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...