With this question, the Swedish priest Ericus Johannis Prytz began a new chapter in his Magia incantatrix – a handwritten treatise on the ‘foul and hideous sin of sorcery’, completed in 1632 according to its title page.2 As a scholar and a clergyman, a sworn enemy of witches and warlocks, and recognised for having a ‘guarding eye in his office against false teachings’,3 Prytz had in previous chapters revealed the demonic roots and devilish nature of all kinds of witchcraft. Now he turned his attention to the issue of the Waffensalbe or weapon salve – a ‘marvellous’ therapy for wound healing, generally attributed to the Swiss physician, alchemist and mystic Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus.4 

In 1610s, the province of Östergötland would become the scene of the first large-scale witch-hunts in early modern Sweden. Traditionally, these persecutions and trials have been taken as examples of how magical practices were indiscriminately rejected by orthodox clergymen, who strived to root out not only the ‘popish leaven’ among their congregations, but all ‘superstition’ wherewith the devil strived to deceive humankind. In contemporary texts, it is also possible to see how the clergy regarded themselves as the soldiers of God, fighting against the demonic forces that lured Christian people into apostasy in the final age. Yet as is discussed in this paper, the ‘orthodox’ view on magic, exemplified by the writings of the clergyman Ericus Johannis Prytz (1587-1637), was far more complex, and with much more in common with the intellectual traditions of the Renaissance, than is usually assumed.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse a displacement of the limits between allowable and illicit knowledge in the orthodox, Lutheran discourse of early modern Sweden. Focusing on the debate over astrology, exemplified in the works of Laurentius Paulinus Gothus (1565-1646) and Sigfridus Aronus Forsius (d. 1624), the thesis aims to challenge the view of how the Reformation, regarded as a preliminary stage to the Enlightenment and modern rationalism, contributed to the so-called ‘disenchantment of the world’, thus driving astrology and other ‘occult sciences’ out of the fields of established science. Throughout the sixteenth century, astrology had been fairly accepted. The principles of astral influence were included in physical theory, and astrology was still indispensable in medical practice. In the Reformation debate, astrology had even been used as a prophetic method in apocalyptical tracts and in preaching, and from the 1580s onwards, Swedish clergymen and intellectuals had issued astrological almanacs and prognostications. However, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the clerical approach to astrology seemed to harden. Swedish bishops condemned astrology as a gentile, forbidden practice, and in 1619 the diocese chapter of Uppsala issued a verdict against astrological predictions. To explain this trend, a few central factors are emphasized. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the relationship between worldly and clerical authorities changed. The division of responsibilities became clearer and the cooperation between Crown and Church was intensified. This meant that the clergy reached a new position where apocalypticism lost much of its political applicability. In the meantime, astrological literature had become accessible to the common man through the agency of the book printers. Hereby old arguments against astrology were accentuated among the orthodox in order to thwart the potentially prophetic claims of the astrologers. The main issue was not to reject astrology as such, but to maintain the clerical authority in confessional as well as in epistemological issues.