Seekers in the 21st century

[T]he dynamic Café Pan. A gigantic new age temple in Götgatsbacken. The center grew to become a colorful forum for everything in the alternative world. There appeared the great domestic and international spiritual teachers of the time to preach their messages. Café Pan was the obvious church for the message of the new age. The lectures succeeded each other, sometimes three could last the same evening.

This is how one of the founders, Tomas Frankell, describes the place in one text.

The picture has been included before. I am the one standing there in front of the establishment. The year is maybe 1987? Towards the end (and it was probably when the picture was taken) I worked in the combined coffee, health and book shop which was just inside the red doors.

Had thought I wanted to collect some material for a post, about the place and the time.

The fact that they called the business a "café" was one thing understatement. It was housed, among other things, in a large, old cinema, so the salon itself did well as a lecture hall and music stage. The back part of what had been the cinema hall had been converted into a dining room. The projector room was the kitchen.

How long was PAN at the location? A year or two more after the picture was taken, as I remember it. A total of ten years perhaps? Or less? (The name then took an employee, Nina Harder, with her and started a smaller, purely lecture business in Hälsans hus on Fjällgatan, so the name lived on for a few more years.)

Some time ago I passed the crest on Götgatan and took the opportunity to take a picture of what used to be the entrance. For a while there had been an O'Leary's there, but they had missed again. Maybe it was a long time ago.

A couple of years earlier I had headed to an address in the gate next door. Took the elevator up to the 3rd floor, stepped through a door, and realized that I was back in the large, spacious apartment that had also been an important part of that "cafe business" thirty years earlier.

Many courses and lectures have taken place in the large meeting room directly inside the hall. (I myself held a study circle there, for a period, which had the title "What is essential?".)

One more thing I wanted to include in this post was an article in the magazine Free (no. 1 2012) which is about the newage scene at the time eh, but quite a lot about PAN as well.

“30 years in the service of spirituality! And so it began!” A real one nostalgia reportage with an abundance of names, facts & photos. About the "new age temple" Café PAN it says, among other things, to read:

“Tomas Frankell [went] on and started Café Pan in Stockholm, with some newfound friends: Tiiu Serenander, Björn Hultin and Mats Samuelsson. Their joint vision was to start a large new age temple in central Stockholm. After a long time of searching, the team finally found the new premises at Götgatan 11 in Stockholm. […]

For almost ten years, Stockholm was offered numerous lectures and courses about everything that the new spirituality could produce. Many of the big names of the time visited Café Pan. Among these were the authors Caroline Myss, Gerald Jampolsky, Yogi Bhajan, Peter Russel, Eva Moberg, Per Ragnar, Bibbi Andersson, Tony Buzan and Doris Ankarberg and others."

(Note: If you are reading on a mobile phone, it is easier to enlarge the pages in the usual way, with your fingers, than to click on "Fullscreen".)