Odd little cultural fossil here on the placard of this Victorian conspiracy theorist. The Australian not the c.19th kind, though this is a story about the 1870s. https://twitter.com/cameronwilson/status/1259358902048575488

It goes back to 1871, when Edward Bulwer-Lytton published his science fiction novella, The Coming Race. That race, the Vril-ya, live in cities built within a vast subterranean cave system, where they listen to organ recitals and leave chores to anthropomorphic robots.

The robots - like everything else in their realm – by a strange biological energy called Vril. They can discharge this from their bodies like their own personal lightning.

Some readers couldn’t rid themselves of the thought that it was something more than fiction. The theosophist Madame Blavatsky borrowed from Lytton to write her 1888 book The Secret Doctrine, blurring the distinction between his fiction and her revealed wisdom.

In 1891, a doctor called Herbert Tibbits – inventor of an electrical massage corset - financed the “Coming Race bazaar” at the Albert Hall, where the British aristocracy cosplayed as Vril-ya below a canvas of the Sphinx. It was not well-attended, and Tibbits went bankrupt.

In 1904, Arthur Lovell founded the Vril-ya Club, whose members were exhorted to develop their nerve-energy and inhale and exhale themselves closer to the status of Bulwer-Lytton’s supermen.

It’s this tradition that modern conspiracy theorists have incorporated into their worldview, and why bit of Victorian sci-fi is memorialised among with all the other nonsense on this woman’s placard.

A real conspiracy theorist, though, would also incorporate the signs of the Vril-ya that you’ll see on the shelves of British supermarkets, at the football ground pie stall, and possibly in your cupboard at home.

It’s there because in 1888, a product called Johnson’s Fluid Beef was rebranded by its makers. They took the Latin for cow – bovus – and the name of Bulwer-Lytton’s superhuman energy.