Vril Society
The Vril Society (German: Vril Gesellschaft) — also called the Vril Gesellschaft and, in some accounts, the Brüder des Lichts (Brothers of the Light) — is an alleged German occult secret society active from approximately 1919, associated with the Thule Society, with channeled contact from non-human intelligent beings in the Aldebaran star system, and with alleged flying disc propulsion research conducted under the auspices of the SS. The historical existence of an organized group under this name remains disputed; the term "Vril Society" in its modern form entered wide circulation via post-war writers and later Neo-Nazi researchers.
The Vril concept
The word "Vril" derives from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 science-fiction novel The Coming Race, in which a subterranean civilization — the Ana, calling themselves the Vril-ya ("the civilised nations") — wields an all-pervasive fluid force called "vril" that powers technology and confers telepathic and psychokinetic abilities. In the novel, vril can influence weather and temperature via "atmospheric magnetism," exert control over minds and bodies of animals and plants via conductors, and through the vril-staff — a slender metal rod — animate and direct inanimate machinery at a distance. The Ana are described as tall, humanoid beings with mechanical folding wings, larger thumbs than surface humans, and a visible nerve in the palm that confers facility with vril — a nerve said to have developed gradually over thousands of generations of vril practice.
The concept was adopted by Helena Blavatsky in her Theosophical works Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), and later by Theosophist William Scott-Elliot, who wrote in 1896 that the Atlanteans' airships were propelled by vril energy. In Germany a racially inflected variant of Theosophy called Ariosophy incorporated vril as a primordial Aryan force, and a short-lived Berlin publishing circle — the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft "Das Kommende Deutschland" — released the pamphlet Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft (1930), describing Atlantean "dynamo-technology" based on vril energy superior to mechanistic modern science. The first known reference to an actual society using the name was made by former German rocket engineer Willy Ley in his 1947 article "Pseudoscience in Naziland," in which he reported that a group in Berlin had believed in and studied the vril force.
Origins and relationship to the Thule Society
According to accounts first published by Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl in their 1992 book The Vril Project, the Vril Society emerged as the esoteric inner circle of Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff's Germanenorden (German Order), with the Germanenorden's political branch becoming Sebottendorff's Thule Society after World War I. In an earlier account drawn from the same milieu and repeated by German occult writer Jan van Helsing, General Karl Haushofer — Hitler's geopolitician — is credited with founding "a second order" in 1919 called the Brothers of the Light, which subsequently became the Vril Gesellschaft, uniting three older esoteric orders: the Die Herren vom Schwarzen Stein (Lords of the Black Stone), the Schwarze Ritter (Black Knights) of the Thule Society, and the Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) SS elite.
The Thule Society — the secret society that had helped bring the Nazi Party into existence — already held that the white Aryan race had ultimately originated from space travelers from Aldebaran, the main star of the constellation Taurus, and that a Hyperborean continent populated by those Aryans had sunk during the last ice age, leaving their descendants sheltering in vast subterranean cities beneath the Himalayas. The Vril Gesellschaft is described as the technological-occult arm of this broader program, dedicated specifically to recovering and reconstructing the lost science of that civilization.
Maria Orsic and the Aldebaran transmissions
The central figure in the Vril Society narrative is Maria Orsic (also spelled Orschitsch), described as a transcendental medium from Zagreb. Per Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl, a secret meeting of Thule and Vril members was held in December 1919 near Berchtesgaden, at which Orsic presented transcripts — written in an old Templar script — of communications she had received telepathically. The script was later identified as Sumerian, and the messages were said to originate from the planet Sumi-Er in the solar system of Aldebaran, sixty-eight light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The communicating beings reportedly informed the mediums that the Sumerians had been a colony of superior beings sent from Aldebaran to Earth some 500 million years ago, and that the Aryan people were their descendants.
A parallel account in Van Helsing's widely circulated Secret Societies describes two unnamed mediums at a forester's lodge near Berchtesgaden who mediumistically received transmissions "in a secret Templar script — a language unknown to her — with the technical data for the construction of a flying machine," with those messages explicitly attributed to Aldebaran. The messages additionally asserted that non-white races were at lower stages of spiritual development, and that the divine Aldebaran people had once colonized a former planet — called Mallona, Maldek, or Marduk — in the orbit now occupied by the asteroid belt.
Orsic's group of mediums is referred to in some accounts as the Vrilerinnen. A second medium, known only as Sigrun, is also named as attending Vril Society sessions alongside Orsic.
Disc propulsion and the Jenseitsflugmaschine
According to the Jürgen-Ratthofer/Ettl account, channeled instructions received by Orsic included not only spatial data about Aldebaran's inhabited planets but also technical blueprints for a disc-shaped propulsion device. W. O. Schumann — a member of both the Thule and Vril societies and later a professor at the Technical University of Munich — pioneered development of electromagnetic fields through rotating disks; a prototype was allegedly constructed near Munich in 1922. In the Van Helsing narrative, the result was the construction of a Jenseitsflugmaschine ("flying machine for the other side"), or otherworldly aircraft, by the Vril Society in the early 1920s.
By the war years, the Van Helsing account claims all of the major alleged "flying saucer" engineers — Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe, Epp, Belluzo — had originally worked under the Vril Society before the program was transferred to SS jurisdiction. The Vril-7 — a large-capacity disc craft — features in claims of a December 1943 meeting of the Vril Gesellschaft at the Baltic port of Kolberg, attended by Orsic and Sigrun, at which "the Aldebaran Project" was the central agenda item: a plan to send the Vril-7 through a "dimension channel" independent of the speed of light, direct to Aldebaran. A first test flight in the "dimension channel" was said to have been attempted in winter 1944, narrowly avoiding disaster.
Exotic research under the Nazis was, in the Van Helsing version, coordinated by SS-Entwicklungsstelle IV (SS Development Group IV), a real SS unit whose actual mission brief was to investigate "free energy" technologies to render Germany independent of foreign oil. Farrell notes that SS-Entwicklungsstelle IV is historically documented, which he regards as partial circumstantial support for certain underlying structural claims, even where the occult framework is unverifiable.
Connection to the SS Ahnenerbe
The SS Ahnenerbe, Heinrich Himmler's office for occult and racial-scientific research established in 1935, forms a parallel institutional thread in the Vril narrative. The Ahnenerbe's mandate — as revealed in Himmler's correspondence — was to study ancient religion, science, and the occult explicitly for military exploitation. The doctrine of the Black Sun — a "hidden" spiritual sun associated with Hyperborea, the galactic center, and the celestial origin of the Aryan race — was the central esoteric doctrine of the SS inner circle, and shared its conceptual vocabulary with the Thule and Vril societies.
Farrell on the occult-technology nexus
Joseph Farrell, in a Forum Borealis interview, argues that the Vril/Thule framework helps explain an otherwise anomalous feature of Nazi weapons research: why Germany's most advanced secret projects were staffed and run by figures with deep occult interests. Farrell focuses on the institutional expression of this in the SS Ahnenerbe, noting that Himmler's founding decree — presented as evidence at the Nuremberg trials — specified that the Ahnenerbe was to investigate "all avenues of the occult" for "potential military application." The same ideological climate, Farrell argues, created a research environment "willing to try and do almost anything" — which explains both the most extreme human experimentation and the most exotic physics projects: "you have this peculiar blend of science and esoteric and occult doctrine" unique to the SS research apparatus.
Farrell specifically identifies Rudolf Hess — one of the primary Thule Society members in Hitler's inner circle — as a key conduit for occult influence, noting his Egyptian upbringing as formative: "Hess was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, to a very prominent kind of upper middle class German family there. And Hess, of course, being in Egypt, imbibed a very healthy, if you want to qualify it that way, interest in esoteric and occult matters." Farrell regards this background as explaining how figures from the Thule Society milieu were able to perpetuate their worldview at the highest levels of the Nazi state throughout the war.
Jorjani on the Vril and Thule claims
Jason Jorjani, philosopher and technology researcher, examined the Vril Society claims in a 2025 American Alchemy interview with Jesse Michels, describing the Thule and Vril society accounts as describing a group of mediums — mostly women — who were engaged in telepathic communication with "a group of supermen" who helped these occultists with both geopolitical machinations and scientific breakthroughs. Jorjani states he has not been able to find evidence of an independently existing Vril Society distinct from the Thule Society, but notes that the concept of vril was important to the Thule milieu; the concept originated with Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 The Coming Race. Jorjani adds that Bulwer-Lytton himself was a notably extraordinary figure — an aristocrat of immense cultural influence who was at one point offered the crown of Greece and declined it — and that his biography suggests deep immersion in occult matters.
Farrell, in the same Forum Borealis interview where he addresses the Ahnenerbe, notes that the Kammler group's parallel think-tank structure was itself a product of the same broader Third Reich research climate that the Vril and Thule traditions had helped create: a climate defined by the conviction that esoteric and occult sources could yield militarily applicable technology.
Historical documentation and postwar transmission
Direct documentary evidence of a functioning "Vril Society" predating 1945 is thin. The earliest documented reference to a group studying vril in Germany was made by Willy Ley in 1947. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (2002), established that German researchers had confirmed the existence of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft "Das Kommende Deutschland" — a small group associated with astrological publisher Wilhelm Becker that published the Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft pamphlets in 1930 — but no more organized or politically connected entity.
The fully elaborated Vril Society narrative — including Maria Orsic, the Aldebaran transmissions, and the disc program — first appeared in Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl's 1992 book The Vril Project and their 1994 documentary UFO Secrets of the Third Reich. Their account was then widely amplified by Jan van Helsing's Secret Societies: Their Power and Influence in the Twentieth Century, which circulated the story in German-language occult and Neo-Nazi networks in the mid-1990s. It was Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl who first systematically imported the term "Vril" into Neo-Nazi circles in the 1990s, building on Ley's earlier casual reference and weaving it into an elaborate cosmological and technological mythos.
The popular association of the Vril Society with broad Nazi leadership — including Hitler, Hess, Göring, and Himmler as members — derives from still later secondary popularizations and lacks documentation. The historically documented society with demonstrably close ties to the early Nazi Party is the Thule Society, whose members included Rudolf Hess and Hans Frank, and which provided real institutional support for the NSDAP's formation.
Salla on the Schumann levitator and the Vril program
Michael Salla, in a UFO: WHISTLEBLOWER! interview, identifies W. O. Schumann as the builder of "the first Schumann levitator for the Vril Society in 1922," noting that Schumann's expertise in "high energy plasma and torsion field physics" later made him a priority recruit for the United States Air Force under Operation Paperclip, taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base immediately after the war. Salla emphasizes that the Vril Society's disc research began during the Weimar Republic — "probably the most open and most progressive nation on the planet" — and that the program was civilian in character until the Nazis came to power in 1933 and incorporated it into the SS.