Jón Magnússon

Jón Magnússon (born c. 1610—died 1696) was an Icelandic parson and author of the Píslarsaga (“Passion Story”), one of the strangest documents of cultural and psychic delusion in all literature.

A parson at Eyri in 1655, Magnússon was stricken by an illness he ascribed to the witchcraft of two of his parishioners, a father and son. When he did not recover, even after the “sorcerers” were burned at the stake, he in 1656 extended his accusation to a daughter of the family, who was cleared of charges and sued the parson. The Píslarsaga, written in protest of this suit, is an eloquent document, both in its fantastic description of Magnússon’s sufferings and in its documentation of a phenomenon prevalent in many 17th-century societies, the belief in witchcraft as the cause of disease. Píslarsaga is a passionate denunciation of the lenient treatment of witches. As a personal exposé of Magnússon’s own torment and madness, Píslarsaga, which was not published until 1914, resembles August Strindberg’s Inferno.