[3] Like most other peoples, Spaniards have long wondered about God and the saints--what they want from mortals, how they affect human affairs, even what they look like. The most direct evidence has come from face to face meetings with the holy ones. These meetings are the subject of this book.

In the past 150 years, divine apparitions to Catholics have been given worldwide publicity. In nineteenth-century France, a number of local visions played a part in the reestablishment of abandoned shrines and a revival of devotional Catholicism. ⁽¹⁾ The two most famous were at La Salette in 1846, where the Virgin threatened famine and chastisement unless the world repented, and at Lourdes in 1858, where the Virgin confirmed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception proclaimed four years earlier by Pius IX. In 1917 appearances of the Virgin to three children at Fatima stiffened popular resistance to the first lay government in Portuguese history and became the symbol of the Church's opposition to Bolshevism. These visions in turn inspired others in Spain. Since 1900 there have been over thirty episodes of public apparitions, largely of Mary. Most of them, like the ones occurring at the time of this writing (the fall of 1979) are at rural sites and have received scant international attention.

Others, especially three cases in northern Spain, were famous in their time: the Christ of Limpias (Santander), whose eyes appeared to move beginning in 1919, attracting pilgrims from France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria (they still come); Our Lady of Ezquioga (Guipúzcoa), 1931-1934, from France and Belgium; and Our Lady of Garabandal (Santander), where the Virgin was seen almost nightly from 1961 to 1965 by three girls. Garabandal has become known on a worldwide basis as a warning of the coming end of times by a conservative portion of Catholic laity.

It was during a long stay in Garabandal in 1968 that my curiosity about apparitions deepened. I learned that the [4] phenomenon is not limited to Spain in modern times. There have been hundreds of such episodes throughout Europe (particularly in Italy) since 1930. ⁽²⁾ Furthermore, this kind of public lay vision is attested by documents for at least six centuries in the West. I have studied about one hundred cases of Spanish apparitions from 1399 to the present. My sources are notarized investigations, largely made by Church and village authorities, still extant in manuscript form in parish, diocesan, or national archives; published versions of these investigations; and for apparitions of the twentieth century, newspaper accounts and the direct testimony of seers or witnesses. I have visited most of the villages discussed in the study and have been present at a number of contemporary visions.

The apparitions I examine here, although they generally occur to only one or two seers, are eminently social visions. They attract immediate public attention and call for some sort of verification. If believed, they provoke public devotion, often very emotional. Indeed, these visions are high drama, sacred plays in which everyday persons are suddenly elevated out of the normal round and granted ambassadorships to heaven, a foretaste of eternity. The village (for these are predominantly rural events) is the chorus, doubtful of why one of their number should be so chosen, but in the cases we learn about, feeling the pride of a chosen people. Villagers remembered actions and words, telling and retelling the stories so often that others can repeat them through following generations. The story of an apparition that occurred in a Segovian village around 1490 was quite fresh when recounted to an ecclesiastical investigator over 120 years later.

By consecrating places or images as special sources of grace, energy, and consolation, apparitions can create new shrines. They also provide critical instructions for coping with actual or imminent disaster, such as plague and war. In recent times they seem to confirm faith itself in the face of unbelief. What people hear the saints say, or the way they see the saints, reveals their deepest preoccupations. The changing faces of divine figures over the last six hundred years lead us to changes in the societies that meet them. ⁽³⁾

[5] People have direct contact with the supernatural in many ways. I have chosen to study those cases of direct sensory contact, whether apparitions proper or signs such as statues weeping, that are publicly known and have significance for a community or the wider society--the antecedents and successors, if you will, of La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima. Hence exclusively personal visions, such as those to supplicants praying for cures at shrines or to members of religious orders with spiritual counsel and consolation, fall outside the scope of this study. Apparitions in the context of miraculous cures generally occur after a shrine is already in existence; they are usually not investigated, but merely recorded in the shrine's miracle book. Visions or revelations to nuns and monks turn up in biographies or hagiographies with little evidence, and their significance is usually limited to the person, convent, or order involved. Rarely does either kind of vision leave its mark in a new shrine or have an immediate social resonance. They could be termed secondary visions, because their social importance is secondary, in the first case, to the miracles and, in the second case, to the sanctity of the seers.

In the religious lore of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these stories of personal visions had a privileged place; their themes and motifs were repeated in the later, more public visions that established or revived shrines. Visions that played a part in miracles entered a Europe-wide pool of legends that circulated in legend collections. In the twelfth century, in the manner of miracle books of the shrines of saints' bodies, like that of Martin of Tours, these legends were collected about a particular Marian shrine, like those of Chartres, Soissons, Laon, and Rocamadour. But by the thirteenth century, these in turn were compiled into anthologies of legends, like the Speculum Historíale of Vincent of Beauvais and the Miracles de la Sainte Vierge of Gualtier de Coincy. These anthologies in turn were used in part by the Spanish poets Gonzalo de Berceo (c. 1250) and Alfonso el Sabio (c. 1275), who added local Spanish miracles. Visions occurring during miracles at Spanish shrines were also mentioned in the exclusively Spanish collections--those of the great shrines of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Montserrat, [6] Saint James of Compostela, the Christ of Burgos, and those of the lesser regional shrines.

The frequency of visions among members of religious orders can be gauged from the Dialogue on Miracles of a German Cistercian, Caesarius of Heisterbach, written about 1223. ⁽⁴⁾ Caesarius was master of novices at his monastery, and his work is essentially a collection of miracles and visions that happened to his fellow monks and their acquaintances. The visions occurred largely around Cologne, but since monks circulated among the monasteries of the order, some of the visions reported took place in France and Spain. The visions were largely of the Virgin Mary, who was especially dear to the followers of Saint Bernard. They were seen by clerics, monks, or nuns who were especially virtuous. It is not difficult to see how this kind of familiarity with divine spirits, which first grew in Christian culture among the desert saints, could pass from monastic over to lay culture. With it came a series of techniques for distinguishing good spirits from bad, and true seers from false ones.

There is also a kind of theological vision, ranging from the Virgin nodding her head in approval of a mystical poem of Adam of Saint Victor to detailed eschatological revelations about the end of times. The visionary interpretations of the Apocalypse by Rupert, Joachim di Fiore, Bridget of Sweden, and others affected the lay visions we study. From the twelfth century on, they identified the lady clothed with light in Revelation 12 as Mary. Our seers often describe Mary as "brighter than the sun." While pre-Christian seers also saw heroes and gods with blinding auras, our seers' formulation must derive in part from a Marian interpretation of the passage in Revelation. As Mary in these visions also brings warning of impending punishment, the Apocalyptic parallels are all the more evident. ⁽⁵⁾

Yet another kind of vision is that of souls in purgatory or ghosts. Such figures are still occasionally seen in Spain and are interpreted as unquiet souls seeking passage to heaven from their relatives (who should have responses or anniversary masses said) or as signs of displeasure at the dispersal of a patrimony. Medieval theologians accepted that souls could visit [7] the earth in visible form, and these souls seem to have been regarded as good, rather than bad, spirits. Occasionally the information they communicated was used for a wider purpose, but generally the ghostly messages and appearances were of significance only to the families involved.

Visions to members of religious orders, theological visions, those of ghosts, and miracles at major shrines were all included in collections of exempla, or sermon illustrations. Caesarius of Heisterbach's compendium doubtless served this purpose, and there were such collections in use in Spain at the time of the visions studied here. Sermon stories must have been important vehicles for the diffusion of church and monastic lore among the rural laity. The striking anecdotes were powerful, long-lasting encapsulations of moral, theological, and mystical messages. Even in the early 1970s women in the villages of Santander illustrated their theological conversations with me by exempla I subsequently read in Clemente Sánchez's El Libro de los exenplos por a.b.c., compiled from 1400-1420. ⁽⁶⁾ While the exempla collections did not generally include local Spanish miracles or village apparitions, they did provide preachers and their audiences with patterns and motifs that seem to have been incorporated into the plots of local visions.

In the cases I have studied of public, socially significant visions, there is a substantial probability that the vision took place. By that I do not mean that a divine figure really materialized or that a statue really wept or bled, but merely that people present thought or said so. These "real" apparitions must be distinguished from more legendary apparitions, stories for which there is no contemporary report. One would class as legendary, for instance, the story of Our Lady of Pilar in Zaragoza. The first written version of the apparition is dated about 800 years after the supposed event. Or Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, for which there is also a considerable gap between apparition and documentation. Such legends were created to justify, illustrate, or dignify a preexisting devotion. But legends in turn can have a dramatic impact, and may even stimulate "real" apparitions of an imitative nature. They must therefore be taken into account as part of the cultural repertoire of a given [8] era. The people of the time rarely made the distinction that I draw here between real and legendary cases.

Apparitions documented for Spain fall into two categories. The first is the kind common in the twentieth century--one or more divine figures who appear to one or more seers "in the flesh," as it were. They usually speak, sometimes touch the seers; often they walk with them and show them things; and sometimes they leave sacred objects for the seers. These are apparitions proper. Those I know about in Spain occurred mainly in two periods: from around 1400 to about 1525 (the subject of this book); and from 1900 to the present. Apparently because of the activities of the Inquisition, only a handful of cases occurred in the years between 1525 and 1900.

Signs, the second category (signum, señal, senyal) are phenomena that can be independently verified by the senses. They can be seen by anyone who looks, felt by anyone who touches. Most late medieval apparitions are "confirmed" by signs, and in Spain in the early modern period, signs alone become the main attraction. These were characteristically the weeping, sweating, or bleeding of images, and group visions of saints in the form of clouds in the sky. In Spain they are concentrated in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, with four or five cases in the twentieth century. I hope to write about them, like the twentieth-century apparitions, elsewhere. ⁽⁷⁾ I do not treat in this study other marvelous phenomena more difficult to document, whether locutions (in which only a voice is heard), celestial music, the smelling of divine aromas, or revelations that bypass the senses altogether.

A third type, not really a true vision, is the finding of statues or paintings. The people of the time often considered these events miraculous. Indeed, the notarized accounts of such discoveries generally include testimony of accompanying signs. The chronology of the findings of paintings and statues coincides with that of signs. While the apparitions are overwhelmingly of Mary, the signs and discoveries are overwhelmingly of the Cross or the crucifix, probably a function of the different periods in which they occurred.

Agne Beijer, after talking about the relation between theater [9] sets and paintings in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, defined the point of view taken in this book:

What is most important, after all, is not the question of the influence of one art on another; it is the existence of a world of images--biblical, legendary, or purely poetic, in which poets, artists, and dramatists equally participated, and which all, in their way, sought to represent. ⁽⁸⁾

I have included complete texts whenever feasible, and have placed them in the forefront with a minimum of introduction for each, so readers can form their own opinions and make their own discoveries before reading my glosses. I hope you will experience in some measure the excitement felt by the villagers and townspeople of Castile and Catalonia when these epiphanies took place. 

1. Thomas Kselman, "Miracles and Prophecies: Popular Religion and the Church in Nineteenth-Century France." Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Dept. of History, University of Michigan, 1978.

2. Bernard Billet et al., Vraies et fausses apparitions dans I'Eglise (Paris, Letheilleux, 1976).

3. The best study to date of the phenomenon of apparitions, in Spain or elsewhere, is Carlos María Staehlin, Apariciones (Madrid, Razón y Fe, 1954).

4. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles (2 vols. London, Routledge, 1929).

5. P. Prigent, Apocalypse 12; Histoire de l'Exégése (Tübingen, 1959).

6. Clemente Sánchez de Vercial, El Libro de los exenplos por a. b. c., ed. John Esten Keller (Madrid, C.S.I.C., 1961). See also John Esten Keller, Motif-Index of Mediaeval Spanish Exempla (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1949); Frederic C.Tubach, Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatenia, 1969); and J. Th. Welter, L'Exemplum dans la litterature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Age (Paris and Toulouse, Occitania, 1927).

7. I treat the signs of the early modern period in Chapter Six of Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981).

8. Agne Beijer, "Visions célestes et infernales dans le théâtre du moyen-âge et de la Renaissance," 413 in Journées Internationales d'Études, Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, Vol. 1 (Paris, CNRS, 1956) 405-417.