Original Order

The Original Order, which Annette Lundström also identifies as Pythia’s instructions, is the doctrine used to organize her family’s beliefs and practices. It gives sacred language to their games, their isolation from the surrounding community, and their account of how children should be raised. In Annette’s conversation with Sofia Zetterlund, the doctrine’s promise of a child-centered original world is inseparable from adult authority over children and from the family’s history of moving them between homes.

Name and Function

Annette names the Original Order when asked about the ground rules associated with Polcirkeln, Sihtunum, and Denmark. Her answer connects the rules to Pythia’s instructions, presenting them not as an improvised family custom but as guidance with an authoritative source. The evidence does not set out a complete code or identify Pythia further; the Order is instead made legible through the beliefs and conduct Annette describes.

The Order also gives the family a way to explain its difference from the people around it. In the remembered setting of Polcirkeln in 1981, Annette sees the Lundströms as outcasts whom no one in the village will speak to. She believes the neighbors object to the family’s games because they do not understand them, and contrasts their exclusion from that knowledge with the family’s ability to sing the Psalms of the Lamb and follow the Original Order. The doctrine thus marks an inward boundary: belonging depends on accepting a way of life that outsiders neither share nor recognize.

The Home of Shadows and Its Rules

Annette’s account associates the Original Order with the Home of Shadows, which she describes as an original country where humanity can be close to God. It is a land of children, but not one reserved for children: adults who understand ancient human life belong there too. Annette imagines men, women, and children hand in hand, and insists that everyone is a child within. This language makes childhood a spiritual ideal and a shared identity, while leaving adults in a position to define what that ideal means in practice.

The doctrine also distinguishes life inside the Home of Shadows from conduct in the outside world. Annette recites an instruction to behave modestly in body and spirit beyond it, because other people do not understand the adherents, wish them harm, and may slander and imprison them. The rule turns social hostility into part of the doctrine’s account of reality: suspicion from outsiders can be interpreted as proof that the group is misunderstood and threatened. In this way, the instruction offers both a behavioral standard and a rationale for guardedness.

Family Practice and the Movement of Children

The Order appears in the circumstances of Annette’s childhood as well as in her theological language. She was engaged to Karl Lundström when she was twelve, and he was nearly nineteen; he was also her cousin. Annette says that she loved him and expected them to have a child of love when she was old enough. The village’s rejection of this relationship is, in her account, part of the broader rejection of the family and its beliefs. Her certainty about the engagement shows how the family’s internal framework can make a relationship condemned by the community appear meaningful and legitimate from within.

The family’s impending departure is likewise narrated through the Order’s social world. Annette says that the family must leave because every neighbor has turned against them, and that Viggo Dürer has helped arrange the move. She expects to start at Sigtuna boarding school in the autumn, where she hopes to find people like herself who will understand. She also says that without Viggo the family would be nothing: he has shown them how the world really is and is now helping them when others have rejected them. His role makes the doctrine more than a set of ideas; in Annette’s account, it is tied to the person who interprets their situation and organizes a route out of it.

Annette later describes children known as Viggo Dürer’s adopted children. She says he helped them come to Sweden from terrible conditions abroad, that they lived on the farm until he found new families for them, and that their stays could last only days or as long as a few months. The family raised them according to Pythia’s word. This account places child migration, temporary residence, and placement with other families inside the Order’s stated system of care. It does not establish the children’s individual circumstances or the details of each placement, but it does show how religious instruction framed adults’ decisions about where children lived and who would raise them.

Disclosure and Narrative Significance

Sofia Zetterlund hears Annette’s explanation during a psychiatric encounter, where Annette speaks of the Home of Shadows and repeats its instruction about the hostile outside world. Sofia recognizes the language and connects it with the sanctuary Karl Lundström had also described. As the conversation develops, she suspects that Annette’s psychosis may contain an element of truth and may function as a confession. That is Sofia’s interpretation, not an independent confirmation of every part of Annette’s account; the distinction keeps the disclosure uncertain even as it makes the doctrine newly consequential.

The account of the adopted children sharpens that uncertainty. Annette presents their movement between the farm and new families as rescue and upbringing under Pythia’s word. Sofia’s reaction, however, is to see in the Home of Shadows a country for children created by adults for their own desires. The contrast exposes the distance between the Order’s idealized language of childhood and the power adults exercise over actual children. The doctrine’s significance lies in that tension: it promises spiritual closeness and protection while also supplying terms through which control, exclusion, and the transfer of children can be understood as justified care.