On , Samuel Wagar <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> On a different topic, was there any occult or mystical connections that you
> know of, with the Finnish colonies at Finn's Slough or Sointula Island?
>
>
> Yes. Matti Kurrikka, the man that
> was brought from the Australian Finnish exile movement by the Finnish coal
> miners in Nanaimo to lead their utopian community at Sointula (near Alert Bay,
> on Malcolm Island at the north end of Vancouver Island in British Columbia) was
> a socialist, Theosophist and free love advocate. Sointula was established in
> 1901 and didn't have a Christian church until 1960. Kurrikka was kicked out of
> the leadership after a few years as the majority of the Sointula colonists were
> communists of a fairly standard Marxist type, and the colony became a mainstay
> of the Socialist and later Social Democratic then Communist Parties.
>
Yes: I have met some of the politcised colonists, and their descendents. Earlier this one was injured on a boat running the Isreali naval blockade off Gaza.
>
> His little colony at Finn's
> Slough didn't last very long either and he ended up in the 'States editing a
> Finnish newspaper there. >
>
> The Finnish community near
> Thunder Bay in Ontario had the same political trajectory but preserved a number
> of folk magic ideas and techniques until the 1970s. National Museum of
> Canada Publication in Folk Culture #3 (1973) "Roles of Magic and Healing:
> The Tietaja in the Memorates and Legends of Canadian Finns" by Matt T. Salo is a
> neat little pamphlet dealing with them.
>
> Again, it's been a while since
> I've gone into those files (although this is a good prompt to get to it, since
> I'm giving a talk in about a month on BC's Occultist history).
Is this a public lecture?
>
> Another very interesting, and
> more explicitly occultist, utopian experiment was the Theosophical messiah
> claimant Brother XII, who set up near Nanaimo in the late 1920s. Two books right
> here are "The Devil of Decourcy Island" by Ron MacIsaac, Don Clark and Charles
> Lillard (Press Porcepic, 1989), and "Brother Twelve" by John Oliphant(McClelland
> and Stewart 1991).
>
>
> And I've wandered off. There have
> been many utopian experiments in BC. Another one is the Emissaries of Divine
> Light communities set up by an eccentric occultist / New Age British lord near
> 100 Mile House in the 1940s. The group expanded to communities in four or five
> locations but lost a large number of members when the lord's successor,
> his grandson IIRC, decided in the 1990s he didn't want to be a guru. About a
> half left immediately looking for another guru, and the communities have never
> been the same.
The Emissaries have a Retreat House in the Fraser Valley which is a good value rental for group retreats.
Thank s
MR