The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [69]
More than gods and demons, the best-attested apparitions are those of saints, especially the Virgin Mary in Western Europe from late medieval to modern times. While alien abduction stories have much more the flavour of profane, demonic apparitions, insight into the UFO myth can also be gained from visions described as sacred. Perhaps best known are those of Jeanne d’Arc in France, St Bridget in Sweden, and Girolamo Savonarola in Italy. But more appropriate for our purpose are the apparitions seen by shepherds and peasants and children. In a world plagued by uncertainty and horror, these people longed for contact with the divine. A detailed record of such events in Castile and Catalonia is provided by William A. Christian Jr in his book Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (1981).
In a typical case, a rural woman or child reports encountering a girl or an oddly tiny woman - perhaps three or four feet tall -who reveals herself to be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. She requests the awestruck witness to go to the village fathers or the local Church authorities and order them to say prayers for the dead, or obey the Commandments, or build a shrine at this very spot in the countryside. If they do not comply, dire penalties are threatened, perhaps the plague. Alternatively, in plague-infested times, Mary promises to cure the disease but only if her request is satisfied.
The witness tries to do as she is told. But when she informs her father or husband or priest, she is ordered to repeat the story to no one; it is mere female foolishness or frivolity or demonic hallucination. So she keeps quiet. Days later she is confronted again by Mary, a little put out that her request has not been honoured.
‘They will not believe me,’ the witness complains. ‘Give me a sign.’ Evidence is needed.
So Mary - who seems to have had no foreknowledge that evidence would have to be provided - provides a sign. The villagers and priests are promptly convinced. The shrine is built. Miraculous cures occur in its vicinity. Pilgrims come from far and wide. Priests are busy. The economy of the region booms. The original witness is appointed keeper of the sacred shrine.
In most of the cases we know of, there was a commission of inquiry, comprising leaders civic and ecclesiastic, who attested to the genuineness of the apparition, despite initial, almost exclusively male, scepticism. But the standards of evidence were not generally high. In one case the testimony of a delirious eight-year-old boy, taken two days before his death from plague, was soberly accepted. Some of these commissions deliberated decades or even a century after the event.
In On the Distinction between True and False Visions, an expert on the subject, Jean Gerson, in around 1400, summarized the criteria for recognizing a credible witness of an apparition: one was the willingness to accept advice from the political and religious hierarchy. Thus anyone seeing a vision disturbing to those in power was ipso facto an unreliable witness, and saints and virgins could be made to say whatever the authorities wanted to hear.
The ‘signs’ allegedly provided by Mary, the evidence offered and considered compelling, included an ordinary candle, a piece of silk, and a magnetic stone; a piece of coloured tile; footprints; the witness’s unusually quick gathering of thistles; a simple wooden cross inserted in the ground; welts and wounds on the witness; and a variety of contortions - a 12-year-old with her hand held funny, or legs folded back, or a closed mouth making her temporarily mute - that are ‘cured’ the moment her story is accepted.
In some cases accounts may have been compared and coordinated before testimony was given. For example, multiple witnesses in a small town might tell of a tall, glowing woman dressed all in white carrying an infant son and surrounded by a radiance that lit up the street the previous night. But in other cases, people standing directly beside the witness could see nothing, as in this report of a 1617 apparition from Castile: