Mannerheim and the Medium June 7, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Beach hates fortune tellers and he loathes séances and he really can’t be doing with mediums (if spirits exist just leave them in peace). But he was struck by this account from the great Mannerheim, Finland’s hero Marshal, who saved the country in three wars against Soviet Communism; even though he lost two of them. This particular event took place before his return to Finland in 1917.
The Russian Tsar had abdicated and the Bolsheviks were about to take over. Mannerheim chose this moment to fall nastily from a horse, something that as a good cavalry man he did periodically through his life and he went, of all places, to Odessa to recuperate. There he met a Red Cross official Lady Muriel Paget who invited him to tea and to his horror, he found that the members of the tea party were determined to talk to the other side. This was particularly distasteful for Mannerheim as his marriage had been in part ruined by his wife’s interest in the Ouija board.
Mannerheim was far too polite to actually stand up and walk out and he tried to be civil as the medium entered a trance. He hated the spectacle but he remembered the medium’s words to him and many years later wrote them down.
I was to received a great command of an army and lead it to victory. After receiving great honours and a high position, I was to relinquish the latter of my own accord, but before long an important mission would take me to two great western countries, where my efforts would be crowned with success. I would return to a higher position than the one I had when I departed, but again it would be of short duration. Many years later, I was again to rise to a very high position.
Mannerheim cared enough about these words to remember them in his memoirs. Let us assume that the Marshal was a good, perhaps an excellent witness how impressed should we be? Well, the medium would clearly have found herself in front of a military man: even if Mannerheim were in tracksuit trousers his moustache and bearing (the photograph above is Odessa 1917) would have given him away. ‘To command an army’… is a fairly flexible sentence and could have suited most Tsarist officers, though of course not all triumphed. The western mission is again a fair enough guess for a high up individual in the Tsarist regime, albeit that regime was melting away. In short, a lot of this is perhaps best interpreted as cold reading. But Mannerheim himself, an arch sceptic, was impressed enough to put the words into his memoirs.
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