Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Coming Race

The pen is mightier than the sword (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race

First an important law of power: Do you see an opponent as a threat? Separate him. Call him a pseudo scientist or as in this case, a fantasist. Success assured.

Nazis adored The Coming Race of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). But they were no blind followers of his novel. Otherwise they would have given women more respect, or they would have been less obsessed by power. Bulwer-Lytton was, despite his alleged fairy tales, not a dreamer, but a man with a hidden agenda. However, in the second half of the twentieth century everything was done to make the man a storyteller. So the opening sentence of one of his short stories went on to live its own life. 'It was a dark and stormy night ...' An opening sentence that was used many times before Bulwer-Lytton. Though Bulwer-Lytton got the dubious honor to have invented it.

In The Coming Race (1871) Bulwer-Lytton describes a superior civilization. Its members were descendants from the gods who lived before the Great Flood. He gives a detailed and surrealistic description of the civilization. Women were superior to men and were able to control a super power with their brain through a nerve in their hand. That super power the author called The Vril. The Vril could take many forms. But one thing was for sure: it was a ‘light power’. All in all, it appears the author himself did not know exactly how The Vril really worked. Though he seemed convinced that the power could be created by mind control.

And he mentioned Lai: a subtle and life giving medium, which is invisible, but is everywhere around us. If The Vril is given free game in that medium, it creates a substance with a temperature similar to this of the highest life forms. [This last sentences is not easy to understand to us, but judge for yourself. See below.]

An original extract from his text: 'She described a subtle and life-giving medium called Lai, which I suspect to be identical with the ethereal oxygen of Dr. Lewin 's, wherein work all the correlative forces united under the name of Vril; and contended that wherever this medium could be expanded, as it agencies or Vril to have ample play, a temperature congenial to the highest forms of life could be secured.’

Bulwer-Lytton speaks in his novel about the different forms of matter. So we get the impression that with the 'temperature related to the highest life forms', he means the plasma state. After heating, matter goes from solid to liquid to gas to plasma. Plasma consists of waves similar to electromagnetic waves. Actually, it's 'loaded matter'. It possesses a large number of free electrons, making it extremely sensitive to electromagnetism. Strange that Bulwer-Lytton seems to point to a correlation between extreme heat, electromagnetism and the highest life forms. Did he knew that plasma and the highest forms had something in common?

Recent scientific discoveries show that plasma can contain life. And already there are scientists who believe that plasma can contain an unimaginable subatomic life form (‘a collective soul?’).

Plasma can contain a mysterious life form.

A subatomic life form.

The story of The Coming Race in a nutshell:

The author -the young American Bulwer-Lytton- travels to the underground places of a country that according to him really exists. And although he doesn’t mention the name of the place, it could have been somewhere in China or Tibet. Tibet, of all places a kind of sacred place for the nazis. Besides the language of the Gy and Ana sounded like Sanskrit. He comes through a hole in a subterranean cave where the Gy and the Ana live. The cave has its own climate (strange that recently they have discovered caves with their own climate in China). Gy are women. They are large and have golden hair and blue eyes. The Ana are men. The Gy are superior in about everything to the Ana. In addition, the Gy have telepathic powers. Noteworthy that the author says that in prehistoric times the Gy and Ana had a lot more body hair. It’s a detail that has nothing to do with the story but apparently the author found it necessary to mention it. (A coincidence that we think that the ‘gods’ transformed the hairy homo sapiens to an almost hairless human?) The civilization of Gy and Ana was named the Vril-ya. A name that had everything to do with the Vril, the miraculous force of the Vril-ya. The force is actually neutral but can be used for many things. She can lift large objects, keeps the society healthy, controls the weather, drives machines and robots, is a famous weapon, can read minds ... And she can be controlled by the mind of the Gy. The Vril-ya stands for purity and equality, creates harmony and respects all life. The Gy are animal lovers. They are very peaceful and 'good' but they would destroy other life if their general interest is threatened. Both, men and women, live on average one hundred to one hundred and fifty years. Death doesn’t scare them off, because they know that the afterlife really does exist. Evil and fear of death is according to them a result of egocentrism that has poisoned several species of the human race who by the way had crossbred with ‘animal humans’. Those humans live above ground, not in the underground caves like the Vril-ya, and they had been spreading very quickly. Also the author is a poisoned human who came from above. According to the Gy the fear of death that the author feels comes from the animal instinct that partly lives in him as a result of crossbreeding between his ancestors and ‘animal humans’. By the way: The Vril-ya ensures herself an ideal population density by birth control. Until their last day Gy and Ana live perfectly healthy, but in the end they see death as a portal to a higher life. Finally: the Vril-ya have, thanks to the Vril, flying light ships. Gy and Ana can fly also by themselves also thanks to the Vril and the mechanical wings they can put on and off like a coat. (Strange that some experts are thinking we will soon do the same.)

So far The Coming Race story in its nutshell.

'Pure fiction', of course, according to many.

But not according to many others. And wé also think there is much truth in the story.

The author gives the impression -more than once- to be deadly serious about his work that was published anonymously (although the latter was not a big deal in those times). But he gives hidden criticism on Darwin’s theory. He names a number of well-known scientists, and even talks about Faraday to explain the Vril: 'Faraday would call the Vril atmospheric magnetism. Something like electricity, but it’s intertwined with other forces of nature and it’s much more subtle. So it’s not electricity, but ‘something else’.

In the last sentences the author reveals why he has written the novel: 'I am now retired for three years and live in my home country a settled life. Recently, my doctor told me I have a disease that will be deadly soon. That is why I feel it is my duty to tell my story to the world. I am afraid that the Vril-Ya will destroy mankind ' (Forgive us the free but correct content of the translation.)

Bulwer-Lytton died a few years later due to the incurable disease.

Did he really feared the Vril-ya? We will never know, but we are sure that he wanted to give us a glimpse of something only a few people on earth know about for sure.

And also for sure: the Vril-Ya would no eat us. They didn’t eat meat. ‘Only the poisoned people eat meat.’ That’s what Bulwer-Lytton tells us in his story.

But if they existed they could be able to destroy us with their Vril power.

And maybe he was right in some way, also with regard to the latter. Because if so-called UFO's can influence the minds of our leaders ...

Anyway, Bulwer-Lytton with this novel was far more than the first science fiction writer, like history described him. He was a great expert of ancient civilizations, politician, writer, an eminent freemason and undeniably a great man. That The Coming Race was published at the end of his life doesn’t have to mean anything. But also he seems to have waited until the end was near to give us a glimpse of our hidden history. The Coming Race just like Plato's Critias is a mix of truth and fiction. Just like Plato, Da Vinci and others, Bulwer-Lytton knew that going against religion or attribute women to much power could have very unpleasant consequences.

Mixing truth with fantasy, was the best thing Bulwer-Lytton could do in a men's world.

By the way: many claim that the Sumerian tablets already mentioned the Vril. The word refers to a divine power that has the snake as a symbol. Hence, the first secret society (at the time of the Sumerians) apparently named 'the society of the snake'.

And in the meantime we know that Isis had a snake as companion, just like the masons. And we know that Bulwer-Lytton was a mason and a follower of Isis.

The nazis have been searching for a mysterial force in the underground of Tibet and other places.

And others have done the same.

We don’t want to expand on project ISIS (what’s in a name), and to be clear we don’t mean the terrorist organization. (Note that Obama and others never use the name ISIS for that organization. They talk about ISIL or IS.) Project ISIS, according to many, was a project set up by the Soviets. As we said we don’t want to expand on it because you will find a lot of nonsense about it on the internet. But on closer inspection we only can conclude that the Soviets in 1961 (sure enough) were looking for extraterrestrial knowledge under the code name ISIS ...

From atoms to galaxies: they have a lot in common. And atoms may be microscopically small, they exist, just like galaxies, almost completely out of empty space. In that incomprehensible 'emptiness' must be hiding a miraculous electromagnetic force. Bulwer-Lytton suggests that the Vril indeed was an electromagnetic phenomenon that arises from 'empty space'.

Just a small remark: An article from 1998 shows that a scholar who used the words ‘cold fusion' got the dangerous nickname ‘pseudo scientist '. No one would ever believe him with a stigma like that upon him. Now they say electromagnetic vibrations can create cold fusion, something conspiracy theorists are saying for a long time. Or how reality can take over the so-called conspiracy theories.

Finally, one more thing straight from The Coming Race:

The Vril could lift gigantic 'dead weights' (including building blocks of pyramids?). In the novel a Gy says that how motionless dead matter may seem, it’s constantly on the move, because the particles from which it is made, are subject to vibration. The Vril can affect that particles in a subtle way, lifting even the heaviest weights.

Update: 21 oktober 2014: magnetic levitation gets the news. Yet another invention that is actually more than 12.600 years old? If magnetic levitation can lift houses it maybe could have lifted the gigantic building blocks of the pyramids or the blocks at Baalbek.

Not so long ago no one could have predicted the immense technological revolution (only if we take into account the extraterrestrial issue it's easy to explain it). Today scientists experiment with magnetic forces that seem to come straight from The Coming Race. But think also about the revolutionary views on dark matter, dark energy, quantum and other theories … and yes about nanotechnology.

Date of publicity in Dutch: August 2009 Translated: October 2014