Pythia’s instructions

Pythia’s instructions are an alleged body of ancient, unquestionable teaching and, in Karl Lundström’s account to his daughter, the title of a book he often read. That uncertainty is central to the rule’s significance: what first sounds like a text turns out, in Jens Hurtig’s understanding, to be a set of rules and truths men invented for their own purposes. The doctrine lends authority to harmful actions by presenting them as sanctioned by collective precedent, even as Karl’s own conscience continues to register that something is wrong.

The name and its competing meanings

Linnea Lundström tells Sofia Zetterlund that her father often spoke of a book called Pythia’s Instructions, although he never showed it to her. Reading a letter from Karl, Sofia recognizes his language about a home of shadows from their first meeting at Huddinge Hospital, where he had described it as a metaphor for a secret, forbidden place. The letter then turns toward questions of desire, history, and responsibility, and invokes Pythia as an oracle who never lies. Linnea thinks her father sounds strange and suggests he was probably drunk; the letter’s later lines are illegible, beside a large dark-red stain that Sofia presumes is wine.

In a later conversation at Rosenlund Hospital, Hurtig asks Henrietta Dürer what Pythia’s instructions mean. She does not understand the question as a request about a book: she says she has never seen a book with that title and explains that the instructions are the original words, ancient and never to be questioned. She then falls silent and looks at the floor. Her answer does not establish whether Karl’s named book existed; instead, it reveals a second, more absolute meaning attached to the phrase. What Linnea knows as a title, Henrietta describes as inherited authority.

A rationale built from precedent

Karl’s letter sets out a logic in which desire and action are not solely matters of individual conscience. He argues that people want what thousands or perhaps millions have wanted before them, and that repetition in history makes their actions seem sanctioned. He places the impulses behind desire in the collective interaction of other people rather than in his own conscience. The reasoning offers a way to shift responsibility outward: if others have already acted in the same way, an individual may tell himself that his own conduct is permitted.

But the letter does not present that argument as a settled absolution. Karl writes that his conscience still tells him something is wrong, and that he does not understand the contradiction. His appeal to Pythia follows that admission: an infallible oracle might supply an answer where his reasoning and conscience do not. He also invokes Socrates’ recognition that a wise person knows what he does not know, then wonders whether recognizing his own ignorance makes him wise. In this sequence, the authority of Pythia is both sought and unsettled. Karl asks for certainty, but the letter records his uncertainty rather than resolving it.

Authority that must not be questioned

Henrietta’s account gives the rule its defining condition: the original words are ancient and must never be questioned. Their authority therefore rests not on a discussion of what they mean, but on their status as words that cannot be challenged. Hurtig interprets this as something reserved exclusively for men, a body of rules and truths they invented for their own purposes. He calls the process brainwashing. His conclusion is a character’s developing interpretation, prompted by Henrietta’s answer, rather than a verified history of the doctrine’s origins.

The contrast between Karl’s letter and Henrietta’s certainty is revealing. Karl’s writing circles around the possibility that collective practice might excuse an individual, but his conscience resists that conclusion. Henrietta, by contrast, presents the instructions as beyond question, then goes quiet. Together, the two moments show how the doctrine can operate at once as an argument about what people are allowed to do and as a demand not to examine the argument. Its claim to ancient authority closes off the very inquiry that Karl’s doubts reopen.

What the rule exposes

The phrase links an intimate family document to a wider system of male authority. Linnea encounters it as one part of her father’s writing; Sofia recognizes language associated with Karl’s earlier account of secrecy; Hurtig hears Henrietta describe inviolable teachings and begins to see a mechanism of indoctrination. The shifts in understanding matter: the supposed book is never produced, while the idea attached to its name is treated as ancient and binding.

The rule’s moral force is therefore double-edged. Collective precedent can make conduct appear normal or authorized, but it cannot silence Karl’s conscience in the letter. Pythia offers the promise of an answer beyond doubt, yet the scenes surrounding the phrase leave its authority entangled with secrecy, male invention, and the refusal to question. Pythia’s instructions function less as a clearly documented text than as a name for a doctrine whose power depends on being treated as unquestionable.