When the townspeople burn Herlof’s Marte—not tied to a stake, the way we imagine, but instead to a ladder before being tipped into the fire to die of actual burning, as opposed to the relative mercy of smoke inhalation—Matthew gasps, because of course he does.
He tells me: in Scandinavia, during the witch craze of Early Modern Europe, there were approximately 5000 accusations of witchcraft and 1500-1800 executions. Denmark, following the reformation of 1536, had an intense period of witch hunts and persecutions, particularly under Christian IV’s reign, during which Carl Th. Dreyer sets Day of Wrath. But while that number sounds severe, the Holy Roman Empire saw nearly 100,000 accusations and 60,000 deaths. Countries that didn’t experience a steep rise in witch hunts—Spain, for instance, and the Italian city-states—had strong central governments that weren’t being challenged by reform movements.
Dreyer insisted that Day of Wrath wasn’t a political allegory, even though it was made during the Nazi occupation. But many interpreted the persecution of witches as analogous to the persecution of Jews—and that even in the depths of autocratic rule, love and life could flourish, if even fleetingly. After the film’s release, Dreyer spent the remainder of the war in Sweden.
In college, I was asked to perform wedding ceremony for two witches. They were actually pagans, but the wedding itself was symbolic, anyhow: the ceremony was part of the protests against Pope John Paul II’s Baltimore visit in 1995. D___ and R___ had decided to mutually change their last names to ‘Flatbush,’ appropriate enough, I supposed, for a lesbian couple. D___ wore peasant dresses and kept her straight brown hair in a ponytail, whereas R___ was shorter, squatter, and chubbier, with curly black hair that framed her round face.
I gleaned a few tips off the nascent internet and threw together a hodgepodge of gestures that could be interpreted as meaningful. At the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, amongst the protestors advocating for gay and lesbian equality and reproductive rights, I gave a blessing to the four elements (a tealight for fire; a pigeon feather for air; a plastic cup of water; a pile of dirt) and bowed to the cardinal directions, and as I quoted Tom Robbin’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (“I believe in nothing; everything is sacred/I believe in everything; nothing is sacred”), D___ and R___, leapt, hand-in-hand, over each of the elements.
I’ve wondered why they asked me, an atheist, to officiate; I knew them only glancingly, though we’d always been friendly. But maybe this was the point: this is how we protest oppression; this is how we live under regimes; this is how we save each other from the flames.
After the ceremony wrapped, the Flatbush wedding party continued down the hill, whooping and hollering, the moment joyously carnivalesque, a glorious inversion, the freaks and weirdoes of Baltimore holding their ground against the throngs of people lined up to catch a glimpse of His Holiness in his bullet-proof buggy.