Our Gods Wear Spandex (8 page)

H. G. Wells presented a more sympathetic version of the Vril-ya in his Utopian novel
The Shape of Things To Come
. Conversely, Aldous Huxley held up the Vril-ya as a warning against excessive government control in his novel
Brave New World
. In fact, with
Vril
, Bulwer began an evolution in fiction writing that led ultimately to present-day tales of super-races like
The X-Men
and
The 4400
.

Vril
had a huge impact on the nascent occultism of the late 19th century. Theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky quoted extensively from it and presented a more palatable form of the Vril-ya in her “Ascended Masters.” Blavatsky was so impressed by
Vril
that she argued that Bulwer must have gotten his ideas from an initiate of an Eastern tradition.
²⁴
Aleister Crowley was also a noted fan of Bulwer and recommended Bulwer's fiction to his acolytes.
²⁵
Masonic Grand Poobah Albert Pike may also have been influenced by Bulwer when he wrote, a year after
Vril
, in his landmark text
Morals and Dogma
of a potent force “by means whereof a single man, who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could revolutionize and change the face of the world.” He described the force as “a ray detached from the glory of the Sun.”
²⁶

On the other hand, Bulwer's novel is seen by many as a criticism of the corrosive effects of a scientific society and socialist Utopianism. The novel's narrator certainly doesn't seem overly fond of the Vril-ya, and Bulwer's opposition to Marxism and Darwinism, and to what he saw as science run amok, is clear throughout the book. In their landmark 1960 work,
The Morning of the Magicians
, Louis Pauwells and Jacques Bergier warn that Bulwer's fiction contains “the conviction that there
are beings endowed with superhuman powers.” They note the potential danger of this belief, pointing to Bulwer's popularity in
fin de siècle
Germany. Some scholars trace the roots of the infamous Vril Society, which allegedly counted among its members Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Göering, back to a secret society originally called The All-German Society for Metaphysics that some say was grounded in Bulwer's work.
²⁷

Regardless of whether you accept this argument, it is difficult to overstate Bulwer's influence on his time. Using the conceit of science fiction, he pioneered the concept of a super-race whose powers far exceed those of ordinary men. In the turmoil of the Victorian Age, when scientific and technological breakthroughs held out the promise of improving or even perfecting the human machine, this was heady stuff. Moreover, it's no accident that this concept came from a practicing occultist. The promise of a new race had a powerful impact—positive and negative—in the century to come. But first a strange band of eccentrics, led by a corpulent, pipe-smoking Russian emigré would expand Bulwer's fanciful ideas into a worldwide movement.

Perhaps the most important alternative religious movement in the 19th century was the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. A peculiar woman with a puzzling biography, Blavatsky revolutionized the counterculture of her time and founded a movement that became truly international in scope. She was one of the first to bring Eastern mysticism to the West. Among her core teachings are the fundamental unity of all existence, the regularity of universal law, and the progress of consciousness toward an ever-increasing realization of unity.

Blavatsky was a stout and homely woman with a restless intellect. She was also charismatic, domineering, and strong-willed. Born Helena von Hahn in 1831, she married a bureaucrat named Nikifor Blavatsky at 18, but soon left him. After a curious odyssey that allegedly took her to Turkey, Greece, Egypt, France, New Orleans, Mexico, South America, the West Indies, England, and Canada in search of spiritual enlightenment, she arrived in Tibet in 1868, where she encountered a band of immortal spiritual masters—the Secret Chiefs, among whom she counted Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha—who tutored her in the spiritual arts and sciences. Her restless nature eventually led her to America, where she met Henry Steele Olcott, who played a decisive role in her life.

Olcott, a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, first met Blavatsky while investigating the Eddy brothers, two Vermont yokels trying to cash in on the Spiritualism craze. Olcott was impressed by what he believed were Blavatsky's great psychic powers; Blavatsky was impressed by Olcott's bank account. Together, in 1875, the two founded the Theosophical Society in New York.

In 1877, Blavatsky published her two-volume
magnum opus, Isis Unveiled
. She and Olcott then pulled up stakes and moved to India, where they launched
The Theosophist
magazine in 1879. The Society began to establish branches throughout America and Europe, as well as in the European colonies. They recruited other lieutenants, including Annie Besant (a socialist, feminist, and Irish nationalist from London), and the scandalous C. W. Leadbetter (a former Anglican priest). In 1887, the Society launched its official magazine,
Lucifer
, in London. In 1888, Blavatsky published another seminal work,
The Secret Doctrine
. After her death, Besant and Leadbetter took control of the Theosophical Society, which continued to grow, counting among its members baseball's founder Abner Doubleday and legendary inventor Thomas Edison.
²⁸
After a series of scandals, the movement fell on hard times and its influence diminished rapidly as the century progressed.
²⁹

Ultimately, Theosophy would provide an umbrella under which a whole host of religious, spiritual, psychic, and paranormal trends could come together as a relatively coherent philosophy. It syncretized Eastern and Western teachings, setting the stage for many of the cult movements of the 20th century. The motto of the
Theosophical Society is: “There is no religion higher than Truth.” As with the later New Age movement, Theosophy taught that there was an eternal truth—the
Sanatana Dharma
—at the core of all religious teachings. Among these core teachings are reincarnation, karma, nonphysical planes of existence, pantheism (the presence of God in all matter), humanity's conscious participation in evolution, mind over matter, and apotheosis (the process of achieving ultimate perfection).

Blavatsky was a prolific writer in her lifetime, although critics have noted that her books are rife with plagiarism, most taken from Masonic, Kabbalistic, Gnostic, Eastern, and other esoteric sources. One critic who exhaustively cataloged Blavatsky's writings concluded that “There is not a single dogma or tenet in Theosophy…the source of which cannot be pointed out in the world's literature.”
³⁰
At the time of her writing, however, most readers were completely unfamiliar with her source material. Despite her plagiaristic bent, or perhaps because of it, she was, therefore, responsible for bringing an important body of occult traditions to the public.

Other critics have criticized Blavatsky for being overly influenced by Bulwer-Lytton.
³¹
Although it may be true that her fascination with Isis originated in her reading of
The Last Days of Pompeii
, biographer Peter Washington claims that “it would not be unjust to say that her new religion was virtually manufactured from his pages.”
³²
And in Blavatsky's second major work,
The Secret Doctrine
, Bulwer-Lytton's fictional supermen begin to morph into objects of religion.

The Secret Doctrine
explored the deeper mysteries of science, religion, and psychic power, claiming that the ancient civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis fell because of their inferior state of spiritual evolution. Theosophy, of course, would lead humanity to its next stage of enlightenment. Blavatsky posited a seven-step progression of human evolution that led to apotheosis. She divided the ages of man according to a series of “root races,” describing the present race as fifth in line, following the self-destruction of Atlantis. The sixth race would be superior in every way to our own, and would usher in a New Age of peace and enlightenment.

Theosophy's influence has been incalculable. It created ripples of esoteric thought that eventually blossomed in Victorian occult movements, the work of Freud and Jung, the reemergence of the Freemasons and other secret societies, and finally the Age of Aquarius and the New Age movement. It provided a spiritual venue for the increasingly emancipated women of the West. It had a particularly strong following among artists, writers, and intellectuals, including Gauguin, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee, and Pollock. Composers Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius were also disciples.
³³

Some of Blavatsky's disciples would form their own influential groups. Rudolph Steiner, a German Theosophist with a strong interest in Christian mysticism, founded the School of Spiritual Science, which soon branched into a number of so-called “Steiner Schools” in Europe and America. The Lucis Trust, founded by Alice Bailey, propounded a globalist philosophy of “World Goodwill.” Bailey's group is still affiliated with the United Nations and active in its causes.

Despite Blavatsky's eccentric nature, her impact has been undeniable. Theosophy and its offshoots ultimately created an expectation of greater human potential. And because Blavatsky's teachings of super-humans and Secret Chiefs were far more optimistic than Bulwer-Lytton's prophesied Vril-ya, the ideas expounded in
The Secret Doctrine
gives us a significant precedent for a religious movement based on fictional super-powered beings. In many ways, the conjunction of popular occultism and popular art brought to prominence by Theosophy and related movements has rearranged the very foundation of Western Culture. The first flowering on this conjunction would emerge with a group whose very name has become synonymous with the occult.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a legendary, but short-lived, occult group founded in 1886, at the height of the spiritual ferment of Victorian England, by a London coroner named William Wynn Westcott. Westcott allegedly obtained hidden writings called the
Cipher Manuscripts
that described rituals
and teachings drawn from Kabbalah, astrology, Tarot, geomancy, and alchemy. Westcott “decoded” the manuscripts and showed them to an eccentric Freemason named S.L. McGregor Mathers. Soon after, he and Mathers established the “Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” to disseminate the teachings of the manuscripts to occult adepts. Lodges dedicated to Osiris, Horus, Amen-Ra, and Hathor quickly sprung up in England, Scotland, and France. In 1892, Mathers claimed to have come into personal contact with Blavatsky's Secret Chiefs themselves.

It is difficult to ascertain exactly what the Golden Dawn was actually all about. Nonethless, it became very fashionable among the smart set of Victorian London. Freemasonry, ascendant at the time, didn't admit women and exuded a stodgy, establishment aura. But Spiritualism and Theosophy had set the table, and those hungry for a deeper occult experience flocked to the Golden Dawn to dine. Poet William Butler Yeats, actress Florence Farr, theater producer Annie Horniman, pioneering cinematographer Charles Rosher, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, famed occultists Israel Regardie and A. E. Waite, and authors Arthur Machen, Arnold Bennett, and Algernon Blackwood were all initiates. Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune soon joined them.
³⁴
Although most of these names are not familiar to us today, they were all important figures in their own time.

The Golden Dawn had a brief and troubled history. Despite its immediate appeal to spiritual aspirants—or perhaps because of it—dissension soon grew in the ranks. Mathers, a major player in the movement, was considered to be pompous and aloof. Initiates soon determined to bypass him and contact the Secret Chiefs on their own. The arrival on the scene of the controversial Aleister Crowley in 1898 further fractured the Order. The original group split, with Mathers establishing the Alpha and Omega Temple, and A. E. Waite taking command of the remnants of the original charter. Mathers' friendship with Crowley, whom many initiates found so objectionable, soon came to grief, and that duo and Yeats found themselves locked in a three-way battle of occult will that consumed the energies of the movement.

Although the Golden Dawn as a spiritual movement was short-lived, its impact was long-lasting. As with the Rosicrucians, the simple idea of a mystical Order harking back to ancient traditions proved more important and lasting than the
organization itself. A secret society comprised of the cognoscenti of the time, reviving what they believed to be the genuine mysteries of the occult past, in one of the world's most powerful imperial cities projects a glamour and appeal to this day.