Year walk swedish tradition4/8/2023 ![]() When reading the notes from Kerstin’s trial, I felt nauseous. At trial’s end, the judge sentences Kerstin to death by beheading, her body burned at the stake. She answers these charges: “I do not know anything of this, please Lord in heaven, deliver me!” But the accusations of the children continue, this time in unison. Kerstin knelt and proclaimed, “I know nothing of this, my suffering does not help that fact!” But the children continue: Kerstin rode on the parish priest to the witches’ sabbath and forced them to take Satan’s hand. Other children told the court that black angels forced them to turn their backs to the altar and to curse the Holy Communion with evil words from a black book: “Cursed be the father, the mother, and everything that dwells on earth.” One girl swore that at the Blåkulla, Satan spoke through Kerstin as serpents writhed about her neck. Image courtesy of The Met, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1962 The boy’s parents and two other adults confirmed his tale. ![]() He testified that an angel appeared to him and said the only way to rid himself of the snake was to confess everything to the parish priest and that, after he did this, a snake crawled from his mouth. One boy informed the court that Kerstin gave him food that was in fact a living snake, and, after eating, he could feel the snake twisting in his stomach. They declared that Kerstin had taken them to the witches’ sabbath, the Blåkulla-a place thought of as both physical and spiritual where the witches were said to copulate with the devil. Fifty-four children and other suspects accused her. Her husband and children embrace her as she cries out-“Perhaps I will never come home to you ever again.” ![]() She has heard about the ordeals of torture and the flames of the pyre. She could not have missed the news from other villages. Watching the solemn group of men who enter, it is possible Kerstin Larsdotter knew right away. A terrible knocking at the door interrupts their labor. It is a mid-September day in the season of harvest and Kerstin Larsdotter, a mother with her family, are hard at work, preparing for the upcoming winter. The place is the small village Hamre, Hälsingland, Sweden. The following text is based on the preserved trial records concerning Kerstin Larsdotter. In following their lives beyond the fäbod, I found myself drawn into a bottomless void of grief. Digging into their stories, I saw archival connections between some of these women and the most intense period of the Swedish witch trials, the years between 16 known to Swedes as “ The Great Noise” ( Det stora oväsendet). A dark history lies behind our innocent tradition and those bonfires.Īs an ethnomusicologist interested in the female tradition of Nordic herding music, I research the histories of women who worked the fäbods, or Scandinavian summer farms. In Europe alone, between the years 14, ideas about witches led to the deaths of as many as 100,000, and the victims were overwhelmingly women. The folklore may be harmless now, but it wasn’t always so. For hundreds of years, Swedes hid their household brooms and, to this day, light bonfires to scare witches away. What better time for witches to stage their most important desecration of the year? As mentioned in texts as far back as the thirteenth century, witches flew to a mysterious place called Blåkulla to perform a sabbath and cavort with the devil. The Easter Hag tradition takes place annually on Maundy Thursday, during Christian Holy Week, which commemorates the washing of feet and, especially, the Last Supper. But deeper study reveals a dark history, one of oppression and persecution. At first glance, the tradition of Påskkärring, or “ Easter Hags,” seems quite innocent-these are children after all, and it’s suspected the tradition has gone on since the early 1800s. These “witches” wander door to door, collecting candy from the neighbors, much as trick-or-treaters do for Halloween, but in exchange for small gifts, like homemade drawings or postcards. In Sweden, during Easter, you are not surprised to see children dressed up in ragged clothing, with dark makeup and a broom between their legs.
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