Theos-Talk Archives (February 2002 Message tt00548)

Further to my first two parts on this subject, a first first 
reference to flying soucers in the SD, went along with the mention 
of an inventor in Philadelphia that was claimed to have develloped 
levitating vril-engines to build "air-ships." 

Blavatsky wrote: "If the question is asked why Mr. Keely was not 
allowed to pass a certain limit, the answer is easy; it was because 
what he had discovered was the terrible sidereal Force known to, and 
named by, the Atlanteans MASH-MAK and by the Aryan Rishis in their 
Astra Vidya by a name that we do not care to give. It is the VRIL of 
Bulwer Lytton's COMING RACE and of the coming races of mankind. 
The name VRIL may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact, since it 
is mentioned in all the secret books.'- `It is this vibratory Force 
which, when aimed at an army from an Agniratha (Firechariot) fixed on 
a flying vessel, according to the instructions found in the Astra 
Vidya, would reduce to ashes a hundred thousand men and elements as 
easily as it would a dead rat."` (SD.Vol. II, see also my two former 
postings the previous days on this subject)

In a later account, a group of esotericists concerned with Atlantis 
and free energy becomes a powerftd UFO research agency. Between 1917 
and 1919, Sebottendorff built up the Germanenorden and the Thule 
Society as true to secret Aryan doctrine. When the Thule was involved 
in the Bavarian revolution of May 1919, a separate section for 
spiritual and esoteric studies was founded as the Vril Society. In 
December 1919 an inner group of the Thule and Vril held a joint 
meeting at Ramsau near Berchtesgaden, where the medium Maria Orsic 
presented transcripts in an old Templar script of communications she 
had received telepathically. These proved to be written in Sumerian, 
the language of the founders of the oldest Babylonian culture. These 
channeled communications allegedly came from the planet Sumi-Er in 
the solar system of Aldebaran, the brightest star in the 
constellation of Taurus, sixty-eight light years away from earth. 
JftrgenRatthofer and Ettl claim that the DHvSS and its modern 
successor, the Vril Society, received mediumistic confirmation that 
the Sumerians were a colony of superior beings sent from Aldebaran to 
earth 500 million years ago. 

In June 1934 Lothar Waiz flew the first RFZ I (Rundflugzeug) at 
Brandenburg. The stimulus of military innovation quickly led to 
highly advanced craft. Thereafter, the Thule Society took a hand by 
establishing the SS Development Department E-IV for advanced saucer 
technology. These larger and much more powerful craft took the series 
name "Haunebu."

The massive Haunebu supposed to have had a diameter of 71 meters and 
could reach a speed of 40,000 kilometers/hour with a range of eight 
weeks, carrying a crew of thirty-two men. The Schumann group 
produced, two smaller saucers, Vril- I and 2, as fighters.
In late 1944, the SS E-IV also designed the Andromeda vessel, 139 
meters in length and 30 meters high. Powered by four "Thule-
Tachyonators" and four "Schumann-Levitators," this long-distance 
spaceship could transport a Haunebu II and two Vril I saucers in its 
internal hangars. This huge cigar-shaped mother ship and its 
accompanying saucers were supposed to be responsible for George 
Adamski's famous sighting in California in 1952.

Ideas of a secret theocracy in the East as in Theosophy were 
supplemented by the spiritual power of vril also mentioned in the 
SD. In his novel The Coming Race (1871), Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton 
had attributed this power to a subterranean race of men, the Vril-ya, 
psychically far in advance of the human species. The powers of vril 
(most likely derived from the Latin virile) included telepathy and 
telekinesis. This purely fictional notion was quoted by Madame 
Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled (1877) as but one name of the mysterious, 
all-pervading force known to man since the ancient theurgists. The 
vril was understood to be an enormous reservoir of psychic energy not 
only in the world at large but also in the human organism, only 
accessible to initiates. It was believed by some occultists that 
whoever became master of the vril force could, like Bulwer-Lytton's 
underground race of Vril-ya, enjoy total mastery over all nature. 
Willy Ley, who emigrated to the United States in 1935 after a short 
career as a rocket engineer in Germany, wrote a short account of the 
pseudo-scientific ideas that had found some official acceptance 
during the Third Reich. Besides Hoerbiger's World Ice Theory and a 
Hollow Earth Doctrine, both of which found leading Nazi patrons, Ley 
recalled a Berlin sect that had engaged in meditation exercises 
focusing on a bisected apple, in order to penetrate the secret of 
vril.

Pauwels and Bergier cited this article in their Le matin de magiciens 
and exaggerated the significance of this obscure Berlin sect in order 
to claim that the Nazi leadership was determined to establish contact 
with an omnipotent subterranean theocracy and gain knowledge of its 
power. It was supposed that this power would enable Germany to 
conquer the whole world and transform human life in accordance with 
an apocalyptic vision:

Alliances could be formed with the Master of the World or the king of 
Fear who reigns over a city hidden somewhere in the East. Those who 
conclude a pact will change the surface of the Earth and endow the 
human adventure with a new meaning for many thousands of years.... 
The world will change: the Lords will emerge from the center of the 
Earth. Unless we have made an alliance with them and become Lords 
ourselves, we shall find ourselves among the slaves, on the dungbeap 
that will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise."

Pauwels and Bergier claimed that Hitler and his entourage believed in 
such ideas. In their account, the Berlin sect was known as the Vril 
Society or the Luminous Lodge, and it was credited with the status of 
an important Nazi organization. A French psychiatrist was quoted to 
the effect that "Hitler's real aim was to perform an act of creation, 
a divine operation ... a biological mutation which would result in an 
unprecedented exaltation of the human race and the'apparition of a 
new race of heroes and demi-gods and god-men." In this way, racism 
was linked with the vril force and the occult mythology of an Eastern 
theocracy to evoke a millenarian image of the Nazi future.

Bulwer-Lytton obtained the idea of aerial craft by reading Comte de 
Gabalis, for in Montfaucon Villars' most curious novel we find not 
only numerous references to "the subterranean people" and "the 
people from the air," but also the tale of the "aerial wanderers" who 
were said to have "fallen from aerial ships."(Montfaucon, "Comte de 
Gabalis", my source was a 1742 edition, where the story appears on 
pages 167-169 of Vol.I) 

In the TS Circular of May 3.1878, the objects of the Society are 
listed as follows: "The objects of the Society are various. 
It influences its fellows to acquire an intimate knowledge of 
natural law, especially its occult manifestations-He(members) 
should, therefore, study to develop his latent powers, and inform 
himself respecting the laws of magnetism, electricity and all forms 
of force, wether of the seen or unseen universes." So the vril-topic 
clearly is to be considerred part of what Theosophy termed
"science," and "the laws of magnetism, electricity and
all forms of
force."

And as I have shown at the beginning of this posting the idea of 
UFO's, areal devices, shows up next in the Secret Doctrine.
Desmond Leslie in his chapters on "Flying Saucers Have Landed", 
makes much of saucers in Atlantis, ancient India, and medieval 
Europe, often using Theosophical texsts like the Secret Doctrine as 
resources.

Other story's in the Secret Doctrine ,about earlier planetary 
conditions also inspired the later UFO myths. As Blavatsky's SD could 
not be kept to conform with physical reality as it originally claimed 
to be, contents where transformed to meet more modern circumstances. 
flying saucers in a way replaced astral travel as means of getting 
around. In many contactee accounts during the fifties, no flying 
saucer is included at all. Venusians walk the streets of urban 
America ready to talk to anyone aware enough to recognise them.

But of course messages from aliens both proceded the rise of the 
Master mythology and the later wave of UFO's, one of the many 
inspirors of Blavatsky Emanuel Swedenborg, already claimed to have 
spoken with spirits from other planets.

In 1844, two French priests, Evariste Huc and Father Gabet, entered 
Tibet. They were the first to write a detailed account of the 
country, published in 1850. Translated into English as "Recollections 
of Travel in Tartary, Tibet and China", a Blavatsky's appropriation 
of part of their narrative, claiming it to be her own travels, they 
would come to influence modern esoteric traditions.

However since Tibet became more accesable, the believe in beings from 
outer space more effectivly withdraws these newer messengers and 
their sources from the scrutiny of outsiders.
The shift from the Masters to the extraterrestrial intelligences was 
largely the effect of the influence of George Adamski. He first 
founded an organization called the Royal Order of Tibet, to 
disseminate the messages of the Masters. In the 1940's he wrote
a short story revolving around spiritual contacts with mysterious, 
highly evolved beings. A decade later, the same claims would once 
again be presented, but this time as biographical facts of
Adamski's 
own life. Other texts from the period of this involvement 
with the Royal Order of Tibet were reworked and the Oriental Mahatmas 
were replaced with aliens. And started the boom for UFO related 
religiosity.

I bring the above in the context of a history of ideas,reg. how 
Theosophical ideas developed in the course of time.



Bri.