Sir Edward Bulmar-Lytton was no ordinary novelist. He was reputedly a member of The Rosicrucians, an ancient esoteric society that claimed to have secret occult knowledge brought to Europe by a knight returning from the crusades. Sir Edward has been linked to numerous other secret societies including the freemasons, typically having an esoteric nature and there is no hard evidence for this but he had reason to downplay such associations because he was also being a politician of international standing, as well as having many readers outside of Great Britain who followed his work. His book ‘The coming race’ was widely available around the same time Helena Blavatsky was writing about ancient wisdom she had discovered in Tibet, reputedly based on a pure, superhuman race she named the Aryans.
Bulmar-Lytton not the only English writer who came to the attention the Nazis. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a British-German-French philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science whose writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, scientific racism, and Nordicism. His best-known book, the two-volume ‘The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’, published in 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. ‘The coming race’ might have been a work of fiction but it fitted in very with other works published around the same that claimed to be based on sound theories and beliefs. Blavatsky’s claims that the original Aryan race had superhuman powers fitted perfectly alongside Bulmar-Lytton’s ‘Vril-ya’ people.
In Germany, there had been a widespread renewed interest in ancient pagan belief, nature and Germanic identity since around the middle of the nineteenth century, in part as a reaction to the industrial revolution and mass migration of the populace to towns and cities. Numerous societies had sprung up all over Germany and Austria dedicated to rediscovering long-lost ideas and beliefs. In Vienna, in the early years of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler was just one of many avid readers of the magazine ‘Ostara’, published by the Arisophist occultist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, which espoused many antisemitic and Völkisch theories. The name of the publication was derived from a reconstructed Old High German goddess and its content harked back to ancient times of a pure race with esoteric learning.
Germany’s (and Austria’s) catastrophic defeat in 1918 caused many people to question both the established religions and what it meant to be German, whilst losing faith in the old orders. Bulmar-Lytton’s story about a superior race with supernatural powers was just what some people wanted to hear as they looked to the past for answers.