The Self-Fellator Who May Have Found the Key to All Knowledge in the Universe

In classy circles, the word “eccentric” gets applied to some fairly everyday stuff. A dude wears a slightly jaunty hat, and everyone treats him like some sort of counterculture hero. But such “eccentric” ubiquity cheapens things — a true eccentric is wonderful, the kind of person who makes the world more interesting.

And an eccentric who can suck his own dick? Now we’re talking.

Ior Bock was a genuinely unusual man, a storyteller and mythologist, frequently high and nude, telling tales of ancient heroes and long-lost rituals. Born in Finland in 1942 as Bror Svedlin, Bock was an outsider from the beginning in ways both big and small — as a Swedish-speaking Finn he was part of a minority within his country (about five percent of Finns are native Swedish speakers), and his self-proclaimed origins were unspeakably bleak.

According to Bock, he was the product of an incestuous relationship between father and daughter. Bock claimed that his grandfather, sea captain Knut Victor Boxström, had been so desperate to continue his male family line following his son’s death that he had impregnated his 42-year-old daughter. The sea captain died a few months after Bock’s birth, and the baby was raised by his mother and her husband. (How true this is has been investigated — there are adoption records that suggest Bock was in fact the son of a Spanish fisherman and a gardening instructor, but Bock claimed these were fabricated to hide the taboo circumstances of his birth.)

From the age of seven, two hours a day were dedicated to a peculiar form of education: Bock would sit in silence as his mother and aunt recounted the oral history of his family from the beginning of time onwards. Oral histories can be like a game of Telephone, becoming distorted and altered with every retelling, but this one, claimed Bock, was different. It was based on a complex linguistic/mathematical system — in turn based upon the pre-civilization Root language — that ensured it was syllable-perfect down the centuries. It told the story of the beginning of the world, from the days when there were no seasons, and the North Pole was a land of paradise where the sun never set.

It was here that an ape impregnated a nanny goat, and the first humans were born — twins Frei and Freia. At the age of seven, Frei, the boy, began a tradition of autofellatio. As recounted in the printed version of The Bock Saga, “He discovered that by putting his legs around his neck, he could drink his own sperm. ...  When he drank in this yoga position, the sperm entered his stomach, from where the essence of the sperm, or the Ra, went into his blood and reached his heart which circulated it to every cell in his body.”

When the sperm he had ingested reached his brain, he suddenly understood the fundamental language of the world around him, as well the roles of his sister and him in populating it. This involved the pair of them having children together and filling the earth with people, and Bock was allegedly a direct descendant of that line

The saga covers a lot — there is a dense, complex alphabet, and detailed mythology integrating elements from paganism, ancient Northern European tales and real historical events — but for obvious reasons, the sucking-your-own-penis element really sticks out. According to the tales, this swallowing of “divine wine” was done both solo and collectively, with the solo position known as sauna-solmu, or “sauna-knot.”

Over the two decades Bock spent learning the saga, a lot happened in his life. His dedication to taking on the oral history of his family had meant making something of a compromise in terms of formal education — he was later described by his friend Michel Merle as “more or less illiterate,” although he loved puns and wordplay, with a lot of the Root language and symbolism based around homonyms. He was charged with involvement in the shooting death of his adopted brother, something Bock said was a story created to make a suicide look like an accident. He began hosting casual sex parties, the snow around his house littered with condoms (however, later in life, some of his friends would describe him as asexual). He trained as a lighting engineer in a theater before moving into acting on stage, occasionally popping up on the small screen, as in the commercial below for washing machine company Coral. Bock also directed the ad, in which he showcased his frankly sick moves (which he claimed to have also put to work as a backup dancer for Tom Jones).

Between acting gigs, he took on work as a tour guide. This allowed him to dive deeper and deeper into his love of mythology, and his tours of the fortress island of Suomenlinna had a tendency to drift away from the established narrative he was meant to be delivering and integrate elements of the Bock saga. While this lost him a few employers, it also turned him into something of a cult figure, his enthusiasm and dedication to storytelling — complete with all the sauna-knot details — enthralling as many tourists as it horrified. The YLE (the Finnish equivalent of the BBC) described his tours as “near-legendary.” 

The other thing he got really into? Weed. Bock had smoked since childhood, but in a poor bit of timing, he got incredibly heavily into weed following a trip to Goa in India, just after it was banned in Finland. 

In 1984, following the death of his mother, Bock announced to anyone who would listen that the time had come to share his saga with the world. This had been preordained, he claimed, and his very existence was based upon the long-standing knowledge that the male heir to the family would share the story that year — that was why his father had been so desperate to sire another child. As journalist Magnus Londen put it in 2010, “Ior (was) a Boxström squared, a SuperBock, and at the same time his mother also became his sister and his grandfather his father.”

Although the world at large didn’t seem as interested in the saga as he had hoped, Bock’s charisma, endless supply of weed, sweet moves and love of a party — as well as an endless enthusiasm for absolutely going to town on himself — meant he gathered a following nonetheless. The Finnish band Kingston Wall recorded an album inspired by him. He appeared naked on television discussing various elements of the saga, and got annoyed that the autofellatio parts seemed to draw too much focus. An annual party he held in remembrance of his mother drew hundreds of guests to dance in the forest. Meanwhile, his neighbors got used to the sight of “naked and tanned international girls” showing up to see him. 

He was able to raise the money to begin digging into a mountain on his land in a bid to reveal the Temple of Lemminkäinen, a location described both in the saga and in the Kalevala, an ancient poem key to Finnish national identity. Despite several years of expensive excavation work, no temple was found, but several drugs busts were made — Bock had established something of a supply chain with his friends in Goa, and the ensuing legal issues led to the excavation project shutting down and Bock having to sell his land to cover enormous debts. 

The man still liked to party, though. In 1999, one particular party at Bock’s house got out-of-hand, and he was stabbed five times. He later told a journalist, “I am almost paralyzed in five joints. The cock probably still stands quite well, but I have a hard time getting it to work.” In 2010 he was stabbed again by two of his assistants, with a bread knife this time, and died of his injuries. The Bock line had ended in a haze of smoke, pain and blood. 

Was Ior Bock really the last direct descendant of the first people on Earth, and guardian of age-old secrets about the fundamental nature of everything? He certainly seemed to think so, devoting decades of his life to telling the stories he believed it was his duty to share. Whether he truly was the caretaker of ancient tales, or at some point became confused about the origins of a dense self-created mythology, he was consistent and earnest in his storytelling, confident he knew the language of the universe. 

And that can’t suck.