The Bock Saga - Is History as we know it a lie?

If you’re a Whistle Boy fan, you may know how he absolutely loves his writers springing difficult or totally foreign words on him. I have had limited success with supposedly helpful pronunciation guides but, thanks to the laidback nature of this channel, it just adds to its charm. We hope, anyway, sorry if the mispronunciations make you gnash your teeth with barely contained rage every time a word is mangled.

One commenter suggested finding some mysteries from Finland to talk about as some of their words are dauntingly long and difficult-looking. So yeah, sorry Simon, this one’s got a couple in there but I think you get away pretty lightly overall. Don’t expect any help because I didn’t even bother trying to work out how to say them. Thanks to YouTube user “nonth606”, which I also don’t know how to pronounce, for suggesting this topic, or maybe we can both just let them take the fall for it if it devolves into a total shambles.

This episode is about folklore, a family saga, an alternative explanation of human history and a central character whose real life was as fascinating as his stories. Come for the buried treasure, stay for the autofellatio. Or don’t. It’s not obligatory. If you don’t know what that is, pretend we never said anything. Onward!

An Alternative History

Creation myths or stories about how the world was made can be found all over the place. Different countries and religions have their own versions about how humans came to be, generally being specifically related to the place or religion that’s doing the telling. These are called “creation myths” as they’re just that — myths and folklore that can form a link to the past, mixing history with storytelling and strengthening the cultural identity of a group of people.

Prior to the advent of writing and recording information, tales were passed on via the oral tradition with people reciting stories to family members or large groups of listeners. These would then be told to other family members or taken to different parts of the country and the stories would live on with every retelling. It’s inevitable that most of these stories were not 100% faithfully repeated from person to person or even by one person every single time they told it.

New details crept in or were left out. Embellishments were made and small things changed so that eventually, the latest telling would differ quite significantly from the first. Of course we can’t take any of them seriously, there are far too many different stories about how humans came to be for any of them to be true and of course, they can’t all be true.

But hang on a moment — what if one particular story about the origins of the human race WAS true and the story had remained unchanged due to the very sounds the words in the story made? Should we all, in fact, be studying the Bocksagan, or in English, the Bock Saga, to better understand where we all came from? Here’s the story.

The Bock Saga

I’ll start by laying out the details of the Bock Saga without any little sarcastic remarks or anything and then we’ll find out more about the Bockmeister himself afterwards. The fact that I make any reference at all to sarcastic remarks, however, kind of hints at my feelings towards the story but never mind, let’s hear the man out. This story has been passed down the Boxström family line for generations and as the man known as Ior Bock was the last surviving member, it fell to him to recount it for the public record. It’s been videoed, taped and put into a book but there are nearly 300 pages and I ain’t that dedicated to this story so let’s go for a bit of an abridged version of the apparent “real” story of the history of the human race.

When thinking of where human life began, you’re probably going to think Africa. Well, according to the Bock Saga, you’re way off. You might not think that Finland would be the origin for human life on the planet, but there you go, it was. I know almost nothing about Finland apart from that they produce quite good Formula 1 drivers and I probably would have a hard time if I was given 5 seconds to point to it on a map.

Sorry, Finland. OK, I’ve looked it up now and it connects with Norway at the very north, Sweden at the north west side and Russia down the eastern side. The south and southwest protrudes out into the Baltic Sea. Now that we’ve got that straight, forget anything you think you may know about the history of the world and even evolution for that matter, cos you’re dead wrong.

Think humans evolved very gradually from a species of primate? Or maybe you believe that a deity created the first humans on earth? Well, sorry to burst your bubble there, but in reality (or at least in the reality of the Bock Saga), the first humans were created due to the mating of a male ape and female goat.

Yeah, not sure about that one either but hey, it’s in the story so it must be true. And it wasn’t a few hundred thousand years ago or even a million or two. It was over 50 million years ago.

This, frankly bizarre, union created the first two humans, Frej and Freja. They were born into a paradise on Earth, near the North Pole in an area called Uudenmaa or Odenmaa. This was your traditional paradise with lots of nice scenery and trees and stuff, the probable basis for the Garden in Eden, in fact.

Uudenmaa was located in what is now Finland. The Bock Saga explains how the Earth used to be oriented so that modern-day Helsinki used to be the top of the world, or the North Pole.

When the Earth was created, a large hole was blown into the magma layer under Helsinki and over time, this became a treasure trove of enormous wealth, featuring gold, jewels, statues, offerings to Finnish gods and artifacts documenting human history.

The first people on Earth were divided into two groups, the Aser and the Vaner. Unfortunately, shortly after they made an appearance, the Ice Age started, dividing the two groups for millions of years when the Aser got stuck in Uudenmaa and the Vaner just did their thing in the rest of the world. These Vaner people eventually split into different races with different languages and their own cultural histories. When the ice finally started to thaw and retreat, the humans who had proliferated in the intervening years were now in danger of being flooded out.

Luckily for them, the Aser had spent their time in ice-olation (get it? Isolation? Never mind) becoming extremely smart and built them boats so that they and their animals could survive the floods. If this sounds familiar, you can thank the Bock Saga for providing the influence for Noah’s Ark.

There may be another connection with a well-known story too. The period when the Aser were basically iced in was known as “Alt-land-is” or “all land ice”. During the millions of years they were trapped, they created agricultural and knowledge systems in the arctic, finally emerging as a pale race with blue or green eyes. Think about it — “Alt-land-is” sounds reeeeeallllly like “Atlantis”, no? Could the lost city have been in Finland all along?

The Aser that made it through the Ice Age sent three main families to explore, teach and populate the areas of Eurasia around Finland and one of these families was the Boxström, of which Ior Bock was the last remaining member. The Aser were hugely influential in Europe, guiding the building up of various civilizations and transferring their beliefs into the pagan beliefs that humans held prior to the arrival of religions like Christianity. They were apparently behind the creations of the Pharaohs, Moses, Buddha, Krishna and Jesus’s parents among others so they were really nothing if not inclusive.

When they made it onto the global scene, the Aser wanted to unite humanity with a common language, so a system was set up that hung on the sounds of the Swedish and Finnish languages. All sounds were symbolic and had their own meanings and the symbols used were not actually made up by humans, but were instead based on a mathematical system of one and zero, also known as “pole and ring” or “stave and circle”.

Therefore, when Ior Bock was told the saga of his family’s history, it was not possible for a mistake or changes to be made as each sound is part of a matrix of meaning called the “root language”. As Carl Borgen, who has written extensively on the Bock Saga puts it on his website: “Since the meaning of the sounds are fixed and cannot be altered, the Saga can be passed onto the next generation without any changes in its purest form. Just as mathematics is the language in which the natural cohesion between numbers is described and can be thus passed on, so is the Root language the natural means of describing the Bock Saga.”

So, Ior Bock was told the story of the real history of the world by his mother and aunt in sessions of 2 hours a day over about 20 years. But how did he end up the sole storykeeper? Well, when organized religions such as Christianity started becoming more popular, the descendents of the Aser ended up taking their more Pagan beliefs and rituals into hiding as they were being suppressed by the church.

In fact, the saga was passed on in secret from about 1248 AD until Ior Bock revealed it in the 1980s. It also ties in heavily with Finnish mythology, especially the Kalevala which is an epic poem, collected and published for the first time in 1835. This is a famous example of Finnish literature and one of the heroes in the story is a youth called Lemminkäinen.

He has various difficult tasks to do in order to win a bride and ends up dying in the attempt. His mother finds his body and, in some tellings, manages to revive him. In the Bock Saga, there is a temple to Lemminkäinen that was closed up in the year 987 to protect it from those meddling Christians and other invading groups.

It is here that wealth beyond belief is stored and, it can be found in Finland in a place now called Sipoo, which was handily on Bock’s estate.

One other notable thing in the saga is the obsession with fertility rites and not wasting your sacred “water” or “seeds of life” aka your ejaculate. In a somewhat abrupt left turn, Bock details that he was taught how to drink his own semen via autofellatio from the age of seven, with the help of also learning yoga. The Bocks called this position the “sauna-solmu” or “sauna knot” and yep, you basically cross your legs behind your head and get to it.

There are some photos to be found online of Bock demonstrating the position but luckily he keeps his trousers on, at least in the ones I’ve seen. The recycling of sperm was apparently totally the thing to do to increase your fertility and brain power. Women could also do it but thankfully were allowed to use a straw.

So to wrap it up, the Bock Saga proclaims that humans have been around for over 50 million years and originated in Finland when an ape had sex with a goat. It may seem utterly bonkers but there was a period when the Bock Saga had quite the following and even to this day people are convinced there is a treasure hoard in Sipoo. But why? Well, we’ve had the myth and the legend, now let’s have the man himself, Ior Bock.

Ior Bock

I guess it’s a bit late to mention this but “Ior” is the Finnish version of “Eeyore” the donkey from Winnie the Pooh so I guess you pronounce it a bit like that or just “Eye Or” like how it’s written. I have and will continue to refer to our main man as “Ior Bock” or “Bock” as that’s what he called himself in later life. He was known in earlier times as Holger Svedlin, Bror Holger Svedlin, Ior Svedlin and sometimes Ior Boxström-Svedlin before settling on the much more manageable “Ior Bock.”

If you believe him and the whole Bock Saga timeline, Ior was conceived when, as other direct Aser descendents were a bit thin on the ground, his grandfather, Sea Captain Knut Victor Boxström, impregnated his own daughter, Rhea, in 1941. It had already been foretold that a male member of the Boxström line would retell the saga in 1984 and Knut’s son had been killed in the First World War, ending that branch of the family tree. Knut was an admirable 81 at the time and because of this double Boxström lineage, Ior later designated himself a “Superbock”.

Rhea was already married to a Bertel Svedlin and to avoid awkward questions, Bertel officially adopted the baby and thus the man who became known as Ior Bock was born as Holger Svedlin in 1942. He later called himself Bror and even later took up the “Ior Bock” moniker. Of course, the fact that there is documented proof of Bock’s biological mother and formal adoption by the Svedlins in the Finnish National Archives doesn’t matter much when you’ve got a good story to tell.

Personally, if I was his adopted mother, I’d be pretty hacked off at Bock for peddling this embarrassing origin story but there you go. “Holger! Will you stop telling people I had sex with my dad!”

The family also adopted a 3 year old boy called Erik who became Ior’s older brother. Thinking about this now, if Bock was adopted, he has no claim at all to any of this saga as he wasn’t a direct descendent of the Boxström family and therefore the Asers. Well, as with many aspects of this story, I guess again, he didn’t let facts get in the way of a good yarn.

During his formative years, Bock didn’t go to a traditional school as he had to sit in silence for at least 2 hours a day, listening to and memorizing the family saga. That’s what he said, anyway. He was apparently sent away to a boarding school for a year when he was about 9 as his father, Bertel Svedlin, had died and his mother was having difficulty with young Ior’s behaviour.

As a man in his 20s, Bock lived the swinging 60s lifestyle. His family did own various plots of land and were very well off so he hosted parties that involved lots of music and sex although he apparently refrained from excessive drinking. He was still drinking of his own special juices throughout this time though, don’t forget about that.

A tragic and slightly mysterious event then happened in 1962. Remember Ior’s older brother, Erik? According to the report Ior gave police at the time, he and Erik were listening to music and Ior was dancing about and decided to get their grandfather’s gun to add some spice to the dance.

As you do. After messing about with it, he threw it to Erik and it went off, shooting Erik through the chest and killing him. Erik isn’t mentioned in the official Bock Saga but in later years, when talking about him to the followers he picked up, Ior Bock is documented as having said his brother shot himself while alone in his room.

Erik was supposed to be getting married the following week and as there were no other witnesses to the event, it’s never been properly explained and Ior was given 4 months probation but the whole thing was written off as an accident. Some of his friends at the time shunned him while others couldn’t believe the gentle, soft-spoken boy could possibly have hurt anyone. Regardless of what really happened, Ior and Erik’s mother held a memorial on what was supposed to have been the wedding day.

Erik’s fiancee remembers seeing Ior whistling and tightrope walking between two trees, basically being an insufferable attention seeker when he should have been keeping his head down.

His desire for the spotlight only increased as he got older. He took to the stage and acted in and directed several productions in Swedish theatres in Finland. He really scratched his itch for showmanship coupled with history however, when he became a tour guide in 1968.

Working at the Suomenlinna sea fortress, also known as “Sveaborg”, Bock could spin incredible tales for tourists, with 18th century history being his favourite topic. The Boxströms were in real life a very historically, socially and financially rich family and had many examples of correspondence with key players in various wars and cultural happenings throughout the 1700s so it’s no real surprise that Bock had loads of juicy stories to tell. He was really good at it and much in demand, although his contract was terminated in 1984 when the management thought his stories were getting a bit out of control.

During this time, he also traveled to London, England in the winters where he probably got up to all kinds of shenanigans, and then from the mid 1970s, he started traveling to Goa, India where his transformation into some sort of hippy mystic guru began. Bock and his partner at the time, Claire Von Frenckell were actually quite well-known in Finland during this period, with their various comings and goings frequently mentioned in magazines and papers.

In Goa, Bock liked to spend time in a small village called Chapora, working on his stories for the coming summer’s tour guide program and smoking cannabis. Quite a lot of cannabis. Eventually, he built up a large group of followers in what might even be called a cult, but his ultimate story, the Bock Family Saga, was still under wraps.

It wasn’t until his mother died in 1984 that Bock declared he had been tasked with delivering the Bock Saga to the world and having it recorded for posterity. Unfortunately, the first time he tried to share the knowledge with an outside group of people was in Goa with a load of hippies taking LSD. Bock has said he never did LSD, not wanting people to think his somewhat hard-to-believe alternate history was in any way related to potentially mind-altering psychedelics.

Unluckily, though, some young Finnish people who had traveled over with Bock and von Frenckell had bad reactions to the drug, and the news got back to the Finnish press, causing a bit of a scandal and ultimately signaling the end of Bock and von Frenckell’s relationship, as well as a shaky start for the veracity of his family’s story.

Later on in 1984, Bock managed to find a more sober audience and he related the saga for the first time in Swedish where it was recorded on tape for the Finnish folk culture archive. This was also the year he was fired from his tourist guide post as his stories just started becoming too weird. Friends had a hard time having normal conversations with him but to their surprise, Bock still had a large group of hangers-on supporting him. Subsequent recordings of the saga were taken over the years, sometimes with more information than other times and a book was also published in Finnish in 1996.

In 1987, Bock confirmed that the location of the Finnish hero Lemminkäinen’s temple was under his own property in the village of Gumbostrand, in the Sipoo municipality of Finland. This was a cave full of amazing treasure, remember, so he got a team together and they raised funds to break through the rocks to find an entrance. Over the course of about 10 years, Bock’s followers made it about 50 metres into the cave but no chamber or staircase or further door was found.

Bock went bankrupt trying to fund the excavations and also got into trouble in 1990 for drug charges relating to LSD and hashish. This led to his largest sponsor pulling the plug on their part in the project and Bock was left in a giant literal, financial and figurative hole. The dig stalled and things only got worse for the last surviving member of the Boxström family.

In 1999, Ior Bock was attacked and stabbed several times by a disturbed follower, leaving him basically a quadraplegic. While he was in the hospital, he had more properties seized and sold to pay some of his outstanding debts to various contractors. He recruited a couple of young Indian men he had met in Goa to work as his personal helpers and spent the next few years mainly sitting around in the nude at home, smoking pot and banging on about his saga and the root language.

Unhappily for Bock, his life ended in October 2010 when one of the men who worked for him suddenly murdered him by stabbing him to death. The man, who was freed by reason of insanity to return home, said he had seen a black crow and then couldn’t remember anything after that. In his call to the emergency services after having killed Bock, the man called him “the Devil.”

So a sad end, then, for this colourful, eccentric, semen-supping storyteller who died at the age of 68. I don’t even think it’s really necessary to decode why his saga is not actually likely to be the one true story for the origin of humankind but we can give it a few sentences, just in case you were wondering.

Decoding the Bock Saga

The first point is that the whole thing is just coming from this one source, Ior Bock. While there are touchstones in Finnish mythology and similarities to other creation stories, Bock’s story is not backed up by anything other than his own chutzpah. Before he came along, nobody was chatting about any of this stuff. Yes, I know it was supposed to be kept secret to avoid being quashed but Bock wasn’t even genetically related to the Boxströms so he really had no skin in the game.

His older brother wasn’t taught the saga — is this because they already knew he’d die early? In which case, why doesn’t that detail feature in the recorded tellings of the Saga?

Second, Bock had all sorts of funny notions about ice ages, large chambers underground and the orientation of the Earth which have no basis in geological or geographical fact.

Third, his root-language idea, while quite interesting, again doesn’t really mean anything. Swedish is not an old language so to say that it was the origin of anything is not realistic. Finnish is a much older language but unless you’re one of those annoying people who like to learn obscure languages for the fun of it, it never spread very far outside of Finland so is a very niche language to hang the whole history of the world on.

According to the website “The Culture Trip.com”, the Finnish language has its origins in the Russian Ural mountain areas so is therefore not the origin of any language itself. The fact that Bock was adamant the Scandinavian alphabet could be used as some sort of story code just means that maybe he hadn’t thought his story all the way through.

That’s what his peers thought, for the most part, too. Basically Bock just started spouting nonsense for attention and then got trapped in a cycle of having to relate it over and over. Maybe he grew to believe it, some of his followers definitely did, but most of the world has never heard of the Bock Saga or the man who helpfully tried to bring it to our attention. In later interviews with people, Bock also seemed to extend this language matrix into modern English which obviously makes no sense whatsoever if you originally hung your hat on the nail of “all languages are descended from the Root language”.

And come on, an ape shagging a goat to make a human? Er, no.

The Saga and the Search Continues

Being that this weird story was just the product of one man’s mind, it’s still pretty impressive that we’re talking about it today. Bock was not yelling into a void, people were actually listening to what he said and some, at least, were taking it seriously. Sure, the mix of impressionable minds, odd sexual practices, drugs and a charismatic storyteller who, at one point, had lots of money, meant that the gathering of some followers was inevitable but his family story and the story of his own life did manage to live on.

Finnish rock band, Kingston Wall, produced a whole album inspired by Bock’s story after founding member Petri Walli met Bock in Goa in 1994. He soon became disillusioned with the so-called mystic’s teachings, though, and regretted dedicating a whole album to them. Walli ended up killing himself in 1995.

I mentioned a Carl Borgen earlier in the episode and he’s one of the main flamekeepers for the Bock Saga. Borgen, a historian and writer, was apparently friends with the original core group of people returning to Sipoo to try and find the treasure and has since managed to squeeze 4 books out of it, one about the Bock Saga itself, one about these treasure hunters and two novels which seem largely based on Finnish mythology and Bock’s alternative version of history so at least someone’s reaping the benefits of the whole debacle.

Hey, we haven’t quite finished yet! Remember the cave in Sipoo I just mentioned? Yeah, it turns out that a cave full of treasure apparently worth billions is quite the itch that people just can’t stop scratching.

Teams of volunteers have been going back to the site every summer for years in the hopes of one day breaking through to the motherload. As I write this, apparently thousands of people are gearing up to go and excavate the hell out of those caves in summer 2022. It’s been slow going up to now with just a handful of dedicated workers from all over the world regularly visiting the site, and with the caves flooding during the rest of the year, they have to start each season by pumping out over 1.5 million litres of water.

Fun. I’m not exactly sure why this year is any different but apparently the group finally feel like they’re on the verge of a breakthrough so naturally all these other greedy layabouts suddenly want to come in at the last second to grab some of the glory and gold for themselves. Who knows, by the time this episode comes out, maybe the Lemminkäinen Hoard will have been discovered and we’ll all be wowed at the treasures found inside and history as we know it will be turned on its head.

But, you know, probably not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bock Saga?

The Bock Saga is a family saga and alternative explanation of human history passed down through the Boxström family line. It tells the story of how humans originated in Finland over 50 million years ago from the mating of a male ape and a female goat.

Who is Ior Bock?

Ior Bock is the central figure of the Bock Saga. He was the last surviving member of the Boxström family and the one who recounted the saga for the public record. He was born Holger Svedlin in 1942 and later changed his name to Ior Bock.

What is the origin of humans according to the Bock Saga?

According to the Bock Saga, humans originated in Finland over 50 million years ago from the mating of a male ape and a female goat. The first humans, Frej and Freja, were born in a paradise near the North Pole in an area called Uudenmaa or Odenmaa.

What is the significance of the Ice Age in the Bock Saga?

In the Bock Saga, the Ice Age divided the first humans into two groups, the Aser and the Vaner. The Aser were trapped in Uudenmaa and became extremely smart, while the Vaner split into different races and languages. The Aser later built boats to survive the floods and spread their knowledge and beliefs.

What is the root language in the Bock Saga?

The root language is a system of sounds that are symbolic and have their own meanings. It is based on the Swedish and Finnish languages and a mathematical system of one and zero. According to the Bock Saga, this language ensures that the story can be passed down without any changes.

What is the connection between the Bock Saga and Finnish mythology?

The Bock Saga ties in heavily with Finnish mythology, especially the Kalevala, an epic poem collected and published in 1835. One of the heroes in the Kalevala, Lemminkäinen, is also mentioned in the Bock Saga, with a temple dedicated to him in Finland.

What happened to Ior Bock’s brother Erik?

Ior Bock’s brother Erik died in 1962 from a gunshot wound. According to Ior’s report to the police, the gun went off accidentally while they were listening to music. However, the circumstances surrounding Erik’s death remain mysterious and unexplained.

What is the Lemminkäinen Hoard?

The Lemminkäinen Hoard is a supposed treasure trove of enormous wealth, including gold, jewels, statues, and artifacts documenting human history. According to the Bock Saga, it is located in a cave in Sipoo, Finland, under Ior Bock’s property.

What is the current status of the search for the Lemminkäinen Hoard?

Teams of volunteers have been excavating the site in Sipoo every summer for years, but progress has been slow due to flooding. As of the article’s writing, thousands of people are preparing to excavate the caves in summer 2022, hoping for a breakthrough.

What is the significance of the sauna-solmu position in the Bock Saga?

The sauna-solmu, or sauna knot, is a yoga position taught to Ior Bock from the age of seven. It involves crossing your legs behind your head and is used for the practice of autofellatio, which the Bocks believed increased fertility and brain power.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Bock Saga - Is History as we know it a lie?
• Hero image source by Sinikka Halme / openverse, by-sa.