Wanda Phinn's infatuation with Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi

Wanda Phinn’s infatuation with Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi turns a brief encounter at a London course into a life-changing summons in her mind. His ritual words, attention, and touch become evidence that she is meant to join him; she leaves her job, studies the Nature Absorption Academy’s teachings, and travels toward Öland convinced that she will become his chosen partner. The intensity of her certainty contrasts with the limited basis for it: Atu’s apparent desire is something Wanda reads into an encounter that took place while he was leading a course, and Shirley sees a far less romantic possibility.

The encounter in London

During the course, Atu leads his followers in repeating the Abanshamash mantra. After the group has sat with eyes closed, Wanda experiences her orientation and desire to return to ordinary reality slipping away. When Atu tells the followers that their souls are beckoning and that they are ready, his language of recognition reaches her in a particularly intimate form. He tells each person that they are as beautiful as the sun itself, but when he comes to Wanda, he repeats the phrase and tells her to listen to her own soul and surrender herself.

The scene joins spiritual address to a physical and personal encounter. Wanda experiences Atu’s words as a long-awaited recognition; her eyes open of their own accord, her skin burns, and her hands twitch. He caresses her cheek and later stretches his palms toward her forehead. These gestures become the origin point of her attachment. Wanda remembers not only what he said but also the altered, involuntary bodily response she associates with his attention, so that the encounter seems to confirm the destiny she will later claim to have felt all her life.

From attraction to a chosen future

After the encounter, Wanda leaves her job in Victoria Embankment Gardens without handing in her notice. Her departure feels like relief: the park and its worries recede, and she imagines a future as one of a small number of chosen people. She tells Shirley that Atu is the future she has dreamed of. In Wanda’s account, his caress, calling her his flower, and kissing the back of her hand have made clear that their connection is more than a passing attraction.

Wanda gives the attachment a definite shape and a purpose. She tells Shirley that she wants to be Atu’s chosen one, to live according to his instructions, and to have his children; she feels called to this life. Shirley tries to interrupt that certainty. She points out that the academy’s buildings, rituals, and seaside setting may look enchanting from a screen, but argues that Wanda may discover that the encounter was only flirtation. She also warns that Atu can attract many women and draws attention to the woman who has already sent Wanda hostile looks. Wanda does not treat these cautions as reasons to reconsider her plan. Shirley’s warning instead helps Wanda name Pirjo as a rival who may have to be displaced.

The academy as promise and obstacle

Wanda writes to the Nature Absorption Academy on Öland to confirm her departure date and ask whether someone can collect her at Kalmar station. She says she wants to take more courses than she had first planned and, if possible, stay afterward as a volunteer spreading Atu’s thoughts and ideals. Her proposed future therefore extends beyond private romance: she imagines serving the academy and helping transmit its teachings as part of her life with him.

The reply that the courses are oversubscribed and that she should not expect a place that year fails to shake her conviction. Wanda believes that Atu will respond differently when he sees her again, and interprets the message’s sender, Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi, as confirmation that the anticipated contest with the older woman is real. She privately anticipates a potentially bloody fight, while also acknowledging that she has not worked out how to settle the score without Atu finding out. The obstacle sharpens rather than weakens the fantasy: Wanda begins to imagine arrival not as a visit dependent on an invitation, but as a confrontation she must prepare to win.

To prepare, she immerses herself in what she calls the universe’s alternative energy and repeatedly recites Atu’s statements about the academy. She reads and rereads its guiding principles until she feels they gather many forms of belief and goodness into one purified system, capable of drawing her away from what she considers ugly and mundane. The study gives her a sense of calm and removes, in her own experience, the last doubt about the project. She expects that her sensuality and understanding of the teachings will impress Atu and persuade him that she is worthy of him. Her faith in the future thus rests both on remembered intimacy and on a disciplined effort to make herself fit the role she has imagined.

The journey and the imagined marriage

Wanda proceeds despite not having been invited. She sends another email announcing when she will arrive and plans for resistance: if nobody meets her at the station, she has booked a hotel and brought enough money to stay for several weeks. She expects that persistence will eventually secure an audience with Atu. The practical arrangements show how firmly the imagined relationship has begun to govern her choices; uncertainty about access becomes a logistical problem, not a reason to abandon the journey.

On the train from Copenhagen, the landscape intensifies her sense that she is crossing into a new life. Farmland gives way to bedrock, long dry-stone walls, red wooden houses, and pine forests. Wanda experiences the journey as a fairy tale and the Swedish countryside as the setting of the kingdom and throne she believes await her. She imagines escaping herself and her past and living with Atu for the rest of her life. When a fellow traveler asks where she is going, she describes Öland as the place where she will meet her husband-to-be, then names Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi. Her declaration makes explicit how far her interpretation has advanced: the relationship she hopes to begin is already spoken of as a marriage in her mind.

The limits of what Wanda knows

Wanda’s conviction is built from a charged course encounter, her interpretation of Atu’s gestures, and her belief in the academy’s teachings. The evidence of personal commitment remains markedly narrower than the future she projects: Wanda thinks Atu desired her and believes they both understood that he could have been with her in London if the course had not occupied him. She treats the interruption as bad timing and imagines returning so that they can continue where they left off. That conclusion is hers; the account does not establish a mutual promise of marriage or a place for her at the academy.

This gap between a brief encounter and an elaborate imagined future gives the infatuation its defining tension. The same words and touches that Wanda experiences as recognition also leave room for Shirley’s warning that she has mistaken flirtation for an invitation. Yet Wanda does not simply wait for Atu to confirm her hopes. She leaves work, studies the doctrine, prepares to stay for weeks, anticipates conflict with Pirjo, and travels with the certainty that persistence will bring her before him. The attachment is therefore both romantic projection and an organizing commitment: it reshapes how Wanda reads rejection, interprets rivalry, and imagines her own future.