Vril and Bovril

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 13 pages

The oddest pairing in the section, and a deliberate joke at the expense of one half of it. Vril — the force named in Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, and so a companion to the Zanoni held in the Buddhas and Initiates series — is treated here as a real thing under a novelist's label: the occult power behind the forces of matter and their common origin, the soul of the universe, with nothing on earth comparable to it. It was once, the file says, the common property of races now extinct; its Atlantean name was Mash-Mak, and its Aryan name is deliberately withheld.

The reason given for that withholding occupies the central pages, and it is a practical one: the force could be used to kill, to alter, to move or otherwise change any object or condition, and when a man understands the laws and centres of force in himself he can make visible and material at will what was before invisible and ideal — which is why the real secrets of nature are not revealed to the profane. Its destructive power is called not altogether a fiction, capable of destroying whole armies in a moment, and a source is cited for the instantaneous destruction of two million soldiers in the field. Against all of which the second word of the title is disposed of in a line: Bovril is a beef extract, boasting of imaginary benefits.

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