Light in the dark

I crossed the bridge to Kalmar again, to do some errands and went to the castle where they opened one of their closed rooms, normally not open for the public. To honour the longest, darkest day of the year they opened their "Confession room", a result of a dark period of the castle. Our king at the time, Gustav III (1746-1792),  had forbidden physical torture as being untimely. As a result of this, because the authorities still had to make the criminals to confess one way or another, they organised this confession room in the cellar, formerly used for keeping firewood, as a place for detention until the prisoner/accused confessed. There are no records for how long they was in there, nor how many passed through the room during the time in use but I imagine it didn't take long at all, since they were in there naked, got hardly any food at all, sharing space with rats and insects and, it was cold, damp and totally dark so they had no way of keeping track of the time. Every now and then someone would come to ask them if they were ready to confess.

Our guide was assuming that depending on who it was, it can't have taken very long before you confessed whatever, just to get out. She was in there with us and after describing the horrors, she turned out the little lamp, long enough for our eyes to get used to the dark. There was absolutely no light coming in, holding a hand in front of your eyes didn't make a difference. Frightening. The method is still in use in several places around the world but luckily not in Sweden anymore.

She continued telling us about our special relation to the light on this day during old times. There is written record from around year 0, of a word resembling Yule, meaning cycle or return, used by us up here in the north. From the 14-hundreds there are plenty of written descriptions of the rituals used by the northern people to celebrate the return of the light and how to protect oneself from the evil forces that tried to break into your house on this evening. Rituals, many of which we still have around us today, lightly disguised in Christian clothing.