Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi

Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi is both the practical force behind Atu’s spiritual enterprise and the disciple whose devotion becomes inseparable from possessiveness. She organizes his life, exercises authority over access to the Academy, and secures unusual independence for herself; yet the intimacy she wants from Atu remains denied. Her journey from resourceful operator to killer is driven by that contradiction, and by her conviction that a child of hers should inherit his mission.

Identity and independence

Pirjo’s talent for reading people is apparent in a brief telephone exchange with Lionel, a nervous man who says he wants to become a singer. She notices his uncertainty immediately and recognizes his potential usefulness. That instinct informs her more elaborate business: she runs two paid advice lines, the Light of the Oracle and the Holistic Chain, charging thirty Danish kroner per minute. On Mondays she presents herself as a psychologist on one line; on Wednesdays, as a therapist on the other. A voice generator gives each persona a distinct sound, helping conceal that both services are hers.

The calls are lucrative, and the income belongs to Pirjo alone. She built the operation herself, turning callers’ everyday details, modest dreams, and disappointments into interpretations that could give them something to anticipate. She regards this not simply as deception but as a kind of useful guidance: her clients receive hope, while she retains the power to shape what they hear. Atu permits no other person associated with the Academy to run an independent business. Pirjo’s exception reflects both her competence and the privileges she has established through her importance to him.

That competence extends beyond money. She is Atu’s extra hand and think tank, as well as his diary writer, organizer, and coordinator. Her authority is real, but it does not satisfy her deepest desire. The distinction between influence and intimacy becomes the pressure point of her life: she can help direct Atu’s world without being loved by him as she wants.

Devotion to Atu and the limits of intimacy

Pirjo has been with Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi from the beginning, when he was known as Frank. As the years pass, she becomes the last disciple who followed him through that earlier life and into his later identity. Their long cooperation and intimacy make her indispensable, but Atu does not treat her as he treats his other women. He tells her, “We two make love with our souls, my friend,” and describes her as giving him his most important orgasms through the gentleness and insight of her soul. Pirjo hates hearing this. She does not consider herself gentle or chaste, and spiritual closeness is no substitute for the physical desire she wants him to return.

Their arrangement began with celibacy. For the first few years, they abstained from sex so that the soul could feed freely into all available energy. When Frank later decided he was ready for bodily relationships with others, Pirjo reluctantly accepted the change, although he was the only person she wanted. His transformation into Atu also established her as Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi, the vestal beside him. Her role became that of his knight and servant: more desirable than the position of many disciples, but restrictive all the same. She wants the arrangement to change, and the gap between her service and her unfulfilled desire shapes the choices she makes afterward.

Wanda, jealousy, and violence

In September 2013, Pirjo reads Wanda Phinn’s message about her imminent arrival ten times. Although gut instinct is not part of the Academy’s teachings, Pirjo trusts hers, and each imagined consequence leads back to the same fear: Wanda will enter and conquer the world Pirjo shares with Atu. Pirjo has rejected Wanda’s request to join a course, but Wanda is coming anyway. Pirjo also knows that Atu’s curiosity and libido could be awakened if he saw the message. She considers herself better able than anyone to manage his weaknesses, and decides that Wanda must not be allowed to reach the Academy.

On Öland, Pirjo sees an opportunity to make Wanda’s arrival fatal. As they travel toward the windmills, she talks about the island’s history: families divided land among themselves until the parcels became too small to sustain them, and people had to leave rather than starve. Pirjo turns that history into an accusation about collective selfishness, calling Öland the island of egotism. While Wanda appears calm, Pirjo pulls her arm and drives her hip into Wanda’s lower back, trying to send her tumbling among vegetation, stumps, and rocks. She anticipates that a fall might kill Wanda; if not, she has a spade. Wanda does fall, but catches Pirjo around the waist as she loses her balance. The plan does not unfold as intended, yet the episode’s aftermath makes clear how far Pirjo has gone: in October she washes her boots, trouser legs, spade, and scooter after what she calls her third murder.

The cleanup takes place in the Academy’s Stable of Senses, a rose-colored building where new disciples usually seek comfort by stroking ponies and breathing in the smell of straw and horse droppings. Pirjo is alone because the others are meditating. She tries to tell herself that the murder is insignificant in the larger scheme, but her red forearms and pounding heart register what the doctrine cannot erase. Her attempt to reduce violence to an unimportant detail stands in sharp contrast to the physical evidence she must wash away.

A hoped-for heir

Pirjo’s fear of losing her place beside Atu intensifies when she learns that Malena has had an abortion. Atu tells Pirjo that Malena miscarried and that Pirjo was absent when he needed her, including when Malena was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Pirjo first tries to absorb the news, then understands it through her own longing: she cannot bear to share Atu while her fertility wanes. She decides that it should be her child he fathers, and imagines that child as his successor and a new savior. Motherhood is not simply a private hope for her; she sees it as the means of securing a permanent place in the future of Atu’s mission.

Later, when Carl Mørck sees Pirjo at the Academy, another disciple identifies her as Atu’s right hand and their mother, and says that she is carrying his child. The pregnancy brings Pirjo’s ambition into public view. At a gathering, Atu invites her onto the podium and gives her two small stones: the sunstones from Knarhøj and the sunstone amulet from Rispebjerg. He asks her to guard them, linking the objects to their ancestors and faith. He also says that, if she bears him a son, the child will be called Amelnaru and will carry the message into the world. Atu places his cloak over Pirjo’s shoulders. The gesture confers a visible office upon her at the moment her imagined succession seems closest to reality.

Collapse and recognition

Carl Mørck and Assad interrupt what Pirjo regards as the most precious moment of her life. Shaking, she knows she has overreacted, but cannot bring herself to reproach herself: she sees the two unconscious men as blasphemers who have intruded on holy ground and threatened the future she has waited for. In the control room, she binds them with non-insulated cable. She pulls down their sleeves, winds the cable around their arms, ties them to a bench and old butcher’s hooks, and then binds their bodies together. The exactness of the procedure shows the same organizing capacity that serves Atu in daily life turned toward coercion.

As Pirjo’s bleeding increases, she feels the bodily signals she associates with pregnancy cease. She begins to cry, convinced that the baby is dead inside her. Her grief is bound up with the future she has assigned to the child: she thinks she will never have Atu impregnate her again, never bear the successor she imagined, and never receive the promised union at the timber circle. She is lost beside the telephone and sees no reason to call for help or save herself when the future she had built around the pregnancy has vanished.

A final realization threatens the story Pirjo has told herself about her violence. If Atu has not killed anyone, then she may have acted on a lie: she has killed three women and nearly killed a fourth, Shirley, consumed by jealousy and misunderstanding. The recognition does not undo what she has done; it exposes the distance between the sacred purpose she claimed and the harm she inflicted. Pirjo’s tragedy is therefore not only that the child and future she wanted are lost, but that the authority and devotion she cultivated have become instruments of a violent delusion.