Sweden’s Easter witches
Ah, Easter. Time for egg hunting, rabbits and … witches? As folklore scholar Fredrik Skott writes, Easter witches are actually a long-standing Swedish tradition.
Shots trace the idea of the Easter witch to the 16th century, when a fear of witches as agents of Satan arrived in Sweden. In witch hunts in the 1660s and 1670s, several thousand people were put on trial for allegedly making covenants with the devil. Hundreds were executed.
One story that Swedes told at the time was that witches flew to a place called Blåkulla to communicate with Satan on witch sabbaths, which are often said to occur at Easter. The means of transportation could be brooms, poles, cows or even humans – as long as they were anointed with ointment stored in horns provided by the devil himself. In Blåkulla, the ordinary world turned around: witches sat around a table facing outwards, old people became young and women took on male roles.
Skott writes that the belief in Blåkulla lived on for centuries. In the middle of the 19th century, Swedish Easter was many things: a holy Christian holiday, a festive work-free day that was celebrated with antics and a time of real fear of witches. People lit bonfires and painted tar crosses on their barn doors to ward off evil. At that time, many people all over western Sweden had also started dressing up as witches at Easter.
In the Easter witch tradition, teenagers and young adults wore worn-out clothes inside and out. Cross-dressing was common: Boys could appear as old witches while girls could play the role of male Easter trolls. Participants painted their faces or wore cloth or paper masks, often with moss hair and eyebrows. Some bare brooms, horns or coffee pots that symbolize Blåkulla’s holidays.
The costumed witches traveled around the city and sometimes played a prank in an attempt to convince people that real witches were roaming the country. This can involve overturning carriages, riding other people’s horses and leaving them sweaty and tired, or climbing onto roofs and pouring ashes into chimneys. They may also stop by the house and beg for something to eat or a drink of schnapps.
Often the masked witches and trolls anonymously delivered “Easter letters”, sometimes by throwing them at a house with firewood and fleeing before they could be captured. The letters usually contained a painting of a witch and often a verse urging the reader to join the witch sabbath. The verses may simply be playful, or they may contain an insult to a recipient who is believed to have done something wrong.
Skott states that the Easter witch tradition still lives on today, in a completely different form. For Maundy Thursday or Easter, groups of young girls dress in aprons and scarves and visit neighbors or relatives, sing songs or hand out drawings in exchange for sweets or money. Much like rabbits and cubs, they are adorable and completely non-threatening, far from ancient wild Easter witches.
Support JSTOR daily! Join our new membership program at Patreon today.
Resources
JSTOR is a digital library for researchers, researchers and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.
By: Fredrik Skott
Béaloideas, Iml. 82 (2014), pp. 67–84
In Cumann Le Béaloideas Éireann / Folklore of Ireland Society