“… sank ned foran mig og stode som Ham af Ild omkring mig” – so yes, clothing/cloak is definitely right! Thank you!
Yup. And your translation above seems sound to me.
A bit more info from a good friend of mine who has researched Hansen’s oeuvre recently:
Hansen really, really wanted to have a part in the esoteric societies in his day, but for various reasons - most notably, perhaps, his relatively low class and lack of contacts - he never joined any of them. Instead he started a host of lodges and secret societies himself, mostly during the 1920s. It says a lot about the man (IMO) that he used two artificial palm trees as a backdrop in his “altar room”.
He wasn’t a celebrity or anything similar, but he carried out such an extensive communication with various cultural persons (writers etc.) that he was used as a character in at least 3 different novels. (Most notably Hans Scherfig’s satirical novel “Idealists”).
An anecdote tells that he once found a way into Rudolf Steiner’s hotel when the latter visited Denmark. Steiner found him pushy and annoying (and probably vaguely creepy).
Among Hansens friends were a cobbler who dedicated a part of his life to building a perpetuum mobile device, and V. Brachma Jespersen who wrote a 16 page pamphlet called “Do the Stars excert a hidden Influence on the Events of History? - A Layman’s musings on the Astrology of our Age” (Danish only).
Thanks!
I find this detail – two artificial palm trees! – both absolutely hilarious and also, perhaps, a bit telling about the man’s rather naïve Orientalism.
The Orient played a big part in the imagination of European occultists during Hansen’s time, after all – what with yoga, opium, Tibet this and Tibet that. The trend went beyond occultism, of course: Orientalism went “mainstream” in Denmark as early as 1843, with the opening of the Tivoli Gardens, explicitly “Oriental” in their design with plenty of pseudo-Turkish, pseudo-Arabic, pseudo-Chinese and pseudo-Japanese elements, and then kept chugging along well into the 1920’s, what with the theosophists, Karl Adolph Gjellerup’s wildly popular pseudo-Buddhist novels, etc., etc.
It seems Hansen was just as obsessed with the Orient as the next guy: His pamphlet abounds with love for Egypt and China and everything ancient, foreign, eastern and “exotic,” in contrast to his own stern and sterile Protestant Denmark. The guy even picked a “magical name” in Hebrew (“Ben Kadosh” = “the holy son,” “son of the holy,” or some such), and insisted on teaching Hebrew to his confused little adepts…!
So yeah, in the light of all that, perhaps the fake palm trees aren’t all that strange after all. The guy digged the Orient, but being from a working class background as well as, well, Danish, he didn’t really have a chance to go and check out what the fuzz was all about.
An eccentric Brit with a similar leaning/yearning could perhaps have joined the Foreign Service – Sir Richard Burton comes to mind, or for that matter Lawrence of Arabia – but for a dirt-poor orphan from Copenhagen’s slum, I guess a couple of fake palm trees, a second-hand Hebrew dictionary and a vivid imagination would have to do…!
EDIT: Well, either that or the guy was just batshit insane, I guess. 
We reached the same conclusion on the palm trees as you, Steken.
And more: Apparently Hansen was very inspired by a late 1800s book on Lucifer, but I can’t remember the title, unfortunately.
And may I express my amazement at the breadth of knowledge among the Dope family. A discussion, in English, about fine points of translation in Danish! How cool is that?