… Aaaaaand I’m back.
With quotes, this time, to back up the OP – in my own half-assed English translation from the original Danish.
And to clarify, the quotes are indeed from the pamphlet mentioned in Hansen’s Wikipedia page, i.e. “Den Ny Morgens Gry: Lucifer-Hiram: Verdens-Bygmesterens Genkomst,” or in English, “The Dawn of a New Morning, Lucifer-Hiram, The Return of the World’s Master Builder,” originally published in Copenhagen in 1906, but here in a 2006 edition by Kadosh Press.
First off, the story about how the guy gets beaten up by the devil, and somehow receives a new body in the process.
As stated in the OP, Hansen frames the story as a quotation (“her Brudstykket af en Beskrivelse om ham” – “here’s a fragment from a description”), without stating his source.
"And then finally I saw Satan (Lucifer) before me – glorious and wonderful to behold. Half-hidden amongst the bushes, he finally stood up – tall, dark-skinned, with shining limbs and nostrils flaming with desire. He stood in the burning, unbearable sunlight, I in the shadows of the bush. Wild and murderous was his gaze, shooting forth contempt for dreamers and dreams. He touched a cliff and it burst open with a noise like a falling ash. Strong was the magnetism flowing forth from his dark body; his enormous foot, well-shaped, with forked toes, lodged in the sand.
‘Come forth,’ he said with contempt, ‘are you afraid to meet me?’
I didn’t answer, but run up to him and struck him. But he beat me thousand-fold and burned and flayed and whipped me with hands of fire. My body lay dead, but happily I attacked again, this time in a new body. Again he turned towards me and beat me doubly and killed my new body. Again I run happily towards him. And yet again the same scene – with him beating me and annihilating my old body – repeated itself.
The bodies I draped myself in all sank down beneath me and stood as [???*] of fire around me, but eventually I threw them off.
The pains I felt in one body became weapons which I swinged in the next body, and I grew in strength.
Finally I stood perfected before him, with a body like his very own, and equal to him in strength, proudly and happily rejoicing. Then he embraced and said “I love you!”
And lo and behold! His form changed, and he knelt down and took me in his arms and lifted me into space and far above the tree-tops across the oceans, along the earth and spirited away below the moon – until we stood in paradise!"
As for the possibility of Hansen being mentally ill, I guess that’s a possibility – I really can’t say for sure either way. On the subject, though, one thing that is interesting to note is that his right-hand man during the 20’s, Grunddal Sjallung, with whose help he organized and led a number of irregular Masonic lodges and secret societies and so on, was in fact a psychiatrist by trade…!
- No clue what this word means – “ham,” but with a capital “h” (that is, “Ham”), as if it were a noun…? Could a native Danish speaker help me out, per chance…? (Perhaps “cloak,” as in old Swedish “hamn”…?)