ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 15
The Swedish Witch Trials
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On October 15, 1674, a district court
convened in the hamlet of Hammar, in the parish of Torsåker, to begin
hearing testimony against the local population on charges of witchcraft. Modern
calendars often list this date as the day of Sweden's largest witch trial,
and both the date and the scale check out. One detail commonly attached to it
does not: Torsåker sits nowhere near Dalarna; it's roughly three hundred miles
north, in the province of Ångermanland, a mistake that quietly erases the real
geography of one of early modern Europe's most severe witch panics…
The confusion with Dalarna is an easy
one to make, since Dalarna genuinely does belong to this story, just an earlier
chapter of it…
Sweden's great witch panic, later
remembered as Det stora oväsendet, “the great noise,” traces back to
1668 and the trial of a woman named Märet Jonsdotter in
Härjedalen, followed quickly by the notorious Mora trial of 1669 in Dalarna
province, where a German engraving of the executions circulated so
widely across Europe that it's since been credited with influencing how the
Salem trials, more than two decades later, imagined their own witches gathering
with the devil. From Dalarna, the panic spread north and east over the
following six years, through Hälsingland and into Ångermanland, where it found
its deadliest expression. Torsåker, not Dalarna, is where that northward spread
finally crested.
Across nearly every Swedish trial of this period, the core charge was the same: that witches physically abducted children, carrying them off to a mythical meadow called Blockula to attend Satan’s own sabbath. The investigation was assigned to Laurentius Christophori Hornæus, a minister from the neighboring parish of Ytterlännäs, ordered by his superior to root out witchcraft in the district. Hornæus leaned heavily on child testimony, including, by some accounts, the so-called Nordingrå boys, children locally believed to possess the ability to spot a witch on sight. Roughly one hundred people, by contemporary accounts, stood accused. When the court’s work was finished, seventy-one had been sentenced to death, sixty-five women and six men, a number so large it's been estimated at close to a fifth of all adult women in the parish. The condemned were beheaded and burned the following year, in the spring of 1675, with most sources placing the executions sometime between March and June, and several accounts describing it as happening in a single mass execution rather than spread across weeks.
Blockula itself is particularly fascinating, since it’s the thread running through nearly every one of these Swedish trials and gives the panic its distinctly local flavor compared to witch trials elsewhere in Europe. Children testified that witches carried them away, often by night, riding animals, people, or household objects transformed for the journey, to a meadow where a great feast took place presided over by the devil himself, complete with music, dancing, and a mock communion. It’s a folkloric elaboration considerably more theatrical than the maleficium-focused accusations common in English or German trials, cursed livestock, soured milk, and it's precisely the vividness of these child accounts, repeated court after court across six years, that let the panic spread as fast and as far as it did. Modern scholars have pointed to a range of explanations for why children so consistently produced such similar, elaborate testimony, including the possibility of coaching, social contagion among young witnesses, and the genuine psychological pressure of an adult court asking a child pointed, leading questions about neighbors already under suspicion.
The Torsåker executions had dubious
legal standing even by the standards of 1675. Neither Hornæus's investigating
commission nor the local court actually held the authority to carry out death
sentences on this scale, and the commission was eventually summoned to
Stockholm to answer for what it had done, though local authorities in Torsåker
rallied to its defense and no one was formally punished. The central government
did, at least, draw a line after Torsåker: no further executions were permitted
there. The wider panic continued regardless, reaching Stockholm itself before
finally ending in 1676 with the execution of Malin Matsdotter, the last witch burned in
Swedish history.
Torsåker went a very long time without any public reckoning at all. It wasn't until 1975, three hundred and one years after that October court date, that a memorial stone was finally raised in the parish to honor the seventy-one people the commission condemned. For most of three centuries, the largest witch trial in Swedish history simply went unmarked where it actually happened, a quiet reminder that getting the location right matters for more than accuracy's sake alone.
By
Judika Illes | Red Wheel/Weiser
Judika Illes’s Witches: A
Compendium, published by Red Wheel/Weiser, is a wide-ranging reference
covering historical witches and witch trials across eras and continents, from
Isobel Gowdie and Countess Erzsébet Báthory through the Salem trials and what
Illes calls the Burning Times more broadly. It won't give you a dedicated
Torsåker chapter, but it situates today’s post within the much larger pattern
this column keeps returning to: how often real, documented persecution gets
flattened into vague shorthand, and how much is lost when a specific tragedy
gets filed under a generic heading instead of remembered on its own terms.
Illes moves comfortably between
documented historical figures and the folkloric and literary witches that grew
up around them, from sacred figures like Hekate and Baba Yaga to popular
culture's own witches, offering what amounts to a working atlas of how the idea
of the witch has traveled across cultures and centuries. That's useful context
for understanding why a court in a remote Swedish parish in 1674 reached so
readily for child testimony about a devil's sabbath, the same basic
architecture of accusation that shows up, with regional variations, across
nearly every major European witch panic the book surveys.
Readers wanting the real depth should
look for Bengt Ankarloo’s work on Swedish witchcraft trials specifically, much
of it unfortunately still untranslated from Swedish. But as a broad, accessible
reference for readers of this column who want to keep building their own mental
map of how witch panics have spread and repeated themselves across history,
Illes’s compendium is a masterful overview of the global panics that, unfortunately,
defined witchcraft in the eyes of the mainstream for centuries.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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