Pirjo and Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi

Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi and Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi are partners in building and maintaining the Nature Absorption Academy, but their closeness never becomes the mutual physical intimacy Pirjo desires. She is his oldest remaining disciple, trusted organizer, and practical right hand; he casts her instead as a vestal, a guardian of his life and work, while directing his sexual attention toward other women. Their relationship therefore joins institutional dependence to private frustration: Pirjo helps make Atu’s authority function, yet cannot make him love her in the way she longs to be loved.

A partnership built around the Academy

Atu’s appeal rests on a personal style that differs from the guru figures Pirjo and Wanda have encountered in brochures and on television. He is presented as a man of flesh and blood rather than a remote ascetic: smiling, alert, and able to make nature absorption seem like a route to bodily renewal and a feeling of unity with the surrounding universe. At the Nature Absorption Academy London Branch, in a simple Bayswater apartment, he walks among people seated on the floor and leads them in the repeated “Abanshamash” mantra. His physical presence and the group’s synchronized participation help turn his teaching into a shared experience, not merely a set of claims.

Pirjo’s own work gives that authority an administrative structure. She describes herself through action as Atu’s extra hand and think tank, as well as his diary writer, organizer, and coordinator. At gatherings she attends to the disciples’ rank and associations before he appears, arranging the order in which they occupy the hall. In October, dressed in white, she enters ahead of him and prepares the assembled followers; the ritual’s glass-tiled floor section, where Atu is expected to stand, is framed as a focal point for the gathering. Her labor prepares the scene in which his words can carry weight.

The work also grants Pirjo unusual independence within the organization. She runs two paid telephone-advice lines, presenting herself in different professional roles and using a voice generator to distinguish the Monday and Wednesday calls. The lines charge thirty Danish kroner per minute; the income is her own, and she is the only member of the nature absorption assembly whom Atu allows to operate a separate business while remaining associated with the Academy. The narrative connects her privileges to what Atu has to thank her for, making her position both a reward for service and a sign of how much the enterprise relies on her.

Intimacy without reciprocity

The arrangement that empowers Pirjo also confines her. Atu locks the door between her office and the atrium when he wants privacy with a new sexual partner. The click of the lock makes her tense, and the text presents this response as familiar: she has considered moving her office and tried to persuade him to move his quarters, but their rooms remain adjacent. Atu’s practical justification is that administration, supplies, and the two of them should remain close together. What he calls convenience leaves Pirjo repeatedly within earshot of the difference between her official closeness to him and his bodily intimacy with other women.

The contrast becomes especially sharp when Atu recruits women in places such as Barcelona, Venice, and London. He presents himself to them as an oracle and healer, and Pirjo sees him lift their sense of isolation toward the sun. Away from the island, she feels alone and insignificant, caught in jealousy. She has fought for her position as his assistant and confidante, but he does not look at her as he looks at those women.

Pirjo is the last disciple who has followed Atu from the beginning, when he was known as Frank. Their long history includes cooperation and intimacy, but not sex. Atu describes their bond in spiritual terms: “We two make love with our souls, my friend,” and “You give me my most important orgasms, sweetest Pirjo.” His language recasts her service and insight as a form of intimacy, while leaving untouched the desire she actually expresses. Pirjo hates being treated as gentle and chaste; she wants him to desire her as a woman, and imagines that one physical encounter might end her fixation on what has never happened. The gap between his definition of their closeness and hers is the central wound in their partnership.

Privilege, jealousy, and the desire for a child

Pirjo’s longing is not simply for recognition: she wants to make love with Atu and has a burning desire for a baby. At thirty-nine, she understands that the possibility feels urgent. Yet Atu has decided that she is to remain the vestal, the virgin symbol who guards him, his business, and everything around him. The role is not one Pirjo chose, even though she has helped sustain it and benefits from the privileges attached to her service.

That contradiction shapes her conduct as well as her feelings. Pirjo can be shrewd and self-serving in her paid advice work, rationalizing that her interpretations give clients something to hope for and that she is skilled at organizing their fates. The narrative links this confidence to Atu’s long-standing influence on her. But neither her competence nor her special standing changes the emotional boundary he has set. The more indispensable she becomes to the Academy, the more clearly her place differs from that of the women he selects as lovers.

Public authority and private cost

In the hall, Atu’s authority is reinforced through ritual, hierarchy, and teaching. He addresses new disciples as participants in nature absorption exercises, distinguishes the Academy’s practice from other spiritual movements, and presents Horus as an expression of gratitude for life and nature. Later, in a gathering described as taking place in October 2013, he leads the assembled followers in a chant about feeling one another and sharing Malena’s pain, although Malena is absent. The episode shows how his authority can organize the group’s feelings around a person who is not even in the room; Pirjo’s puzzlement registers the distance between the collective performance and the individual’s actual presence.

When Carl and Assad eventually observe the Academy, the same public pattern is visible: white-clad followers wait in silence, and Atu spreads his arms and chants “Abanshamash, Abanshamash, Abanshamash” before the assembly joins him. The scene confirms the force of the ritual, but Pirjo’s part in the relationship remains legible beneath it. She helps order the followers and sustain the setting in which Atu appears to them as a spiritual center. Her own fate within their partnership is less triumphant: she is essential to his work and close to his daily life, yet held at a distance from the physical love and family she wants. That imbalance defines the bond—devotion made operational, intimacy renamed as spiritual, and a woman’s indispensable service mistaken for fulfillment.