Nazi Secrets: An Occult Breach in the Fabric of History (13 page)

Signet of the Black Sun

The Black Sun seems to be an invisible counterpart of our visible sun, which is able to bestow its influence onto planets, things and living beings. It hides from mortals, though keeping tuned with their very biological rhythms, but can be seen by souls in the Netherworld. Its alchemical and psycho-analytical meaning is that of a spiritual force, able to lead a deep internal transformation prior to a total rebirth or reincarnation.

Nazis were after the spiritual secrets of the Nordic race, and they could have envisaged the Black Sun, at least in a very confidential inner circle of the SS, as a universal pervasive force of creative energy that shines "from within." Some went so far as to state that this force would "allow souls to experience many levels of reality simultaneously."

This definition of the Black Sun resembles strongly that of the Vril force, for which documentation is scarce if not mostly unreliable. Likewise, it is said that our planet is hollow and illuminated by a central Black Sun, dispensing a greenish light.

The Vril

The Vril, as well as the secret society bearing its name, is now a traditional stopover in the meanders of so-called Nazi esotericism. Compared to the Black Sun, the Vril’s very existence is really controversial, and sometimes we shall have to depart from historically verifiable facts in order to enter a twilight zone between myth and reality. But how unreal are the myths?

In the Beginning Was a Sci-Fi Novel
– Many sects actually begin with the sayings or visions of a single man, whereas others are based on a holy book or even a novel. This is the case of Scientology, but it could be applied to some extent to other very successful religions. The Vril was first mentioned in a book entitled The Coming Race, written by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1871. Though the term “science fiction” did not exist at that time, it would well fit to this book as well as to Jules Verne's. He also wrote Zanoni, an occult fiction, and the famous Last Days of Pompeii.

The plot centers on a traveller who lost his way in an old mine in Great Britain, only to find himself the guest of an antediluvian subterranean race called the Vril-ya. Neither gods nor angels, they look, however, far superior to humans by their height, their intelligence, their cold wisdom and their supernatural powers like telepathy. They harness an "all-permeating" fluid called Vril. Through training their will, they can master this universal, invisible, creative energy that can heal, transform or destroy, besides acting as a fuel for transportation devices and lighting of the underground. The latter was of a light green luminescence.

The hero and narrator is taught the most accessible history of the Vril-ya by Zee, his host's daughter. He learns that when the underground caves are not sufficient for their breeding, the Vril-ya will have to conquer the surface world, destroying mankind if necessary. Vril is indeed so powerful that a Vril-ya child could reduce a city of tens of millions of inhabitants to ashes in a matter of seconds.

The narrator studies the Vril-ya language and draws the conclusion that they are "descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world."

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Somehow the Vril-ya have much in common with Lovecraft's Unknown Superiors: telepathy, mastery of unknown forces and an antediluvian ancestry.

Black Sun & Alchemy
– One ought to be cautious with all that refers to esotericism, since one fake myth reinforces the other, especially on the Internet. Nonetheless, the idea exists that Bulwer-Lytton only based his novel on more ancient myths and archetypes, which were popular among Middle Ages alchemists. The life force underlying the Vril was indeed already known since antiquity as Prana, Chi, Ojas, Astral Light, Odic Force and Orgone. Some advocates of the Hollow Earth Theory have even said, more recently, that Vril came from the Black Sun hidden force that would be an irradiating Prima Materia ("primordial matter" in Latin), at the center of our planet.

Green is the Symbol of the Vril
– The green light that illuminates the Vril-ya’s underworld reminds of many other occurrences of that color: Goethe's tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; the Holy Grail that could be an emerald fallen from Lucifer's forehead; the Greenland, named in the 10th century by Erik the Red, in remembrance of the Primordial Earth, though 60 percent of the island was by then already covered by white ice; Osiris was seen by certain Egyptologists as a green irradiating god; the Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl Great Priest drew their might from an enormous magical emerald and the god himself was green; the famous Emerald Tablet (tabula smaragdina) of the hermetic tradition of the alchemists; eventually, some green lunar stones would possess a "levitation" power enabling witches to fly in old Scottish lore or, hidden under cathedrals, would have prevented bombs from falling onto them during WWII in Germany.

Quetzalcoatl

Let us have a special mention for the Order of the Green Dragon and the Monk with the Green Gloves.

The Order of the Green Dragon was a Japanese secret (political/mystical) society dedicated to mastering the human body, which in turn permitted access to a "great power." Higher initiates were required to be able to germinate a seed by telekinesis.

While a military attaché in Tokyo before WWI, Karl Haushofer would have been one of just three Westerner members of the Order. Haushofer was one of the founders of geopolitics (the theory of Lebensraum or vital space) and allegedly also a member of the Vril Society. He never was a member of the Nazi Party, and was even married to a Jewish woman despite many contrary assertions in neo-Nazi esoteric literature.

The Vril Society profess to have sent expeditions to Tibet before WWII, and as late as 1942, to meet the Bon Pö monks of Agarthi. In the ‘20s, Tibetan monks formed the Society of Green Men in Berlin and Munich. Their High Priest was a man called the Monk with the Green Gloves. Hitler would have visited him for his clairvoyant gifts.

The Society of Green Men, helped by the Order of the Green Dragon, allegedly helped the Nazis to try to turn Aryans into God-Men. Pauwels and Bergier, in their Morning of the Magicians, a very unreliable source but the only one on this subject, report that during the fall of Berlin, the Russians found many dead bodies of Asians in German uniforms who apparently committed suicide in a ritual way.

According to the same source, Haushofer would have committed the same kind of suicide, except that this is historically untrue. Historian H. A. Jacobsen proved that all what was written in The Morning of the Magicians about him, the Thule Society, and the Vril Society is simply fiction.

The Vril Society
– Louis Jacolliot (1837–1890) was a French consul in Calcutta, India, when he wrote Les fils de Dieu (1873) and Les Traditions indo-européennes (1876). Both books stressed the existence of the Vril that appeared a bit earlier in Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race (1871). Jacolliot is supposed to have met the Vril among the Jains in Mysore, and Gujarat in the country where he lived as a diplomat and judge.

Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, was also impressed by Bulwer-Lytton's book. She found a confirmation of the racial aspects of her theories in respect to the origin of mankind, of which she wrote in her books Isis Unveiled (1877), and again in The Secret Doctrine (1888). The physical and spiritual superiority of the white race was later on mixed with anti-Semitism, and the first studies of the Indo-European peoples by the German nationalists gave thus birth to ariosophy (Aryan + theosophy). It was mostly the works of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels.

Both Louis Jacolliot and Madame Blavatsky supported Bulwer-Lytton's Vril myth so well, and many contemporaries actually believed in the existence of this green force.

According to Joscelyn Godwin (Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival), the only primary source of information on the Vril Society is Willy Ley.

Willy Ley was a German rocket engineer who fled Nazi Germany in 1933. In 1947, he published an article called "Pseudoscience in Naziland" in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He explained that the Nazis did obtain many technical successes because they systematically tried every option possible in all scientific fields and beyond. This included the pseudo-sciences of the Hollow Earth, the Welteislehre (The World Ice Theory) and even magic at the fringe. Among these weird theories there really existed, according to Ley, a group interested in Vril:

"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 Corning 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." The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire. Surely the Romans had had it, enclosed in small metal balls, which guarded their homes and were referred to as Lares. For reasons which I failed to penetrate, the secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves.

(Left to right) Heinz Haber, Wernher von Braun,

and Willy Ley

No, I am not joking, that is what I was told with great solemnity and secrecy. Such a group actually existed, they even got out the first issue of a magazine which was to proclaim their credo (I wish I had kept some of these things, but I had enough books to smuggle out as it was)."

Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, 2002) tells a different and more probable account based on the findings of Dr. Peter Bahn in his 1996 essay, Das Geheimnis der Vril-Energie (The Secret of the Vril energy): "The reality of the Vril Society was a good deal less impressive. Its formal name was Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Das Kommende Deutschland’ (Reich Working Group ‘The Coming Germany’); one of hundreds of little occult societies in Weimer Germany, it was sponsored by the astrological publisher Wilhelm Becker. The group put out a magazine, which apparently folded after one issue.