VRIL SOCIETY
In a 1947 article in the American pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, rocket engineer Willy Ley mentioned a small group active in Berlin during the 1930s that he called the Wahrheitsgesellschaft (Truth Society). According to Ley, members meditated on a bisected apple in order to gain control of the mysterious power of “vril.” Post-war books on the Nazi-occult connection built this brief reference into a claim that the organization, renamed the Vril Society, was closely affiliated with the Thule Society and the Nazi hierarchy itself and played an important role in the Third Reich’s plans for world domination, putting the Nazis in contact with occult forces and reverse engineering alien technology from Aldebaran to equip the Third Reich with flying saucers.
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. In 1930 it also published two pamphlets, Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft (Vril: The Primal Cosmic Power) and Weltdynamismus (World Dynamism), claiming to reveal the secrets of Atlantean free energy technology. A section of the latter pamphlet shows a bisected apple as a symbol of the free energy field surrounding the earth. While this confirms Ley’s account, it does nothing to back up the extravagant claims made for the Vril Society’s activities and influence by later writers.
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SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006