nazis
were closet occultists, Hitler was an “adept,” and so on. Moreover, I would argue,
the very fact that such demystification is possible and convincing should serve to
deconstruct yet another myth: the popular poststructural argument, or cliché,
that history writing is no more than narrative making, and historians are
incapable of establishing “what really happened.” Of course they can. Granted the
obvious fact that no historian can reproduce exactly wie es eigentlich gewesen,
anybody with even a minimal respect for empirical evidence and rational
argument will have to admit that Strube’s account of how the Vril and Nazi-
occultism mythology emerged and developed is superior in every respect to the
pseudo-historical claims of its supporters. If we give in to the lazy conclusion
(more common in popularized versions, I hasten to add, than in the work of the
theoretical founding fathers, who are usually more subtle) that the accounts of
professional historians are never more than “just an opinion,” because their
claims of “knowledge” are in fact just claims of power, we will eventually find
ourselves without protection against the powerful seductions of mythmaking in
the interest of political goals. In other words: without realizing it, we will have
joined the ranks of the believers in Vril.