#finnland
When it comes to finnish practices of necromancy, it’s important to point out that evoking the spirits of the dead to do your bidding usually doesn’t involve actually raising zombie armies or anything cool like that. While records of practical witchcraft are few and sparse, they did occasionally appear in court cases.
I’ve forgotten the names of the time, place and the people involved, and I am notoriously bad at googling, but there was a court case somewhere in the 1700s, where a woman stood accused of witchcraft. She was the matron of a house (seriously how the fuck do you translate “emäntä”?), who was accused of binding the soul of a drowned local 12-year-old boy to her turnip field, to guard it against thieves.
The main witness of the case was an elderly woman who had been living in her house/on her property (the title “loinen” translates directly to “parasite”, and I don’t know whether it’s an appropriate translation in the context of the social status, but anyway it’s the one below peasants, but above beggars), who claimed that the lady of the house had ordered her to help with the spell.
They had gone to the turnip field at midnight, where the lady handed the old woman the boy’s blackened skull, which she had stolen from the grave herself, and told her to circle the turnip field three times while holding it. Neither of the books I read which described the case actually explained this part, but comparing notes to other spells in finnish witchcraft I’ve read, this was probably to mark the boundaries of the spell - to ensure that the boy would haunt the entire turnip field, but onlythe turnip field, within its exact borders.
The matron herself pulled the hem of her skirt up over her head, so she was naked from the waist down (anasyrma is another very solid part of finnish witchcraft, vitun väki is about as strong as the power of the dead, if not stronger) and started muttering a spell. When the court asked the old woman for the exact words that the lady allegedly said, she argued that she could not hear, because as she circled the turnip field, she was too far away to hear a thing, and when she passed right by, the other woman’s voice was muffled by her skirt.
They then buried the skull among the turnips and left home.
Another witness summoned to the court was a local farmhand, who told the court of a time when he - drunk as hell - had been walking home very late one night, passed this woman’s turnip field, and decided to steal one for a 3 AM snack. As he bent down to dig one up, he suddenly - completely unprompted and out of the blue - suddenly remembered the 12-year-old boy, whom he hadn’t closely known and who had died years earlier, and thought how fucked up it would be if the dead kid was there and suddenly attacked him.
Having scared the shit out of himself, he ran the rest of the way home. This story was written down in the court log as a witness account to a potential crime.
If I recall correctly, the court never came to a conclusion and the accused woman never got the punishment for the crime - which, at the time, was a fine. A skull was never found from her turnip field, and neither of her witnesses - being an decrepit, spiteful old woman with literally nothing to lose, and a drunken young man who had spooked himself with the power of his own imagination - were considered sufficiently neutral for their accounts to have much weight.
As far as the court of law was concerned, witchcraft in and of itself is veryreal, but it had simply not occurred here.
Nein, ich war heute nicht bei einer Frauentags-Kundgebung. Keine Lust, aber auch, weil ich dort zuviele Frauen treffen würde, mit denen ich zuviele politische Differenzen habe. Der Hardcore-Fundamental-Feminismus nervt. Sie werden immer mehr zur neo-puritanischen Moralbewegung. Nein, nicht weil sie Männer vielleicht ungerecht behandeln. Vielleicht tun sie das. Maybe. Aber da sist mir eigentlich…
