Ølene commune

Ølene commune was a summer community on Bornholm and a formative part of Frank Brennan’s spiritual life. Its members were described as a spiritual family of disciples, connected less by a clearly defined formal structure than by shared inquiry into religion, healing, and alternative knowledge. The novel later recalls the community through the people who passed through it—and through the secrecy and coercion that emerge around some of its former members.

Community and spiritual network

Frank lived at Ølene commune for an entire summer, a period one former resident remembered as a good time. Frank and the resident disagreed, but their conversations were described as particularly rewarding. The community thus appears as a place of argument as well as affiliation: membership did not require agreement, and discussion itself helped bind its participants.

The commune’s connections extended into the alternative-therapy world. Frank visited practitioners to learn their methods and sought to bring together knowledge from healing, religion, and ancient sciences. In this network, the people living at Ølene were understood as his spiritual family and disciples. An Aura-Soma therapist was among those connected to the group; on one occasion, another disciple accompanied Frank when he visited her to strengthen his aura. The episode suggests a network that crossed the boundary between communal life and individual therapeutic practice.

Frank, archaeology, and competing ideas

Frank’s interests also took him to the excavations at Rispebjerg, where he and a former commune resident both participated. Frank felt a particular attachment to the site because of its sun offerings and the evidence of ancient cultures. The former resident disclosed, sotto voce, that Frank had stolen one of the excavated sunstones. The theft gives a concrete, illicit edge to his reverence for the past: his fascination with ancient solar practice was not only theoretical but attached to an object taken from the excavation.

People associated with Ølene commune did not all build successful lives in the alternative world. One former resident dismissed Søren Mølgård as a passing hippie who lacked the talent to become a numerologist, despite trying to follow that path. The account presents the commune as a point of departure rather than a guarantee of shared vocation or lasting achievement: some people made a good go of alternative work, while others did not grasp the order they believed a worldview required.

Membership, secrecy, and later control

Pirjo’s recollection of the commune is marked by the risks of disclosure. While pregnant, she considered contacting Søren Mølgård after hearing that he might speak, but decided against it because he could reveal that she had called. She regarded him as the commune’s weakest link, someone who repeatedly succumbed to temptation. Pirjo believed that, apart from Atu, she alone among the people from Ølene knew anything about Alberte. This is her assessment, not independent confirmation, but it shows how the community’s past becomes bound up with guarded knowledge and the fear that an unreliable former member might expose it.

The novel also links the language of discipleship and inner-circle membership to Pirjo’s later treatment of Shirley at the center. Pirjo tells Shirley that she cannot remain or enter the inner circle, then offers her a recruiting role for a London office, presenting exclusion as an opportunity. Behind that conciliatory offer, Pirjo is considering how to eliminate Shirley and whether a cable kit from the garage could be used to electrocute her. The episode concerns Pirjo’s conduct rather than establishing that every former commune member shared her actions; it nevertheless shows how communal belonging and spiritual authority can be manipulated by someone who controls access to the group.

Isolation and the cost of belonging

Shirley is shown a new purification house in the center’s quarters: a high-ceilinged, wood-clad room with skylights about seven or eight metres above the floor, but no ordinary view outside. The beautiful materials and colored tiles do not alter the practical effect of the room: Shirley recognizes that she will be unable to see what is happening beyond it. In the surrounding community, disciples are summoned for meals and communal meditation, but Shirley waits for food that does not arrive. After three days without a plausible explanation, the water stops running as well.

The building’s solid carpentry, admired by Shirley’s captors as craftsmanship, becomes an obstacle when she tries to escape. She manages to loosen the wallboard by no more than about one and a half millimetres, then decides to wrench a metal drainpipe from beneath the sink and use it to break through. These details make the contrast between spiritual language and lived conditions tangible: a purification room and communal order become, for Shirley, confinement, deprivation, and an urgent struggle to get out. The commune’s importance to the wider story lies partly in this contrast between a network founded on shared spiritual inquiry and the later use of belonging, secrecy, and ritualized settings as instruments of control.