The Vril contagion

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.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

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.

****************************************

Wandering through Lemuria

Today's post is brought to you by the Department of One Thing Leads to Another.

Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) was a distinguished British biologist with a long and illustrious career.  He was an expert ornithologist, but his knowledge extended to just about every group of living things.  He is considered to have founded the science of biogeography -- linking evolution to the geographical regions where assemblages of species live -- and because of his contributions, he has no fewer than eleven species named after him.

It was while he was studying the biogeography of Africa and India that he noticed something odd.  Madagascar is the home to a group called lemurs -- relatively small-bodied, large-eyed primates that are thought to have branched off from other primate groups on the order of fifty million years ago.  Inquiries by Sclater and others into paleontology found fossils of lemurs and lemur-like primates not only in Madagascar and east Africa, but in India; more curious, though, is that there were no similar fossils anywhere to be found in North Africa or the Middle East.

So how did they get from southern Africa to India, and leave no fossils behind along the way?

Continental Africa to Madagascar is possible; it requires crossing the Mozambique Channel, but that's at least plausible.  But the Indian Ocean?  Seems like a long way for a lemur (or, more accurately, at least two lemurs) to swim, so how could this be explained?

Sclater proposed that the landmasses of India and East Africa were once connected.  Given that this was 1864, and prior to any knowledge of continental drift and plate tectonics, the continents were believed to stay firmly where they were; so the only possibility Sclater could come up with was that there had once been dry land where the western Indian Ocean now is.  A "lost continent," as it were, drowned beneath the sea.

Because he'd come up with the idea based on the distribution of lemur fossils, Sclater called the continent "Lemuria."

Lots of other biologists thought this explanation was pretty nifty, and even the prominent German researcher Ernst Haeckel gave it his imprimatur, adding that maybe this could be a possible location for the origin of the human species.

The problem was, when the first attempts were made at sounding in the western Indian Ocean, it seemed way too deep for Sclater's explanation to be plausible.  It was known that the vagaries of ice ages and other climatic shifts made the sea levels rise and fall, but even Sclater's most ardent supporters began to wonder how Lemuria could have sunk by thousands of meters, leaving no traces whatsoever.  Then, when Alfred Wegener and others began to take the idea of continental drift seriously, it explained the distribution of lemur fossils (and other similar examples that had been discovered in the interim) without positing a lost continent.  India itself had moved, carrying its flora, fauna, and fossil assemblage with it, accounting for the odd biogeography of the lemurs (and the origin of the Himalayas thrown in as an added benefit).

Lemuria had been a good guess, as these things go, but seemed to be another example of Thomas Henry Huxley's quip that the tragedy of science is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  So you'd think that'd be that.

You'd be wrong.  Because enter, stage left, one Helena Petrovna von Hahn Blavatsky.

Helena Blavatsky in 1877 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Blavatsky was a very, very odd character.  She was widely traveled, making her way through Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, India, and Tibet, and mostly seemed to use her wanderings to pick up pieces of esoteric lore.  And what she didn't find, she was quite content to make up herself.  She claimed that one of her books, The Secret Doctrine, was based on a mysterious and holy text from Tibet called The Book of Dzyan, which appears to have been a complete fabrication of her own.  This sort of thing notwithstanding, she gained a cult following, eventually founding a movement called Theosophy, which -- with no apparent sense of irony -- has this as its symbol:

Well, Blavatsky loved the idea of Lemuria.  It gave her a place where her Ascended Masters had lived, whose spirits she claimed to still be able to converse with.  Lemuria became, so to speak, the Atlantis of the East; a place that had been the home of a Golden Age of Humanity, eventually destroyed by the wickedness of a few, but from which there were still relic documents scattered around the world that the wise could learn from (and of course which Blavatsky would be happy to tell you all about).

Except for two inconvenient facts: (1) Lemuria never existed, and (2) the documents Blavatsky "translated" were almost all forgeries.

This didn't stop her from claiming that science supported her claims, citing Sclater's scholarly papers as evidence and conveniently not mentioning any of the later ones that had shot down Sclater's hypothesis.

The whole thing gained additional momentum when early twentieth century horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft got on board, mentioning Lemuria as one of the places the Elder Gods had lived.  Lovecraft even mentions The Book of Dzyan in his story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer:"

I learned of The Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the Earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilize our planet.

This, of course, added further fuel to the fire, because although most people knew Lovecraft's stories were fiction, maybe -- just maybe -- the various books he mentioned weren't.  Which explains why you can buy Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon on Amazon, even though Lovecraft himself made up both the "mad Arab" and his "monstrous and abhorred book," something he said outright in a letter to fellow writer Robert Bloch:

By the way—there is no "Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."  That hellish & forbidden volume is an imaginative conception of mine, which others of the W.T. group have also used as a background of allusion.

But of course... he would say that, wouldn't he?  *slow single-eyebrow raise*

If things haven't gotten eye-rollingly convoluted enough, we have one last person to introduce, which is Tamil scholar and fervent nationalist Devaneya Pavanar.  In the early twentieth century, Pavanar was trying to do two things, one of which was considerably more laudable than the other: (1) develop a comprehensive linguistics of the Tamil language, and (2) establish the Tamils as the culture from which all language, literature, religion, music, art, and science worldwide ultimately sprang.  The current Tamils live mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka, but despite his best efforts, Pavanar found that there was little hard evidence in those regions available to support that latter idea.  So instead of going, "Okay, I guess I musta been wrong, then," he latched onto Sclater's hypothesis, via Blavatsky, and decided that Lemuria was indeed the home of a lost Golden Age of Humanity, but it had been run entirely by the ancestors of today's Tamil people, so that had to be where all the evidence had gone; it was sunk under the waves of the western Indian Ocean.

He said the Tamil name for Lemuria was Kumari Kandam, and claimed that science supported his contention -- like Blavatsky, leaving out the unfortunate footnote that all the science in the intervening years had disproven the whole damn thing.  The brilliant Tamil poet Seshagiri Sastri said that Kumari Kandam was "a mere fiction originated by the prolific imagination of Tamil poets," but that appears to have convinced no one who wasn't already convinced.

And because it fell right in line with Pavanar's extremely popular ethnocentric claims, the idea of Kumari Kandam made its way into science textbooks in Tamil Nadu and parts of Sri Lanka, and in some places is still taught as scientifically-accepted fact, despite the fact that there is exactly zero evidence -- not a single artifact brought up from the western Indian Ocean seafloor, no submerged buildings, no geological evidence of a drowned continent, nothing -- supporting any of it.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So there you are.  What started out as a reasonable (if, ultimately, incorrect) guess by a reputable scientist still lives on today because a flock of woo-woos led by a loony Russian mystic and a Tamil-first extremist grabbed it and ran right off the cliff with it.  Which I guess is yet another indication that you don't need any evidence at all to fall for a claim that supports what you already believed to be true.

Me, I prefer actual science, but some days I appear to be in the minority.

****************************************