Vrill
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 — 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
The word has a traceable genealogy, which is more than most terms on this wiki can offer. 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