The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [70]
‘Aye, Bartolome, the lady who came to me these past days is coming through the meadow, and she is kneeling and embracing the cross there - look at her, look at her!’ The youth though he looked as hard as he could saw nothing except some small birds flying around above the cross.
Possiole motives for inventing and accepting such stories are not hard to find: jobs for priests, notaries, carpenters and merchants, and other boosts to the original economy in a time of depression; augmented social status of the witness and her family; prayers once again offered for relatives buried in graveyards later abandoned because of plague, drought and war; rousing public spirit against enemies, especially Moors;
improving civility and obedience to canon law; and confirming the faith of the pious. The fervour of pilgrims in such shrines was impressive; it was not uncommon for rock scrapings or dirt from the shrine to be mixed with water and drunk as medicine. But I’m not suggesting that most witnesses made the whole business up. Something else was going on.
Almost all the urgent requests by Mary were remarkable for their prosaicness - for example, in this 1483 apparition from Catalonia:
I charge you by your soul to charge the souls of the men of the parishes of El Torn, Milleras, El Salent, and Sant Miquel de Campmaior to charge the souls of the priests to ask the people to pay up the tithes and all the duties of the church and restore other things that they hold covertly or openly which are not theirs to their rightful owners within thirty days, for it will be necessary, and observe well the holy Sunday.
And second that they should cease and desist from blaspheming and they should pay the usual charitas mandated by their dead ancestors.
Often the apparition is seen just after the witness awakes. Francisca la Brava testified in 1523 that she had gotten out of bed ‘without knowing if she was in control of her senses’, although in later testimony she claimed to be fully awake. (This was in response to a question which allowed a gradation of possibilities: fully awake, dozing, in a trance, asleep.) Sometimes details are wholly missing, such as what the accompanying angels looked like; or Mary is described as both tall and short, both mother and child, characteristics that unmistakably suggest themselves as dream material. In the Dialogue on Miracles written around 1223 by Caesarius of Heisterbach, clerical visions of the Virgin Mary often occurred during matins, which took place at the sleepy midnight hour.
It is natural to suspect that many, perhaps all, of these apparitions were a species of dream, waking or sleeping, compounded by hoaxes (and by forgeries; there was a thriving business in contrived miracles: religious paintings and statues dug up by accident or divine command). The matter was addressed in the Siete Partidas, the codex of canon and civil law compiled under the direction of Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile, around 1248. In it we can read the following:
Some men fraudulently discover or build altars in fields or in towns, saying that there are relics of certain saints in those places and pretending that they perform miracles, and, for this reason, people from many places are induced to go there as on a pilgrimage, in order to take something away from them; and there are others who influenced by dreams or empty phantoms which appear to them, erect altars and pretend to discover them in the above named localities.
In listing the reasons for erroneous beliefs, Alfonso lays out a continuum from sect, opinion, fantasy and dream to hallucination. A kind of fantasy named antoian$a is defined as follows:
Antoianca is something that stops before the eyes and then disappears, as one sees or hears it in a trance, and so is without substance.
A 1517 papal bull distinguishes between apparitions that appear ‘in dreams or divinely’. Clearly, the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, even in times of extreme credulity, were alert to the possibilities of hoax and delusion.
Nevertheless, in most of medieval Europe,