The witches of Thor's meadow

It's the mid 17th century. Sweden is beset on all sides by enemies. Just as war rages in the south against the Danes, cruel rumours spread from Dalarna to Stockholm and start heading north. Soon, a hysteria will engulf the kingdom that will result in the biggest mass execution of civilians in Swedish history. (Pictured: The skull of a dead swedish sailor from the 17th century)

Ytterlännäs old medieval church. One of the three churches around which the horrific events would unfold.

In the province of Ångermanland the hysteria reached the people in 1674. In Torsåker, the name meaning "Thor's maedow" and Ytterlännes the following events unfolded. Young boys, traveling from province to province, came with tales of child abductions to Blåkulla where witches and warlocks would have intercourse with demons and seal unholy pacts while forcing children to partake in all manner of horrible things.

A local priest, Laurentius Hornaeus, picked up on the stories and soon the trials were in full swing.

The inside of the above pictured church.

The laws in Sweden had up to this point been rather lenient in the standards ( Cases I have studied myself where there were 19 cases of manslaughter/murder only ended in 3 executions). But things were about to change for the worse.

Hornaeus went to work and started forcing children to confess that they had been abducted. He threw children in ice cold water, threatened to set them on fire, and whipped them. His own grandson would later write that he knew people who never got back to good health after these events and that people still, long after his death, feared walking past Hornaeus' old house.

About a 100 persons were put to trial and 71 of them, 65 of them women, were condemned to execution.

Some of the "witches" were forced to wait for the execution date in a dank, cold cellar for weeks. When the time came, the first of june 1675, the grandson of Hornaeus writes that:

"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."

The victims were decapitated on a lower side of the mountains as the hundres of liters of blood would have soaked the stakes, making the burning complicated. Once the bodies had burnt and the flames went out, the locals went back home, by the accounts numbed and silent.

A fifth of the women in the parish had been killed. One of my male ancestors were one of the "warlocks" killed during these horrific events.

The mountain of the stake, today. Also known simply as "Häxberget". The mountain of the witches.

But how, and why, did this happen?

Feminist scholars during the 60s and 70s claimed it was all a proof of misogyny. This has been proven to be untrue as there were mostly male victims in both Iceland and Finland, which conforms to the fact that in these countries men were seen as those who practised witchcraft, not females as in Sweden.

The medieval laws of Sweden had been rather lenient. Unmarried sex, Adultury, and manslaughter usually only ended up getting people fined. But stricter laws had been put in place since the start of the 17th century. Sadly, these laws were taken from the bible. The bible said that warlock and witches were to be put to death instead of fined.

Was it the state that forced it all on the people? No. The trials always started with the population demanding that trials be held. Young boys and girls telling stories and priests fanning the flames did happen, but just as today with superstitious claims of satanic (non existing) pedophilia networks, it was the people who demanded action. The problem was that the state let the people have what they wanted.

One of my own ancestors, Nils Sternaelius, prosecuted witches in my hometown of Härnösand that is not far from Torsåker.

In the end, words reached the king of these events and he ordered a royal decree to be read in all the churches of the kingdom where it was said that the witches had been forever destroyed and banished from the land. The hysteria was over.

The two teenage boys who had come to Torsåker spreading the rumours were later found in a ditch by the road, strangeled to death. No one was prosecuted for their deaths.

TLDR; Superstition kills.