The Vril Society was a fictitious secret society that is said to have existed in Germany in the early to mid-twentieth century. A series of conspiracy theories and pseudohistorical texts, starting with The Morning of the Magicians (1960), claim that it was involved in the rise of Nazism and used supernatural energies to develop innovative flying machines during the Nazi era or "Reichsflugscheiben".

There is no historical evidence that this was the name of a secret society, nor for the achievements attributed to it; however historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke acknowledged the existence of a small group that actually believed in the so-called vril energy, but he denied it played a significant political role, while Giorgio Galli, although believing the legends surrounding it to be exaggerated, pays close attention to the Vril Society, which he considers historically documented and significant for its occult influences on nazism.

The term Vril was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) for his novel The Coming Race (1871), and likely derives from the Latin term virilis (manly, powerful). Bulwer-Lytton used the term for a supposed vital energy which grants its users with telepathy, telekinesis, and a number of other abilities.

The word Vril comes from the novel The Coming Race published in 1871 by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) and was probably derived from the Latin word virilis (manly', 'powerful'). In this novel, the narrator encounters a subterranean race of humans, the Vril-Ya, who possess a psychic vital energy called Vril that is far superior to that of the human race. The Vril powers enable them to use telepathy and telekinesis and allow them to influence any form of animate or inanimate matter to heal, to resurrect the dead or to destroy. Originally a people who lived on the surface of the earth, the Vril-ya were cut off from the rest of humanity by a natural disaster and moved into an underground cave system where they found a new home. There, in a history marked by wars and social upheaval, they eventually evolved into an egalitarian society practicing eugenics, superior to all other races, through the discovery of a new force of nature - the Vril Force. Through contact with the novel's narrator, the Vril-ya learn about the humans living on the surface of the Earth and question him in detail about human society. The narrator manages to escape from the realm of the Vril-ya and at the end of the novel he warns his readers of the danger that the Vril-ya would pose to humanity if they were ever to return to the surface.

While contemporary critics saw The Coming Race as satire, other sections of the public regarded it as an occultist roman à clef. In these circles, the view was held that Bulwer-Lytton was a member of the Rosicrucians and that the "Vril" force was an actually existing universal life force. According to this view, the novel was merely a vehicle with which Bulwer-Lytton wanted to communicate secret knowledge to his readers under the guise of anonymity.

Helena Blavatsky and other occult authors adopted the term "Vril" as a synonym for secret natural forces that could only be used by magic. In Blavatsky's first work Isis unveiled (1877), Vril was portrayed as a real, independent force.

In her second book The Secret Doctrine in 1888, she described how the inhabitants of Atlantis had used Vril to build colossal structures. After the fall of Atlantis, a small group of surviving priests would have preserved this knowledge and only passed it on to a select few. This psychic energy should therefore allow the mastery of all of nature. Several books mention a Vril-ya Club founded in London in 1904, which is said to have addressed this issue. Bulwer-Lytton's writings are passed on in the New Thought movement.

It was particularly momentous that the theosophist William Scott-Elliot described the vril in his 1896 pamphlet The Story of Atlantis in connection with airships, which it served as the driving force behind. This characteristic of the vril, already described in The Coming Race, became a main reference for certain developments after World War II due to Scott-Elliot's explicit Atlantis association.