A museum in Iceland is home to the only known pair of necropants: pants made out of human skin.
Legend has it that Icelandic sorcerers would tear the skin off of a dead friend’s body and clothe themselves in their flesh. They called them Nábrók, or necropants — a type of dark magic that was supposed to bring the wearer unlimited wealth.
You may have seen a picture of the pants before. A few years back, they enjoyed a short-lived viral celebrity, being shared in sensational stories that make ancient Iceland sound like a place full of dark sorcerers draped in the skin of the dead.
But just how true are these stories? Did anyone ever really wear necropants?
More fiction than fact has been spread about this strange tool from Iceland’s past – but there is a little dark glimmer of reality to the legends of the pants made out of human flesh.
The legend of Necropants was passed down orally for generations before anyone wrote it down. It took until the mid-19th century before an Icelandic Folklorist, Jón Árnason , wrote the ritual down in graphic detail:
“A man who wants to have such breeches must make an agreement with someone still alive that as soon as the latter dies, he can have the use of his skin. As soon as this happens, the survivor goes to the churchyard by night and digs the dead man up. He then flays the skin off from the waist down and slips it off in one piece, for he must take care that there is no hole in the breeches.”
A graveyard in the eveningWhen a sorcerer put on the flayed skin from his friend’s legs, it would latch onto his flesh. Every part of it would stick to the sorcerer like glue. Only one small flap of flesh would remain loose: a small pocket at the wearer’s scrotum.
In that pocket, the sorcerer would have to place a magic rune and a coin stolen from a wretchedly poor widow. From then, he would be able to reach his hand into the pocket and pull out as much wealth as he wanted without ever running out.
Necropants were a type of Satanic magic; the stories we have about them come from a time when Christianity had come into Iceland and the old, Pagan ways seemed barbaric and blasphemous. Every part of the legend makes it clear that to put these pants on was to form a pact with the Devil.
The coin the sorcerer had to steal couldn’t just be taken at any time. He had to steal it “at the moment between the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel on one of three major church festivals of the year” – or, in essence, when it would desecrate a moment of extreme Christian devotion.
Coin of the Icelandic currency Krona (ISK) showing a shore crabThe wearer of the pants was all but guaranteed damnation in hell. He had only one chance to redeem his immortal soul: before he died, he would have to convince someone else to take the pants from him.
This, though, would be no small task. A sorcerer couldn’t simply peel off the pants. The best he could do would be to pull his right leg out, but his left leg would stay glued to the dried skin. The only way to get it off would be to have somebody place their right leg inside. The necropants would latch themselves wholly onto the new wearer, and then and only then would the former owner be free.
He had to act fast, though. If he died with the pants still at his waist, his corpse would be torn apart by lice the second he died, and his immortal soul would be damned to hell.
