Martinus Thomsen and his movement
It has probably loomed up here and there that I became interested in the Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen (d. 1981) and his visions. Here is a post I posted elsewhere this spring for the centenary of what he himself said was the starting point for his work. What makes me think of him right now? Yes, this week a verdict was reached in a protracted dispute over copyright that had been going on for ten years and which had split and divided the Martinus movement. Isn't that strange in and of itself, that kind of thing happens in most spiritual contexts.
This is not a debate post. No recruitment attempt either. A bit of new-spirited monitoring of the world and a VDN marking of me, you can probably see it as. And my opinion of right and wrong in the dispute does not belong here. Let the dead bury their dead, I'm just saying. Life goes on.
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Behind this window, in the days a hundred years ago, something strange happened. The young dairyman Martinus Thomsen came home one evening, sat down in his wicker chair and immediately had some kind of prophetic experience that sent him in an unexpected direction for the rest of his life.
Well, it's actually remarkable no matter how you look at it. Philosophical of life, because of what he later shared, if you are inclined in that direction. Religious studies. A mystic in our local area with a large production of texts, lectures and "symbolic images" over half a century which - until now - hardly received any attention at all from the academic world.
Or psychologically. I never met him myself. I became familiar with Martinus Thomsen and his dizzying "cosmology" only the year after he died. But I have met many who knew him. And he seems to have behaved himself, no strangeness, no major scandals or extravagances. The picture you get is of a simple, friendly and fun-loving man. Indeed, over time he became a kind of cult leader, with a few thousand faithful followers. But there was never very much money involved, no missionary work, there was absolutely nothing you could become a member of.
So psychologically, he is not easy to understand, or explain away, either. That is, to bring the person together with the work. A psychotic, or at least disturbed, someone driven by a desire to impress and gain power over others, etc. He actually seems to have been a rather different neo-spiritual foreground figure. I often say that this movement is like my spiritual home. Nowadays hardly more than this. But I always think of Martinus Thomsen (1890-1981) with warmth.
(The chair is preserved at the Martinus Institute in Copenhagen. The house at Jagtvej 52 still stands and looks much like it did then. He himself rests in a small mausoleum in Frederiksberg's old cemetery.)