#witch trial
Pictured above: The cells in which the accused were held while awaiting execution.
On June 1st, 1675 during an 8-year hysteria of witch-hunting in Sweden, 71 people were beheaded and burned. 65 women and 6 men.
1/5 of the women in the region were killed.
The Background
The Torsåker Witch Trials occurred from late 1674 to 1675, in the Torsåker Parish, Sweden. These trials are notable for being the largest witch trials to happen in Det Stora oväsendet (The Great Noise), Sweden’s title for a mass hysteria that lasted from 1668 and 1676 which lead to the death of 300 individuals on the basis of witchcraft. (It’s important to note that around 100 others lost their lives for witchcraft prior to this period, over the span of many years, but this time is notable as being a hysteria because of the sheer volume of deaths in such a short period.
At the time Sweden did not have a separation of church and state, which can partially explain how such a series of events came to be. The first trial of Märet Jonsdotter in Dalarna, 1668, was the event that is thought to have sent things spiralling. The minister of Ytterlännas parish, Laurentius Hornæus, was instructed by Johannes Wattrangius of Torsåker parish, to deal with the sudden explosion of witch hysteria in Torsåker.
The Accusations
Most of the ‘witnesses’ were children. The main point Hornæus pushed was that witches had abducted the children and taken them to Blåkulla, a meadow of Swedish folklore in which the devil held a court during a sabbat. Hornæus tortured the children in order to gain statements. Some of his punishments involved whipping, bathing the children in ice-cold water, even putting them in an oven and threatening to bake them. Some of the children were later found with their throats cut.
“His grandson, Jöns Hornæus, who wrote down the story in 1735 after it was dictated by his grandmother, Laurentius Hornæus’ wife Britta Rufina, was quoted as saying: “I remember some of these witnesses, who by these methods were in lack of health for the rest of their lives”. He adds that children were still, sixty years afterwards, afraid to go near the house where his grandfather lived.” (Source)
Even though around a hundred individuals of both sexes were accused by the children, mostly women took the fall. Many managed to escape death by being pregnant, running away or bribing the courts.
The Day Of Execution
Several months after the initial detainment and accusations of the victims, a sermon was held in Torsåker church. The 71 accused were lead to the place of execution. By this point, many of them were so malnourished from being refused food that their relatives had to carry them to their deaths.
The accused were decapitated, stripped naked, then burned at the stake.
Jöns Hornæus describes the execution in his book, where he wrote down the exact words of his grandmother who was a witness to the scene.
“Then they began to understand what would happen. Cries to heaven rose of vengeance over those who caused their innocent deaths, but no cries and no tears would help. Parents, men and brothers held a fence of pikes. (By which she meant that the men of the village, the family members of the prisoners, surrounded the prisoners with weapons) They were driven, seventy-one of them, of which only two could sing a psalm, which they repeated when they walked as soon as it ended. Many fainted on the way out of weakness and death wish, and those were carried by their families up until the place of execution, which was in the middle in the parish, half a mile from all the three churches, and called “The Mountain of the Stake.” (Source)
“Här brann häxbål 1675. Kvinnor dog, män dömde. Tidens tro drabbar människan.” A small memorial exists in Torsåker to this day. I am currently learning Swedish but I am fairly new to it, so please forgive any mistakes in this translation and feel free to post a better version if you are Swedish.
“Here burned a witchpyre (stake?), 1675.
Women died
Men judged
The faith of time
affects mankind.”
Sources:
In Swedish
- http://www.norrlandmagic.se/landskap/ångermanland/häxorna-i-torsåker-26940588
- http://web.comhem.se/lienn/torsakerhaxor.htm
In English
- http://www.hhogman.se/witch-trials-sweden.htm
- http://spangenhelm.com/largest-witch-trial-swedish-history/
- http://www.witchcraftandwitches.com/trials_torsaker.html
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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.
