Afterword: Islands in the Sea: The Public and Private Distribution of Knowledge of Religious Visions

Abstract

Experience in searching for historic public religious visions in Spain and in casual conversations on the subject in Spain and the United States suggests that the vast majority of unusual sensory experiences, many relating to the dead, go unreported, that those that do reach the media conform to certain patterns and stimulate other similar events, and that external conditions and media attention cycles make the reporting more or less likely.

Keywords:

• Apparitions
• Visions
• Media Selection Bias
• Ghosts
• Catholicism
• Spain

Acknowledgments

A version of this article was given at the conference, “Visionaries and Vision Hunters,” at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, 8–10 February 2007. The author thanks the convener, Lisa Bitel, the participants of the conference, the participants in the SIAS post‐doctoral seminar, “The Vision Thing,” held in June 2007 at Stanford University (Palo Alto, California) and in June–July 2008 in Budapest, as well as Anne Taves, Doug McAdam, and Lisa Godson for their references and suggestions.

Notes

1. Narciso Camós, Jardín de María plantado en el principiado de Cataluña (Barcelona: Jayme Plantada, 1657); Roque Alberto Faci, Aragón, Reyno de Christo y dote de María Santísma, 2nd rev. ed. (Zaragoza: Joseph Fort, 1739 [Facsimile ed., Zaragoza: La Diputación General de Aragón, 1979]); Juan de Villafañe, Compendio histórica en que se da noticia de las milagrosas y devotas imágenes de la Reyna de cielos y tierra, María Santísima, que se veneran en los más célebres santuarios de España, 2nd aug. ed. (Madrid: Imprenta y Librería de Manuel Fernández, 1740).

2. José Augusto Sánchez Pérez, El culto mariano en España (Madrid: CSIC, 1943).

3. Nazario Pérez, Historia Mariana de España, 5 v. 1947–1949 (Santander: Sal Terrae; Valladolid: Gráficas J. Concejo, Impresos Gerper), 2nd ed. “corrected and augmented” by Evencio Cófreces, 2 v. (Toledo: n.p., 1993–1995). See also the entries for “Santuarios” in Q. Aldea, T. Marín, J. Vives, eds., Diccionario de historia eclesiástica de España (Madrid: CSIC, 1972) 4: 2207–2381, and subsequently the sixteen guides to Marian shrines by autonomous region in the series Maria en los Pueblos de España (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 1989–2000).

4. For references, see William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth‐Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

5. For example, Bernard Billet, Vraies et fausses apparitions dans l'Église (Paris: Letheilleux, 1976).

6. El Alcazar, Madrid, 6 May 1947, 6.

7. William A. Christian, Jr., “Religious Apparitions and the Cold War in Southern Europe” in Eric R. Wolf, ed., Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities: The Northern Shore of the Mediterranean (Berlin: Mouton, 1984) 239–66, updated in Roldán Jimeno Aranguren, ed., Religión y símbolos, Zainak, Cuadernos de Antropologia‐Etnografia 18, (Donostia: Eusko Ikaskuntza, 1999), 55–86, at http://www.euskomedia.org/PDFAnlt/zainak/18/18065086.pdf (accessed 26 October 2008).

8. “I 13 miracoli del '95” and “Altre due in lacrime in provincia di Napoli,” La Repubblica, 8 April 1995, 2.

9. William A. Christian, Jr., Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) 165–71, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5q2nb3sn/ (accessed 26 October 2008).

10. John D. McCarthy, Clark McPhail, Jackie Smith, “Images of Protest: Dimensions of Selection Bias in Media Coverage of Washington Demonstrations, 1982 and 1991,” American Sociological Review 61 (June 1996): 478–99, at 481. Significantly, from our regard, the authors themselves were subject to a certain selection bias, as they omitted from consideration religious demonstrations (483). I am grateful to the late Charles Tilly for this reference.

11. McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith, “Images of Protest,” 494.

12. Eric Pace, “William Shawn, 85, is Dead; New Yorker's Gentle Despot,” New York Times, 9 December 1992, at http://partners.nytimes.com/library/books/050798shawn‐obit.html (accessed 26 October 2008). An official of the diocese of Fresno told Lisa Bitel, when in the spring of 2008 she asked about the visions of Lady of the Rock, which had been going on monthly for nineteen years, that it was “a non‐event” (Lisa Bitel, personal communication).

13. Roser Tosquellas, personal communication, 20 December 2007, Cerdanyola del Vallès.

14. Paolo Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra: Local Visions and Cosmic Drama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

15. Christian, Visionaries, 22–23, 171–210.

16. William A. Christian, Jr., Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 134–40.

17. See, for example, his Les Apparitions de la Lozère; mystique et pathologie à Saint‐Bonnet‐de‐Montauroux (Paris: Jean Flory, 1938).

18. Paolo Apolito, The Internet and the Madonna: Visionary Experience on the Web, trans. Anthony Shugaar (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005).

19. Stephen S. Hall, “Marie Tharp, The Contrary Map Maker,” New York Times Magazine, 31 December 2006, at http://nytimes.com/2006/12/31/magazine/31Tharp.t.html (accessed 26 October 2008).

20. Luis R. Corteguera, “The Making of a Visionary Woman: The Life of Beatriz Ana Ruiz, 1666–1735,” in Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera, eds., Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 164–81, at 173.

21. A professor friend to whom I sent a draft of this paper responded (3 August 2008), “I saw Santa too, and also had a very lucid vision of a sofa with people on it float in the sky past the living room window when I was 5 or 6. I announced it to my class and my first grade teacher, and she not only laughed but actually scolded me, and told me not to tell lies like that.”

22. María Cátedra, This World, Other Worlds: Sickness, Suicide, and the Afterlife among the Vaqueiros de Alzada of Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 255–85.

23. Christian, Visionaries, chap. 8.

24. Christian, “Religious Apparitions and the Cold War”; Robert A. Ventresca, From Fascism to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), chap. 3; Monique Scheer, Rosenkranz und Kriegsvisionen; Marienerschienungskulte im 20. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2006).

25. Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

26. Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth‐Century France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

27. Michael Allen, Ritual, Power and Gender; Explorations in the Ethnography of Vanuatu, Nepal and Ireland, Sydney Studies in Society and Culture 19 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 299–367.

28. For some other unusual sensory experiences: Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Jean‐Pierre Albert, Odeurs de Sainteté: La mythologie chrétienne des aromates, 2nd ed. (Paris: EHESS, 1996); Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation; Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Jacqueline E. Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious Imagination,” forthcoming in Colum Hourihane, ed., Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and History (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, 2009); David Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).