5. Summary 1. Up to now there has been no comprehensive survey of Swedish witchcraft trials, and the extensive source material has only partially been known. The primary intention of this work is to fill this gap. Those writers who have at least commented on the persecutions in general terms have mainly regarded them as a Swedish phenomenon. Their views have not been influenced by international research as founded in now classical studies by Soldan, Hansen, Lea and others. The obvious connection between trials here and on the continent is thus another important area for investigation. On the other hand, the slightly provincial attitude has allowed a freer discussion of the general causes of the persecutions in terms which only later on came into serious use in the international literature. ^laterial, social and psychological factors of 17th century Swedish society have all been cited in connection with the Blåkulla myth, i. e. the Swedish variant of the widely spread ideas about the Witches’ Sabbath and the journey there. A. U. Bååth (1887), in a popular, somewhat sketchy work, interpreted this myth as an expression of the spiritual needs of a suppressed and alienated peasant class. The common distress, the heavy taxation and the hostile, moralistic preaching of the Orthodox Church made these fantasies of the common people understandable, almost natural. Using roughly the same background but an entirely different set of values two more recent scholars, Gadelius (1913) and Linderholm (1918), described the belief in witches as something pathological epidemic. Legal measures, the repressive and injudicious reactions of the authorities to this spiritual malady, contributed secondarily towards further strengthening and spreading the craze. In Sweden the great persecutions began towards the end of the 1660s, that is to say later than the majority of those on the continent. Nontheless Linderholm maintains that the mediaeval conception of witchery, as created by the Catholic Inquisition and described by Hansen, had also gained a foothold in Sweden by the 15th century at the latest. In support of this theory he really only cites the many infernal and diabolical motifs from the church paintings of this period. He is therefore obliged to resort to a rather artificial explanation of the fact that the trials did not commence in earnest until two hundred years later. First the War of Independence with Denmark, then the Reformation, and in the 17th century Sweden’s participation in the 30 Years’ War occupied the attention of the spiritual and secular powers, leaving them mass hysteria, a spiritual 324
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