The Coming Race (Vril) by Bulwer-Lytton: Complete Guide to the Esoteric Novel

Overview and Historical Context

Published anonymously in 1871 as The Coming Race (later editions added or, The Power of the Coming Race; also published as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race), this novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton tells the story of an American mining engineer who discovers a vast subterranean world inhabited by the Vril-ya, a superior race of beings who have mastered a universal energy force called Vril.

Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was a prominent Victorian novelist, politician, and occultist. He was a member of the Rosicrucian order and deeply interested in mesmerism, Egyptology, and the occult sciences. His earlier novel Zanoni (1842) also dealt with esoteric themes. He famously coined the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword" and the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night."

The novel appeared at an extraordinary cultural moment. Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) had shaken Victorian certainties about the fixed nature of humanity. The spiritualist movement was sweeping Britain and America, with thousands attending seances and debating whether science could prove the reality of invisible forces. Faraday's electromagnetic discoveries had made the existence of invisible fields of energy a scientific fact rather than mere speculation. Into this context, Bulwer-Lytton introduced a story about a civilization whose mastery of invisible energy had transformed them into something more than human.

The novel was an immediate popular success and has never gone out of print. Its influence, however, extends far beyond literature. The concept of Vril was taken up by Theosophists, occultists, and esoteric writers who treated it not as fiction but as a veiled disclosure of genuine occult knowledge. This reception history makes The Coming Race one of the most significant nodes in the network connecting Victorian literature to modern esotericism.

Vril: The All-Permeating Energy

Vril is the central concept of the novel and the source of its esoteric influence. Bulwer-Lytton describes it as an all-permeating fluid that the Vril-ya have learned to channel through specialized staffs and through their own will. Vril can:

• Heal diseases and repair injuries at a distance
• Destroy matter with terrifying efficiency
• Illuminate underground cities without fire or gas
• Power mechanical devices and aerial vehicles
• Enable telepathic communication between individuals
• Influence the weather and natural phenomena
• Animate and control matter through concentrated will

The concept draws on several real scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas of the Victorian era, including Faraday's research on electromagnetism, Mesmer's "animal magnetism," Reichenbach's "odic force," and the broader Victorian fascination with invisible forces (electricity, magnetism, ether) that seemed to pervade the natural world.

Joscelyn Godwin, a scholar of Western esotericism at Colgate University, notes in Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (2011) that "the concept of Vril synthesized the best scientific thinking of Bulwer-Lytton's era with genuine occult knowledge drawn from his initiatory training, creating something that resonated with multiple traditions simultaneously." This resonance explains why practitioners of such diverse systems as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and later New Age movements all found in Vril a concept they could make their own.

Esoteric readers have identified Vril with numerous concepts from spiritual traditions: the Hindu prana (breath-force that animates living beings), the Chinese chi (vital energy circulating through meridians), the Polynesian mana (spiritual power concentrated in persons and objects), Wilhelm Reich's orgone (biological energy he claimed to detect with a specialized microscope), and the astral light of Eliphas Levi (the universal medium through which occult phenomena are produced). Whether Bulwer-Lytton intended these correspondences or whether readers projected them onto the text remains debated, but the convergence is striking.

The Subterranean Civilization

The Vril-ya live in a vast underground world illuminated by Vril energy. Their civilization is characterized by several features that Bulwer-Lytton presents as the natural consequences of mastering Vril:

No war: Because every citizen possesses the ability to destroy any other through Vril, conventional warfare is impossible. Mutual assured destruction at the individual level creates a forced peace, an idea that would later be echoed in discussions of nuclear deterrence. The parallel to modern nuclear strategy is not accidental; several Cold War thinkers acknowledged the influence of Bulwer-Lytton's thought experiment.

No crime: The abundance created by Vril technology eliminates material want, and the cultural development of the Vril-ya has reduced destructive impulses to the point where crime is virtually unknown. The narrator observes that the Vril-ya regard surface humanity's constant warfare and crime as signs of arrested development rather than moral failing.

Gender equality (with a twist): The Gy-ei (women) of the Vril-ya are physically larger and more powerful than the An (men), and they take the initiative in courtship. This reversal of Victorian gender norms was both a satire of contemporary society and a speculation about how mastery of a universal force might restructure social relations along the lines of natural capacity rather than cultural convention.

Emotional serenity: The Vril-ya have largely transcended the emotional turbulence that characterizes surface humanity. They are calm, composed, and content, though the narrator finds their serenity somewhat unsettling in its lack of passion. Bulwer-Lytton seems to question whether the elimination of suffering also eliminates vitality.

Lifespan and child development: Vril-ya children are educated through a remarkable process in which Vril energy appears to accelerate the integration of knowledge and wisdom. The narrator notes that even young Vril-ya display a composure and capability that surface adults rarely achieve, suggesting that Vril cultivation reshapes not just the body but the entire arc of development.

The narrator, initially impressed by the Vril-ya's achievements, gradually realizes that their superiority poses an existential threat to surface humanity. If the Vril-ya ever emerge from their underground world, they could effortlessly conquer or destroy the human race. The novel ends with this warning, leaving the reader to contemplate what it means when a "coming race" surpasses humanity.

Occult Influence and Reception

The novel's influence on esoteric and occult movements has been disproportionate to its literary status:

Theosophy: Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, referenced Vril in Isis Unveiled (1877), treating it as a fictional representation of the genuine astral light or akasha. She wrote: "The name 'Vril' may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works." Theosophists viewed Bulwer-Lytton as an initiate who encoded real occult knowledge in fictional form, a practice they considered both wise and ethical since it made truth accessible while maintaining its sacred character.

The Vril Society: A persistent (but historically unverified) legend claims that a "Vril Society" (Vril-Gesellschaft) existed in pre-Nazi Germany, devoted to harnessing Vril energy through meditation and technology. Historians Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels popularized this claim in The Morning of the Magicians (1960), though most academic historians, including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985), consider the Vril Society to be a post-war myth that served ideological purposes rather than documented historical reality.

Rudolf Steiner: The founder of Anthroposophy referenced Bulwer-Lytton's work in his lectures on the evolution of consciousness, treating the Vril-ya as a literary depiction of future stages of human development when spiritual faculties presently dormant in most people become ordinary capacities of the race. Steiner considered Bulwer-Lytton to be among the few Victorian writers who genuinely understood the trajectory of human spiritual evolution.

Modern esotericism: The concept of Vril continues to appear in New Age, occult, and alternative science literature, often blended with ideas about free energy, zero-point field physics, and the lost technologies of ancient civilizations.

Literary Analysis

As literature, The Coming Race belongs to the genre of the "utopian novel" (or, more precisely, the "ambiguous utopia"), alongside works by Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and H. G. Wells. Bulwer-Lytton's underground world is presented as superior to surface civilization in most respects, but the narrator's unease suggests that the author was ambivalent about the implications of his own creation.

The novel also belongs to the tradition of the "hollow earth" narrative, which includes works by Edgar Allan Poe (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), Jules Verne (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), and later, Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Pellucidar series). The hollow earth was a common literary and scientific speculation in the 19th century, based on theories by Edmund Halley and John Cleves Symmes that the Earth's interior might contain habitable spaces.

Literary scholar Patricia Merivale, in her analysis of Victorian occult fiction, identifies The Coming Race as a prototype for a distinct subgenre: the "initiation novel in disguise," in which a narrator undergoes what functions as an initiation experience while ostensibly observing an alien civilization. The narrator enters the underground world (descent), encounters beings of superior knowledge (confrontation with the initiating force), falls in love with one of them (temptation and emotional trial), and escapes (return with knowledge). This narrative arc mirrors classical initiation rites across cultures.

Bulwer-Lytton's prose style is characteristically Victorian: elaborate, digressive, and occasionally ponderous. Modern readers may find the pacing slow by contemporary standards, but the ideas embedded in the novel repay patient engagement.

Bulwer-Lytton as Occultist

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was not merely a novelist who dabbled in occult themes; he was a serious practitioner. He was a member of a Rosicrucian lodge, studied with the French occultist Eliphas Levi, and was deeply versed in Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah, and mesmerism. His earlier novel Zanoni (1842) contains detailed descriptions of Rosicrucian initiation and the "Dweller on the Threshold," a concept that entered the vocabulary of Western esotericism through his fiction.

Kenneth Mackenzie, a Victorian Rosicrucian who was an important source for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, counted Bulwer-Lytton among his associates. The Golden Dawn's founding documents and ritual structure show the influence of Bulwer-Lytton's esoteric novels, particularly Zanoni and A Strange Story. W. B. Yeats, a Golden Dawn member, specifically cited Bulwer-Lytton as one of the authors who prepared him for occult study.

This background lends credibility to the esoteric reading of The Coming Race. Bulwer-Lytton was not a naive storyteller who accidentally created a concept (Vril) that happened to resonate with occult traditions. He was a knowledgeable insider who may well have been encoding genuine esoteric concepts in fictional form, as the Theosophists claimed. Whether this is true or whether the resonance is coincidental remains one of the enduring puzzles of Victorian literary occultism.

Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophical Reading

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of Anthroposophy, gave several lectures in which he discussed Bulwer-Lytton's novels as genuine works of initiate knowledge. In his lecture cycle on the spiritual beings in the heavenly bodies and in the kingdoms of nature, Steiner spoke of Bulwer-Lytton as possessing "the clairvoyant faculty to look behind the veil of ordinary perception" and noted that his literary descriptions of invisible forces were not mere invention but were grounded in direct spiritual experience.

Steiner's reading of the Vril-ya is particularly interesting from an Anthroposophical perspective. He identified them not as literal beings existing beneath the earth's surface but as representations of a future condition of humanity in which the forces now only dimly accessible to occult students would become the ordinary natural inheritance of all human beings. The "coming race" of the title is, in this reading, not an alien threat but the future humanity that current esoteric practice is preparing.

The connection to Steiner's broader project is significant. Anthroposophy posits that humanity is engaged in a long evolutionary process through a series of "root races" and "cultural epochs," each developing specific faculties of consciousness. The Vril-ya, with their serenity, their transcendence of destructive emotion, and their mastery of forces invisible to ordinary consciousness, represent what Steiner called the "sixth root race" condition: a state in which spiritual development has restructured the physical and etheric bodies to make spiritual faculties as ordinary as thinking is today.

Vril as Spiritual Practice: Working with Universal Energy

For contemporary spiritual practitioners, the question is not merely historical or literary: what can the concept of Vril teach us about working with universal energy in practice? The novel itself offers several implicit teachings.

The parallels between Vril practice and established traditions are instructive. In Taoist chi cultivation, the practitioner begins with awareness of chi in the dantian (lower abdomen) before learning to circulate it through the meridian system. In Reiki, the practitioner is "attuned" to a universal energy and learns to channel it through the hands. In yogic pranayama, the practitioner works with prana through breath and visualization. Each of these systems shares with Bulwer-Lytton's Vril the foundational insight that the universe is permeated by an intelligent energy that responsive human beings can learn to access and direct.

The scholar Wouter Hanegraaff, in his landmark study New Age Religion and Western Culture (1998), traces the concept of universal energy through its many names and traditions, noting that the idea is "one of the most persistent themes in Western esoteric thought from the Renaissance to the present" and that Vril represents its most influential Victorian expression.

Vril in Modern Context

The concept of an all-permeating energy force continues to find echoes in contemporary science and spirituality:

• Zero-point field: The quantum mechanical vacuum energy that Lynne McTaggart explores in The Field (2001) shares structural features with Vril: an omnipresent energy that connects all matter and can be accessed through appropriate means. McTaggart interviews physicists including Hal Puthoff and William Tiller whose research suggests that the quantum vacuum is not empty but is a seething field of energy with which living systems interact.
• Dark energy: The mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe, comprising approximately 68% of the total energy content of the cosmos, resonates with the idea of an invisible, all-permeating energy that science is only beginning to understand.
• Biofield therapies: Practices like Reiki, therapeutic touch, and pranic healing work with the concept of a life-force energy that can be channeled for healing, directly paralleling Vril's healing applications. The National Institutes of Health now funds research into biofield therapies through its National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
• Consciousness research: The work of Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences has produced statistically significant evidence that human intention can influence physical systems, which is precisely the core claim that Bulwer-Lytton makes about Vril: that it responds to trained human will and intention.

Legacy in Literature and Popular Culture

The Coming Race's influence extends well beyond the occult world. The novel helped define several genres and themes that continue to shape popular culture.

In science fiction, the advanced subterranean civilization became a recurring motif, appearing in works ranging from Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864, predating Bulwer-Lytton but in dialogue with the same tradition) to the many "inner earth" narratives of 20th-century pulp fiction. The concept of a race that has surpassed humanity through technological and moral development anticipates the "post-human" theme that runs through science fiction from H. G. Wells through Arthur C. Clarke to contemporary transhumanism.

The concept of Vril itself entered commercial culture in a peculiar way: the British beef extract drink "Bovril," introduced in 1870 and still sold today, derives its name from "bovine" and "Vril," the creator John Lawson Johnston apparently believing that the energy concept would make his product sound more vital and powerful. This may be the most unexpected legacy of Bulwer-Lytton's esoteric novel.

In film and television, the concept of a universal force that can be harnessed by trained adepts has become one of the most familiar tropes in popular culture. The Force in Star Wars, with its parallels to chi, Vril, prana, and the Jedi's resemblance to warrior-monks of various traditions, is the most culturally prominent example of this idea in contemporary media. George Lucas has acknowledged drawing on Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology, which itself draws on the same wells of universal energy concepts that feed the Vril tradition.

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