Mora and Blåkulla — the road to Salem

OVERVIEW

Mora is a town in Dalarna in central Sweden. Blåkulla — the blue hill — was the legendary island where the Devil was said to hold his earthly court at the witches' sabbath: a meadow with no visible end and a house where the Devil stayed. The children's confessions described him appearing in a grey coat with red and blue stockings, a red beard and a high-crowned hat with linen of many colours wrapped about it.

HISTORY

Sweden had few witch trials by European standards — about four hundred people executed in total before the last case in 1704 — but roughly 280 of those fell in the eight years between 1668 and 1676, the period called *det stora oväsendet*. It began in Dalarna in 1668 with the accusation brought by Gertrud Svensdotter against Märet Jonsdotter, and the commission that sat at Mora in 1669 is the centre of it. The evidence was overwhelmingly the testimony of children, who said they had been carried to Blåkulla.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The reason Mora belongs on this map rather than only in a Swedish history is what happened to the paperwork. An account of the Swedish trials was translated and printed in London in 1681, and Joseph Glanvill included it in *Sadducismus Triumphatus* in 1682 as 'True Account of What Happen'd in the Kingdom of Sweden In the Years 1669, 1670, and upwards'. That book crossed the Atlantic. Cotton Mather drew on the Swedish material, and the Blåkulla pattern — children as witnesses, spectral journeys, a named meeting place — is visible in the Salem trials of 1692 and in *The Wonders of the Invisible World*, which is on the Library's own shelf. The entry records the point at which a Swedish panic became a New England one.

VISITING

An ordinary town in Dalarna, best known now for the Vasaloppet. Nothing is staged around the trials.