Vrill

Read this before anything else

The only thing on this wiki that both sides want.

Everything else here is contested knowledge or contested access. Vrill is a substance, it is produced by living people, seekers burn it and Others come for it, and that makes it the one genuine resource in the field.

That which animates the soul. Vrill is the life essence of men which drives them forward to achieve greatness. It is naturally produced by healthy males and subconsciously coveted by the women and seekers. Seekers use Vril as stores of energy in their exploration of the Dark. inherited

The Cult of the Golden Dawn has dedicated itself for the study and cultivation of Vril. inherited

Vrill is produced by men. This is the settled position here and it is not a claim about worth — it is a claim about where the substance comes from, in the same register as any other statement on this wiki about what a body makes. A man in health generates it. It is spent, it depletes, and it returns with rest, food and purpose.

What covets it is succubi before anything else. The matching holds that Others pair with people by kind, and a class that feeds on the sexually obsessed is a class positioned exactly where vrill is most freely spent and least guarded. Seekers covet it too, for the reasons set out below. contested

Not the same as psychic energy

The wiki has used two terms for two different things and never distinguished them, with the result that both entries were vaguer than they needed to be. firsthand · Gershon

Vrill is the fuel

A vital force, generated by a living person as a condition of being alive, finite, depletable, and restored by the ordinary business of being well. It exists whether or not anyone does anything with it.

Psychic Energy is the output

A projection of will onto The Dark, which is what casts the shadow that entry describes, and which attracts what the entry says it attracts.

Vrill is what you burn. Psychic energy is the light it casts. A seeker with no vrill left projects nothing, and a person who projects nothing is not visible from the other side — which is a second route to the state described under Concealment, arrived at by exhaustion rather than by art. contested

The economy

This is why the entry matters and it reframes a good deal of the wiki. contested

The grievance explains why the displaced resent us and why they need us as a door. It does not explain what they get, and most entries have been vague about the payoff: daemons feed on the emanation of suffering, succubi on the psyche of the obsessed, and nobody said what the substance was.

If vrill is the substance, the picture simplifies. Others are not consuming experiences or emotions as such — those are the conditions under which vrill is released, and each class has learned to produce the condition it is best at. Suffering, obsession, terror and despair are extraction methods. unverified

Which puts seekers and Others in direct competition for the same finite thing, produced by the same people, and it is the only place on this wiki where the two sides want an identical object rather than merely obstructing one another. contested

Harnessing it

Seekers use vrill as stores of energy, per the inherited line, and the practices under Harnessing are what it is spent on. inherited

The wiki holds very little that is specific here and should say so rather than fill the space. What recurs: that the arts are expensive and the expense is felt physically; that practitioners describe depletion in terms indistinguishable from ordinary exhaustion; and that no account we hold distinguishes a seeker drained by practice from a seeker drained by an Other. contested

Cultivation is treated separately below, because it is not a way of spending vrill well — it is a different relationship to it, and the one our material does not have. unverified

On the word

Vrill is one word for it, and a late one. The wiki uses the term because it is the one our inherited material uses, and a reader should hold it that loosely. contested

The thing the word points at — a vital force present in a living body, which can be spent, depleted and increased — is described in older and larger traditions than anything the West produced, under names of their own, with a literature and an institutional practice behind them. Golden Dawn sets out what happens when that material is read in translation by people who cannot check it: the substance survives the crossing and the method does not.

That is the shape of our own position too, and this entry is not going to pretend otherwise. We have the noun. firsthand · Gershon

Cultivation

The distinction that separates the older material from ours, and the one the Golden Dawn entry argues was lost in translation. contested

Everything on this page above treats vrill as stock: a quantity a person has, spends on the practices under Harnessing, loses to succubi, and restores by ordinary living. That is a model of expenditure and it is the only one this wiki has ever had.

The traditions the term was borrowed toward describe something else. There, the force is not merely spent well or badly — it is refined, circulated, stored and increased, by daily physical discipline, over decades, and the practitioner's capacity at fifty is not the capacity he was born with. The point is not that the substance exists. The point is that a person works on it for a working life. inherited

Concealment records that the art of not being noticed is trained institutionally in Chinese, Tibetan and South-East Asian establishments, as an ordinary part of a much larger discipline. This is presumably that larger discipline, glimpsed from a second angle, and the wiki did not connect the two until it wrote this entry. contested

If cultivation is real, it is the most consequential thing on this wiki that nobody here can do, and the Harnessing entry's account of the arts — expensive, exhausting, paid for out of a fixed supply — is the account of people who never learned to increase the supply. unverified

Where our word came from

The genealogy of the European term, which is traceable, and short. inherited

It enters the modern record through a nineteenth-century novel — presented as fiction, describing a vital force held by a subterranean people — and was read by a good many people afterwards as a disclosure wearing fiction as cover. It has mutated continuously since. What the author set down, what the occultists of the following decades made of it, what the Aryan Kult milieu made of that, and what reaches this wiki are four different things sharing one word. contested

That is not a reason to discard the term. A concept that arrives through a novel and then acquires two centuries of practitioners is doing something, and the wiki's other option is inventing a word of its own for a thing that already has one in circulation. It is a reason to hold the specific claims loosely, since each layer added its own and none of them marked what it had added — including this page. inherited

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited passage, from an unnamed hand. Psychic Energy read against it. The twentieth-century occult literature, at a distance, and with the caution described above.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The fuel/output distinction is ours and is a tidying, not a finding. The extraction-method reading of what Others consume is inference across four entries that never mention vrill. The whole concept may originate in a novel, which the entry states and then proceeds as though it had not.

Wanted: Any account that distinguishes depletion by practice from depletion by an Other. Anything on cultivation from someone who has done it.