assumption that the bodies were those of soldiers was quickly dispelled when they realised that the dead men were all Orientals. One of the Russians, who was from Mongolia, identified the men as Tibetans. It was also evident to the Russian soldiers that the men had not died in battle but seemed to have committed suicide. Over the following week, hundreds more Tibetans were discovered in Berlin: some of them had clearly died in battle, while others had committed ritual suicide, like the ones discovered by the Russian unit. (2)
What were Tibetans doing in Nazi Germany towards the end of the Second World War? The answer to this question may be found in a curious novel entitled The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), first Baron Lytton. A prolific and very successful writer (his output included novels, plays, essays and poetry) Bulwer- Lytton was considered in his lifetime to be one of the greatest writers in the English language. Unfortunately, his reputation for vanity, ostentation and eccentricity attracted a good deal of hostility from the press and this has damaged his subsequent literary reputation to a disproportionate extent, with the result that today his books are extremely hard to find and his work is seldom — if at all — taught in universities in the English-speaking world. (3)
Throughout his career, Bulwer-Lytton wrote on many themes, including romance, politics, history, social satire, melodrama and the occult. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that he should have turned to the subject of Utopian science fiction with The Coming Race, published in 1871. In this novel, the narrator, a traveller and adventurer of independent means, explores a mine in an unnamed location and discovers a vast subterranean world, inhabited by a superior race of humans called the Vril-ya. Once tenants of the Earth’s outer surface, the Vril- ya were forced to retreat underground by a natural catastrophe similar to the biblical Flood many thousands of years ago. Their technology is far in advance of anything to be found in the world of ordinary humanity, and is based on the application of a force known as ‘vril’. Befriended by a young female Vril-ya named Zee, the narrator asks about the nature of the vril force.
Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:
‘I have long held an opinion,’ says that illustrious experimentalist, ‘almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.’ (4)
According to Zee, all Vril-ya are trained in the application of vril, which can be used to control the physical world, including the minds and bodies of others, as well as to enhance the telepathic and telekinetic potentials of the human mind. The vril force is most often applied through the use of a device known as the Vril Staff which, like the vril force itself, requires many years to master. (The narrator is not allowed to hold one, ‘for fear of some terrible accident occasioned by my ignorance of its use’.) The Vril Staff ‘is hollow, and has in the handle several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can be altered, modified, or directed — so that by one process it destroys, by another it heals — by one it can rend the rock, by another disperse the vapour — by one it affects bodies, by another it can exercise a certain influence over minds’. (5)
During his protracted stay in the subterranean realm, the narrator learns of the system of government by which the Vril-ya live. They are ruled by a single supreme magistrate who abdicates the position at the first sign of advancing age.
Although their society is entirely free of crime or strife of any kind, they consider strength and force to be among the finest virtues, and the triumph of the strong over the weak to be in perfect accordance with Nature. Democracy and free institutions are, to them, merely the crude experiments of an immature culture.
The government of the tribe of Vril-ya … was apparently very complicated, really very simple. It was based upon a principle recognised in theory, though little carried out in practice, above ground — viz., that the object of all systems of philosophical thought tends to the attainment of unity, or the ascent through all intervening labyrinths to the simplicity of a single first cause or principle. Thus in politics, even republican writers have agreed that a benevolent autocracy would insure the best administration, if there were any guarantees for its continuance, or against its gradual abuse of the powers accorded to it. There was … in this society nothing to induce any of its members to covet the cares of office. No honours, no insignia of higher rank were assigned to it. The supreme magistrate was not distinguished from the rest by superior habitation or revenue. On the other hand, the duties awarded to him were marvellously light and easy, requiring no preponderant degree of energy or intelligence. (6)
After a number of adventures in the subterranean world — and a great many conversations with its denizens — the narrator comes to the following conclusion regarding the ultimate origins of the fantastic Vril-ya race:
[T]his people — though originally not only of our human race, but, as seems to me clear by the roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilisation of the world; and having, according to their myths and their history, passed through phases of society familiar to ourselves, — had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it was impossible that any community in the upper world could amalgamate: And that if they ever emerged from these nether recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of man. (7)
Although greatly impressed with the knowledge and accomplishments of the Vril-ya, the narrator is nevertheless terrified by their power and the ease with which they wield it, implying at one point that, should he have angered them at any time, they would have had no compunction in turning their Vril Staffs on him and reducing him to cinders. This uneasiness, coupled with his natural desire to return to the upper world and the life with which he is familiar, prompts the narrator to begin seeking a means of escape from the subterranean world of the Vril-ya. Aid comes in the unlikely form of Zee, who has fallen in love with him and has attempted to persuade him to stay, but who nevertheless understands that an unrequited love cannot result in happiness for either of them. It is she who leads him back to the mine shaft through which he first entered the realm of the Vril-ya.
Upon his return home, the narrator begins to ponder the wonders he has beheld far below the surface of the Earth, and once again hints at the possible dreadful fate awaiting a blissfully unaware humanity at the hands of the ‘Coming Race’. In the final chapter, we read:
[T]he more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes offeree, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances, — the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers. (8)
It is an assumption of many occultists that The Coming Race is fact disguised as fiction: that Bulwer-Lytton based his engaging novel on a genuine body of esoteric knowledge. He was greatly interested in the Rosicrucians, the powerful occult society which arose in the sixteenth century and which claimed to possess ancient wisdom, discovered in a secret underground chamber, regarding the ultimate secrets of the Universe. There is some evidence that Bulwer-Lytton believed in the possibility of a subterranean world, for he wrote to his friend Hargrave Jennings in 1854: ‘So Rosenkreuz [the founder of the Rosicrucians] found his wisdom in a secret chamber. So will we all. There is much to be learned from the substrata of our planet.’ (9)
Some writers, including Alec Maclellan, author of the fascinating book The Lost World of Agharti (1996), have suggested that The Coming Race revealed too much of the subterranean world, and was as a result suppressed in the years following Bulwer-Lytton’s death in 1873. Indeed, he describes the book as ‘one of the hardest to find of all books of mysticism’, (10) and informs us of his own search for a copy, which for some years met with no success. While doubtless an intriguing piece of stage-setting on Maclellan’s part, the rarity of the book can surely be accounted for by the unjust waning of Bulwer-Lytton’s posthumous literary reputation (mentioned earlier). The present author searched for some months for a copy of The Coming Race, before finding an extremely affordable
