You ready for a twisted tale?
In 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published a novel called The Coming Race. The plot is pretty wild, considering that science fiction/fantasy only really took off as a genre in the early twentieth century. The story revolves around a young wealthy man who goes exploring with a friend, and they come upon what appears to be an abandoned mine shaft. They descend into the opening using a rope, but the rope snaps and the two men fall. The friend is killed; the narrator is stunned but largely uninjured, and finds himself in a complex of underground caves.
After blundering about for a while, he discovers -- or, more accurately, is discovered by -- a angelic humanoid who turns out to be (1) superintelligent, and (2) telepathic. In short order they establish communication with each other. The narrator learns that the people who live down in the caves belong to a race called the Vril-ya, that there are twelve thousand of them, and that they have harnessed an "all-permeating etheric fluid" called Vril that gives them their extraordinary powers. The end of the story is rather predictable (although it certainly was innovative for its time). The narrator falls in love with the Guide's daughter, Zee. While the Guide was okay with the narrator living down there, he couldn't condone any kind of Vril-ya/human hanky-panky, so he orders his son Taë to kill the narrator. Taë conspires to free the narrator, and Zee leads him to a tunnel that goes back to the surface. But Zee warns him before he escapes to safety that it's only a matter of time before the Vril-ya run out of space and resources, and at that point they'll come above ground themselves -- with the purpose of conquering the surface of the planet.
The novel did quite well, and was even adapted into a successful stage play.
The whole thing reminds me of three other subterranean races -- H. G. Wells's Morlocks (from The Time Machine), the people of K'n-yan in the terrifying story by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop called "The Mound," and of course the Silurians from Doctor Who. ("The Mound" is similar enough to Bulwer-Lytton's story that I have to wonder if the latter was the former's inspiration; but in the Lovecraft/Bishop story the narrator's lover meets with a gruesome fate because of her betrayal, because Lovecraft didn't even do equivocal endings, much less happy ones.)
Okay, so we have a strange and atmospheric novel by a nineteenth-century British author, which so far is only mildly interesting. But of course the story doesn't end there.
Shortly after The Coming Race's publication, Bulwer-Lytton was shocked to find out that a significant number of people who read it apparently didn't know it was a work of fiction. The first bunch were the members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, one of the sub-branches of the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians were an esoteric sect that, like many others, fell victim to squabbling and infighting that led to schisms, to the extent that at one point the number of Rosicrucian sects exceeded the number of actual Rosicrucians. But this particular splinter group was going strong in the 1870s, and appointed Bulwer-Lytton as its "Grand Patron." Bulwer-Lytton was horrified, and said, more or less, "But... look! I made it all up! See? It says 'fiction' right here on the spine of the book!" This, predictably, had zero effect on the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, who if they had a firm grasp on reality probably wouldn't have been Rosicrucians in the first place.
Then the whole concept of Vril got picked up and popularized by the infamous Madame Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy. Blavatsky just loved the idea of Vril, and said that it was a real magical force that allowed for superior people to do supernatural stuff. The underground people from Bulwer-Lytton's novel were real, too, she said; they were spiritual guides who you could get in touch with if you purchased and read all of her books and then tried hard enough. Shortly afterward, the Scottish loony William Scott-Elliot got on board with the claim that the people of Atlantis had known all about Vril, and used it to power their aircraft. Oh, and the Atlanteans were the ancestors of the Vril-ya, who were driven underground when Atlantis was destroyed.
Then like some weird contagion, the idea was picked up by the Thule Society, a proto-Nazi group of German occultists that flourished in Münich between World War I and World War II. (Members included Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.) While the Thule Society -- at least what was left of them -- was disbanded after the end of World War II, the Vril concept, and its connection to a superior, super-powerful race, persists to this day in neo-Nazi circles, where it's been wound together with ideas gleaned from Norse mythology to create a poisonous, if bizarre, amalgam.
So Edward Bulwer-Lytton created a concept that, on one hand, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and on the other generated a juggernaut that pretty much obliterated his original novel. What's wryly amusing is that this isn't the only time he wrote something that people took literally; his story The Haunted and the Haunters bears an uncanny resemblance to the legend of 50 Berkeley Square, the "most haunted house in London," which still figures prominently on "ghost walks" and antiquarian tours of the city.
Even though as a novelist, I'm a little envious of his success -- I'd be thrilled if one of my books was still being talked about a century and a half later -- I'm forced to the conclusion that Bulwer-Lytton really should have been more careful about what he wrote into his stories.
Anyhow, what we have is a fictional concept about a fictional substance utilized by a fictional race, as described in a work of fiction (not to belabor the point unduly), which nonetheless inspired numerous people over the following 150 years to believe that it was one hundred percent true. For me, it just reinforces my sense that I have no idea what makes most people tick. It should have just taken someone saying, "Hey, lookit, the whole thing comes from a novel, here's a copy, check it out," for the Vril-believers to say, "Ha! Wouldja look at that? What a goober I am," and then to run off and believe something completely different and hopefully more plausible.
But even after pretty much everyone knew that Bulwer-Lytton had made the whole thing up, there were -- and still are -- people who think it's all real.
So there you have it. Underground angels, telepathy, and Vril. Me, I'm dubious, but if at some point the Vril-ya start coming up out of mine shafts and want to take over the world, I guess I'll have to admit I was wrong. On the other hand, if they do, I'm all for giving them carte blanche. The Vril-ya couldn't do much worse than the set of incompetent, amoral wingnuts we currently have in charge.
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