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

The inherited passage is kept because the record is the record. Two things about it should be said plainly: the claim that it is produced by one sex and coveted by the other is unsupported by anything we hold, appears in no other entry, and is not what the rest of this page assumes. What the wiki now holds is that vrill is a general vital force produced by living people, and that the thing which covets it is not women but succubi. 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 — increasing the supply rather than spending it carefully — is what the Golden Dawn entry says that body dedicated itself to. We cannot say whether they achieved anything, and that entry explains why our information about them is worse than the citation above implies. unverified

On the word

Vril is a borrowed term with an awkward history and the wiki is not going to be coy about it. ⚠ warning

It enters the modern record through a nineteenth-century novel, is taken up by occultists who read it as a disclosure rather than as fiction, and is thereafter entangled with the milieu that produced the Aryan Kult — which is where a great deal of the twentieth-century literature on it comes from and why that literature reads the way it does. inherited

We use the word because it is the one in circulation and the one the inherited material uses. A recruit should know that the sources are contaminated at the root, that the concept may be entirely a literary invention that acquired believers, and that this is not a reason to discard it so much as a reason to distrust every specific claim attached to it — including the ones on this page. contested

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.