The walker’s ultimate goal was to look into the windows of the church (or to reach the town cemetery, depending on the locale) in order to receive visions of the future. Either way, the victim would be lost forever. Said to be the forest guardians, they would lure people to their homes to either marry them or kill them. The huldra was a deceptively beautiful female entity, who often had bark and treelike features growing on her back instead of skin. When the horse felt it had enough riders, it would jump into a body of water, drowning all of its riders and taking their souls for its own. Each time a child mounted the brook-horse, its back would lengthen to accommodate yet another rider. The brook-horse took the shape of a normal horse, and it would invite children to ride on its back. One could expect to encounter many terrifying Swedish entities, such as the brook-horse ( bäckahäst) and the huldra. This would fully open the walker up to the world of the spirits and visions of the future, but it also invited great danger. The walker would then go up to the door of the church and blow into the keyhole, renouncing their faith temporarily. The walker was to emerge from the room exactly at midnight and head to the town church, where he or she would walk counterclockwise around the building. This was meant to disconnect the walker from the physical world, and open them up to the spiritual world before the ritual.
For an entire day before taking the Year Walk, the walker must sit inside a dark room, and is not allowed to eat or speak. The first requirement was that the ritual be performed on a certain night, most often Christmas or New Years’ Eve, sometimes at the winter solstice, but always at midnight. In order to perform the ritual, the walker would have to make several sacrifices and meet multiple requirements. The pseudo-pagan ritual of Årsgång, which, when translated to English, means Year Walk, was meant to reveal visions of the future to a person willing to perform the walk. The informant heard this particularly sinister and magical ritual from a Swedish friend from Malmö when she was studying abroad a few years ago in Europe.
0 kommentar(er)
