Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi

Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi is the spiritual persona Frank Brennan creates for himself: a charismatic teacher who promises renewal through nature absorption and the energy of the sun, but whose authority rests on an increasingly unequal relationship with his closest disciple, Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi. His story traces how a language of spiritual liberation becomes both a public performance and a means of organizing private loyalties.

Identity and Formation

Atu first reaches Wanda Phinn through the Nature Absorption Academy London Branch, where Shirley invites her to an introductory course. The Academy’s promotional account presents him as a radiant spirit from a Scandinavian dream world, bringing a teaching that can unite humanity through its understanding of energy and connection. In person, however, he is neither an otherworldly ascetic nor a guru posed in serene stillness. He appears as a man of flesh and blood, smiling as he describes nature absorption as a path by which each cell might resist attack and the body might merge with the surrounding universe. In a modest Bayswater apartment, he leads the seated group through rhythmic breathing and the repeated “Abanshamash” chant. His charisma is made concrete through this intimate performance: he walks among his listeners, and his words and gaze encourage them to relax into the experience.

The identity of Atu grows out of Frank Brennan’s earlier life in Copenhagen. After Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi had been expelled from a youth house and spent a month homeless, Frank offered her a different account of how to escape bodily need and unhappiness: spiritual practice and meditation could free the person through the cultivation of the soul. They worked at Burger King on Rådhuspladsen, while devoting their remaining time to experiments in mysticism, including clairvoyance, yoga, horoscopes, and tarot. Their first years together were celibate, in keeping with their effort to reserve energy for spiritual development.

Frank eventually announced that he was ready to experience his body with others. The change was not shared equally: he left celibacy for himself, while Pirjo, who desired him, reluctantly accepted that she did not want sex with anyone else. This turn established both his new persona, Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi, and Pirjo’s identity as Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi. From then on, she was chiefly his knight and servant, a privileged position within their undertaking that also confined her. The gap between the spiritual partnership they proclaimed and the intimacy she wanted became one of the central tensions in his life.

Authority, Disciples, and Private Power

Atu’s teaching is not confined to the intimate London introduction. By October 2013, he is leading a hall full of followers in a collective ritual, asking them to feel one another and to gather their attention around Malena’s pain, although Malena herself is absent. The ceremony makes the group’s shared feeling part of his authority: he names the experience, directs its emotional focus, and turns an individual crisis into a communal spiritual exercise. Later, at another gathering, he speaks at length in English about living in symbiosis with nature and renouncing dogmas and beliefs in favor of the universe and the life-giving sun. His doctrine thus combines an invitation to abandon fixed authority with the conspicuous authority of the man who tells the assembly how to live.

That authority operates alongside a personal hierarchy in which Pirjo’s service is indispensable but her desires are not reciprocated. She has become Atu’s organizer, coordinator, diary writer, and thinking partner, and the last disciple still beside him from the period when he was known as Frank. Yet he tells her that their love is spiritual, assigning her a special role in his life while withholding the physical intimacy she longs for. The distinction is not merely between public doctrine and private conduct: Pirjo’s position as his trusted companion gives her closeness and responsibility, while leaving her unable to claim the kind of relationship she wants. Her knowledge of him, accumulated over years, later becomes a source of warning to other women as well as a measure of how little the partnership has given her.

Malena’s pregnancy exposes the force of Atu’s expectations around discipleship and childbearing. Pirjo tells Malena that she is the third woman by Atu whose pregnancy has ended in miscarriage, that he has no children despite being over forty, and that he wants a child more than anything. According to Pirjo, Atu sees Malena’s miscarriage as an abyss of negative energy and feels betrayed; she warns that if Malena returns to the center, he will sacrifice her to the sea, as she claims happened to the other two women. This is Pirjo’s account and warning, not an independently confirmed explanation of the earlier deaths. Even so, it shows how the Academy’s spiritual language can make pregnancy signify far more than an individual relationship: loss is framed as a crisis of energy and loyalty, while the threat Pirjo describes turns that framework into a claim of lethal power.

The same pregnancy changes how Atu treats Pirjo, without resolving their old imbalance. When she is carrying his child, he draws close and caresses her belly; she understands their shared intimacy as being about the baby and their unity, not sexual desire. He now regards her as a sacred figure of embodied fertility, in addition to her established role as vestal and squire. Pirjo, however, privately intends to ask him to impregnate her again after the birth, hoping that another pregnancy will eventually provide the physical intimacy she has never received from him. The difference between his reverence for her as a bearer of life and her wish to be desired as a woman keeps their relationship divided even at its most intimate.

Recognition, Exposure, and Death

The search for Atu brings Carl Mørck and Assad to a gathering where the teacher appears in a yellow garment with colorful ornamentation. His long ash-blond hair, dark eyebrows, light skin, and dimpled chin make the identification unmistakable: despite the years that have passed, he is the man they have been seeking. He enters to a chant of “Abanshamash,” first speaking alone and then leading the assembly in unison. The scene restores the public ritual of his authority, but now Carl and Assad are present as investigators, watching the performance rather than being drawn into it.

At the gathering, Atu delivers an extended account of how to live in symbiosis with nature, urging his listeners to renounce dogma and belief and give themselves to the universe and the life-giving sun. The language presents surrender as liberation, even as the ceremony remains directed by Atu himself. When he turns to the woman who began the proceedings, he says he has learned the name of their child through Zini, the spirit of the wind. The scene’s mystical language thus sits beside the concrete personal stakes already shaping his relationships and expectations around pregnancy.

Pirjo eventually confronts Atu with the accusation that he killed Alberte Goldschmid, the girl he had been with on Bornholm. The accusation unsettles him; in the exchange that follows, a memory begins to return. He recalls Bjarke Habersaat as an admiring helper at the excavations on Knarhøj, then remembers Bjarke offering him a figure and declaring his love. Atu says he rejected him and told him they were leaving; Bjarke responded that everything was Alberte’s fault. Atu concludes that Bjarke was the one who did it. The recollection gives the accusation a new direction, tying the wooden figure and Bjarke’s attachment to Atu to the unresolved death, without turning the memory into a simple or complete account of what happened.

At Bjarke’s funeral, June Habersaat draws a pistol as Atu calls her name in desperation. The people gathered at the graveside hesitate and then move back. June’s weapon is knocked from her hand, and she flees over the churchyard wall, while Carl directs Assad to pursue her. Atu lies beside the grave with one foot across it, shot twice in the stomach and once in the shoulder. The priest checks his pulse and confirms that he is dead. One bullet has passed through the place where Atu’s tattoo reads “RIVER,” a detail Carl remembers as he looks at the body. Atu’s death comes at the island churchyard associated with its fabled Templar mysteries, a setting that makes his self-fashioned identity as guardian of enigma and son of the sun end in stark physical finality.

Wanda’s Attraction and the Academy’s Contradictions

At the London introduction, Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi’s authority becomes personal for Wanda Phinn when he caresses her cheek and calls her his flower. She loses consciousness and, on coming to, finds herself enthralled by his eyes and the sensation of his lips on the back of her hand. The encounter becomes a turning point: she leaves her job without notice, convinced that life at the Academy is the future she has dreamed of. Shirley warns that the attraction may amount to no more than flirting and that Atu can have any woman he wants, but Wanda treats the warning as an obstacle to a chosen destiny rather than a reason to turn back.

Later, when Shirley comes to the Academy asking about the friend who had travelled there, she says she has heard that Wanda never arrived. Atu responds that he remembers her from the London course and recalls her as attractive and mixed-race. The exchange places his confident public welcome beside an unresolved absence: he recognizes the woman whom the Academy’s reception says is not there, while Pirjo reacts with sudden alarm. The discrepancy does not by itself establish what happened to Wanda, but it sharpens the contrast between the promise that the Academy offers newcomers and the uncertainty surrounding those who disappear from its orbit.