The Cult of Transcendence on its home turf (1989–present)

By the time he threw Ebbe Carlsson to the wolves in 1988, Gustav Elmersson’s real work was to gather power. Nominally opposing the Cult of Transcendence, he was now a member and agent of the same organization. He used his government connections and his aging goon squad to aid several fronts furthering the goal of Transcendence, such as the Gradinari in Scandinavia after 1989.¹

Elmersson also seeded new organizations. The most successful of these worked for or against a renewal of traditional Swedish social democratic ideals (Folkhemmet). Each one was intentionally flawed, such as the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), a political party founded in 1988.

In 1991, one of Elmersson’s goons staged the suicide of a prosecutor in Bergen, Norway, to sustain a Gradinari operation. Two years later, two Norwegians avenged that killing, murdering Elmersson himself in his sleep. The two Norwegian avengers were the dead prosecutor’s wife and her half-brother, the only two children of a 1942 MILPROG program veteran named Tore Falkanger. Many decades earlier, Falkanger had been considered a friendly of Delta Green following a suppressed incident peripheral to a 1944 OSS Sepals/Perianth operation. Unable to travel, Falkanger recognized the use of occult methods to stage his son-in-law’s suicide. He guided the operation against Elmersson from Norway.

Elmersson had habitually assassinated his most competent competitors, including those in his own organization. Falkanger’s two children found Elmersson’s remaining associates to be loyal and instead orchestrated their killing of Elmersson with the aid of an abused secretary and a personal driver who disabled the security system at the victim’s estate in Bromma.

Following his death in 1993, Elmersson’s eight closest associates agreed that the man’s spirit still observed them by preternatural means. They went on a careless spree of torture and killing which consumed Elmersson’s entire domestic and office staff, his elderly lover, his favourite waiter, and a neighbour’s Whippet. The victims included the secretary and the driver, and through their confessions, Tore Falkanger, his two children and their families in turn.

The killers made heavy use of magic to prevent and obstruct investigation, relying on their infiltration of the government to suppress any loose ends. Feeling that Elmersson’s spirit must have been appeased, they began to fall apart as an organization. Five of them moved to dismantle the Vertical’s Kalix Line bunker, removing the materials therein for personal benefit. The facility had been poorly maintained and many of its contents now seemed uninteresting to the looters. They closed the bunker, covered its entrances with earth and shredded documents revealing its location.

The goons divided up Elmersson’s power but failed to unite behind a single successor. Over the course of the next ten years, they grew to hate each other bitterly. Two succumbed to pre-emptive infighting and fears of blackmail. Some emigrated while the remainder floundered as minor agents of the Cult of Transcendence, their incompetence contributing to its slow collapse.

The most successful emigrée, Isa Ingelsson, had been the daughter of Elmersson’s lover. She established herself as an archaeologist on false credentials. Starting in Iceland in 1999, with major projects in Greenland and Norway’s Oppland in the 2000s, Ingelsson pioneered the recovery of ancient artefacts from retreating glaciers. Some of these artefacts allowed her to establish a personal witch cult and perpetuate the operation.

The most notable goon of Elmersson to remain in Sweden is Fredrik Löw, who clung to the belief that the old man had arranged both an afterlife for himself and the ability to influence the living. The Cult of Transcendence, which had no interest in reconsolidating Elmersson’s personal power base, still courted Löw as a contact at the FRA. There, Löw provides reports both on occult developments and on the security of the Cult’s own general headquarters near Stockholm.