Perttu Häkkinen and Vesa Iitti. Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland. Inner Traditions, 2022.
This enjoyable read has in my view been given the wrong title. I would suggest 'Riotous Assembly' for what follows is just that: a smorgasbord of short biographies mostly from the twentieth century of some of Finland's most notorious characters involved in one form or another in the occult.
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At one extreme these characters can be described as eccentric if not certifiably mad. At the other end are some profound individuals genuinely in search of the transcendental, and in the middle a scattering of mischievous conmen. In the latter category the figure who immediately springs to mind is Ior Bock, the scion of a wealthy family who began his young adult life by accidentally shooting dead his brother Eric during boisterous indoor games for which he received a short term of imprisonment.
Bock later practiced a ritual involving 'lying on his back, with his legs bent over his head and his penis in his mouth - "so that he can drink his own semen". Wintering every year in Goa, it was there that he spun tales about his family. In essence he claimed that his family had fled Atlantis eons ago and that temple ruins from that era were located at Lemminkäinen back in Finland. So impressed were a number of his fellow countrymen that they began excavating the site suggested by him, even receiving financial backing from a local bank. It was all nonsense of course but attracted national interest until the Finnish National Board of Antiquities declared the 'temple' a natural formation.
At the more serious end of things is the case of Pekka Ervast, the 'Light of the North', who in 1906 opened the first Finnish branch of the Theosophical Society. He was something of a visionary who argued in 1929 in favour of the abolition of nation states and the establishment of a common currency. The underlying principle behind his thinking was his belief in the brotherhood of mankind. On the occult side of things, he received messages from the mythical demigod Väinäöinen, and also promoted freemasonry, in particular Le Droit Humain Freemasonry (open to both sexes).
Impressive though Pekka Ervast undoubtedly is, he appears dull by comparison to some of the other characters in the book. Amongst them stand out the Satanists. If Satanism as a religion appears flawed in the sense, as others have pointed out, that it can only exist by reference to Judaeo-Christianity, its participants seem to accept it as a form of heady materialism to be fully enjoyed. Whilst the calling of some religious fundamentalists seems to be to hypocritically condemn man and womankind's carnal pleasures, the Satanists in Finland ignored all that and just got on with having a good time.
A good example of this is Pekka Siitoin, 'the Archbishop of Lucifer', who achieved national notoriety partly through his written works in the 1970's. His book Black Magic, advised that Satan, 'hates love and wants it to be replaced by bodily lusts and 'animalistic orgies...' Siitoin did not omit in his writings to give precise instructions on how to conduct an orgy through three rituals. In the first four men and four women undress and put their clothes on the floor in the shape of a pyramid, they then stand opposite each staring at each others genitals for eight minutes. Then the men test the women with the fingers of the left hand. Those men who do not get aroused need more practice in the form of 'orgies or group sex', "Eating onions should help too".
Another ritual includes the proclamation, "O great Satan, here is my humble gift for you. May my cock be like a rock and cold like ice!" In all of this there seems to be little of the search for the transcendental and certainly no question of spiritual retreat from the world. Quite the contrary, Siitoin was heavily involved in politics, although the form it took was a national embarrassment since he advocated a form of neo-nazism, which was difficult to take seriously since he sometimes wore a Nazi uniform and even sported a Hitler moustache.
This is not to equate Satanism with the far right. The leftist Alias Reima Saarinem claimed he had hung out with the Red Army Faction and that he and his Korean girlfriend had been pro PLO sharp shooters in the Middle East. Saarinem was a magician/adept of the black arts familiar with Siitoin's Black Magic, as well as Crowley's doctrine of Thelema. Saarinem argued that, "our main leisure pursuit is, of course, the female body...the fact that there is a head on top of the female body is a side issue". Unpleasantly misogynistic though this may appear, perhaps the reverence for sex was a healthy development in a society that had been oppressed in the past by the misanthropy contained within the puritanism of northern Europe.
The authors though show that things in Finland seem to have moved full circle. In 1172 a Papal Bull had condemned the Finns for being 'twice the children of hell' for blasphemy and despising Christianity. When the Catholic Church in 2012 announced the consecration of Finland for the Virgin Mary, the Turku Society for the Spiritual Sciences responded by announcing a simultaneous nationwide ceremony,'to consecrate Finland for Satan'. It is of course impossible to assess the extent of devotion to Satan in Finnish society today but in one respect at least Satanists have proved important. As the authors point out Finnish Satanists have influenced a number of heavy metal bands in the country that has the highest number of such bands per capita in the world.
Noted above are just a few of the characters from this seriously impressive relation of Finland's recent occult history, and the reader will no doubt find himself not only entertained but also enlightened.
- Dr. Robin Carlile
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