The Coming Race appeared anonymously in May 1871: a narrator descends into caverns and meets the Vril-ya, an advanced subterranean race channeling vril, a unified force of destruction and healing, through staffs. Bulwer-Lytton explained in a letter that he meant electricity, not mysticism: a race charged with that electricity, able to direct it. There is no evidence he was an occultist; when the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia made him Grand Patron in 1870, he complained by letter in 1872. The claim was never revoked.
Blavatsky, Scott-Elliot, and Steiner treated the book as cloaked occult truth. In 1960, Pauwels and Bergier's Morning of the Magicians asserted a real Vril Society in Weimar Berlin, and the legend compounded into the Nazi-occult industrial complex, complete with Haushofer, channeling mediums, and disc craft, a cathedral built on a novel its own author defined as a thought experiment.
The claim: vril demonstrates that invented forces convert to believed forces faster than revealed ones, because fiction arrives pre-optimized for memorability, and the twentieth century's darkest occult-political mythos was substantially crowd-sourced from a Victorian entertainment. Verdict: the mechanism is real and this archive tracks its siblings, Enochian started as a séance, Thelema as a dictated book. The disturbing part is the asymmetry: authors cannot take the power back. Bulwer-Lytton complained, and the claim was never revoked.
What happens to a metaphor when a civilization decides to believe it?