It’s almost Easter. Time for… witches?
Ah, Europe. You can always be counted on to make the most unlikely holidays spooky.
In Sweden and parts of Finland, people love their painted eggs as much as anyone. But they also dress their kids up as witches and send them door to door in search of treats. You have to admit, it’s a lot more interesting than our anodyne peeps and hyacinths that always seem to be trying just a little too hard with their annoying pastel hues. I’m just coming out of winter, dammit! I need me some witches.
In the collective mind of Northern Europe, the dark time between Christ’s betrayal on Maundy Thursday and the radiant hope of His resurrection on Easter is the optimal strike zone for witchery. Just as ants start to find their way into American homes in spring, witches begin to swarm on Nordic rooftops and create mischief for Scandinavian villagers. As preventative measures, devout Christians hide their gardening tools – especially brooms and rakes – and paint crosses on their chests.
I think it’s fairly well-known by now that a number of Easter traditions have their origins in a shadowy pre-Christian past. The Church shrewdly co-opted these for its own festivals and teachings. So the fertility symbols of eggs and hare, central to the pagan celebration of spring and the goddess Eostre, are now enshrined in chocolate and sold to us by Cadbury.
Witches, condemned by the Church since the Middle Ages, are a little harder to market in a young country like the U.S., with its proud Puritan heritage, but to the Northern European the ideas of women riding around on brooms or traveling in the company of black cats are a matter of course. In fact, the prototype can be found in Freyja, the Norse fertility goddess. Wagnerians know her well as Freia, the spouse of Wotan, or Odin.
I won’t go into the details of what kind of debauchery these witches would get up to if they kidnapped you and took you back to their boss. Suffice it to say, the reverent lit fires of evergreens to smoke them out of their chimneys and fed large bonfires against them on Holy Saturday.
Fear and hysteria led to plenty of very real and gruesome deaths of those suspected of witchery. But after a few centuries that all began to die down and everyone decided that witches weren’t so bad after all. In fact, they were rather quaint. Perhaps as a reaction against the Industrial Age, society grew nostalgic for the rural folk superstitions of yore, and the Easter Witch was embraced by mummers as a now-welcome guest at feasts and parades. All at once, it was considered lucky to have a witch on your roof on Maundy Thursday. The witch was even given a companion in the flower-loving Easter Troll.
Hey, I like to think of myself as pretty live and let live. Of more concern to me is that the Easter Witch is also said to be very fond of coffee. Benevolent or not, any witch who tries to get between me and my coffee is going be met by a brand of flaming evergreen.
Wishing you all a Glad Påsk!
Four images of the Easter Witch. Note the prevalence of coffee!