I was standing in a forest at night, by a dark lake taking part in a Mother Earth ritual. Shaman drums echoed between the cliffs. The witch leading the ritual suddenly encouraged us to sound like wild animals. The other women seemed to greet this as something predictable and expected. “Stand up, let your inner spirit out, the wild animal within you!” the witch called out. And then she laughed out loud into the darkness – and just howled.
A woman in her 60s, with long blonde tangled hair, looking tough and slender-limbed at the same time, rose to her feet, and with something wild glittering in her eyes, she followed the witch into this transcendental phase of the ritual, and started to howl too.
I was in Hälsingland, a region in southern Sweden’s Norrland (Northland). I travelled there in September 2021, to find out more about a group of people who were staunchly against COVID-19 vaccinations, as part of a four-year research project. A well-known pundit working at a national newspaper had called vaccine sceptics, like the ones I was to meet, “egoistic, ill-bred tearaway teenagers” in a national newspaper. I knew there would be more to them than that, so I wanted to meet them and try my best to understand them.
