7.
The Proliferation of Visions
Any if not most of the great vision sequences in modern Europe have provoked waves of replication. Visions in the Papal States and at La Salette, Lourdes, Marpingen, Knock, Fatima, Limpias, Beauraing, and Siracusa each produced a skein of similar events. Those at Medjugorje especially, because of televised publicity, elicited hundreds if not thousands of other visions. In all these cases there seems to be a chain reaction. Visions that gain public attention spark others that provoke yet others, until the media becomes jaded and stops reporting them and the pent-up emotional energy of consumers is exhausted. A careful look at the emergence of subsequent visions as news of Ezkioga spread reveals processes that may also be at work in the transmission, particularly by children, of other complex paranormal constructs like airborne witches or, more recently, Satanic baby killers.
Seers at Ezkioga came from all the areas that sent pilgrims, including the neighboring provinces of Alava, Navarra, and Bizkaia. But newspapers mentioned many of these seers only once, their visions often being weak
and vague. There were invisible barriers that excluded many and favored the regular Gipuzkoan crowd at Ezkioga. The language of the ceremonies and the visions was predominantly Basque, which left out the Castilian speakers of Alava and most of Navarra. There was no regular public transport from Navarra. There were trains from Bizkaia to Zumarraga, but Bizkaians spoke a different dialect and had a quite separate identity that made the provincial boundary a cultural frontier. With few exceptions the better known seers, those with habitual "strong" visions, came from the southern, highland, half of Gipuzkoa, the Goiherri, where villages or towns sent buses daily or weekly to Ezkioga through the fall of 1931. Each of these seers came with an entourage, or cuadrilla, of relatives, friends, neighbors, and converts.[1]
Apolito, Cielo in Terra, 116, usefully distinguishes between vague "weak" visions, as of a flare or light with little content, and "strong" visions, those with clear visual content or messages. He notes that the weak visions of credible people often serve to "confirm" the strong visions of the less credible. On the cuadrilla as a Basque institution, see del Valle, Korrika, 42.
Visions spread out from Ezkioga in three ways: newspapers reported the events throughout Spain, pilgrim seers returned from Ezkioga to their home villages, and later seers abandoned Ezkioga because of church edicts. In all there were dozens of mini-Ezkiogas. They took place out of the public eye, almost totally unrecorded. The only way to find out about them was through the hazy memories of participants fifty years later. In several towns people were reluctant to speak of the visions, as the child seers were now adult neighbors. I can only hope that those towns where people did talk to me are representative of the others. In any case, the reader will have to forgive me if I am imprecise with dates and discreet about names.
Visions Spread or Brought to Light by News
While the visions were in part behavior that was learned, they were also behavior that was permitted and rewarded. Some people already knew how to have visions but had done so only in private. The publicity Ezkioga received allowed people to share their religious experiences and showed them uses for their contacts with another plane of reality. It was not necessary for all such people to go to Ezkioga; it was sometimes enough that they knew of the free-for-all inspiration by word of mouth, by radio, or by newspaper. The effect of the sensational news was a sensitizing to the subject throughout Spain in seers, potential seers, and the media alike. This effect worked quickly, often at considerable distance. Within weeks of the first reports in July 1931, the press was noting visions in many other places.
Bachicabo, a hamlet in Alava, was one of the first places to reproduce the visions. Located in the valley of Valdegovia on the border with Burgos, it was beyond the zone from which buses took people to Ezkioga. The first to see the Virgin there was the fourteen-year-old son of an emigrant to Sestao, a Bilbao industrial suburb; the boy was back in the village for the summer. On about 2 August 1931 he was tending oxen a kilometer from the village near a spring called Petrás, where the villagers often stopped on their annual pilgrimage to the shrine
of Nuestra Señora de Angosto. In a cavity of a large boulder he saw a flower, and when he went to touch it, the Virgin Mary appeared in its place.
The villagers did not heed the boy, but a group of them paused before the boulder on the evening of August 6 on their way to the fiesta of San Salvador in Espejo. One of them, Ignacio, aged about twenty-two, went to the rock, put his hand in the cavity, and said, "Aquí no hay Virgen ni hostias!" This was a blasphemous way of saying that the Virgin was not there. But then he shouted that she was indeed there and lay down, weeping, on the ground. His friends wrapped him in a blanket.
A woman and a man who had been present described that moment to me with great gusto and a certain amount of jocular hindsight.[2]
On 27 March 1983 I spoke with four people in their seventies. Raimundo Conde and a woman who did not wish to have her name used had been with Ignacio.
They themselves saw nothing but took the matter seriously. That evening the boy from Sestao, accompanied by the Bachicabo sexton Timoteo, recounted his original vision to the parish priest in Espejo. The priest was skeptical: "You must have heard about the people seeing apparitions in Ezkioga." Nevertheless, the fiesta was interrupted as everybody, including the priest, went to the boulder and said the rosary.As in the rest of the nuclear villages in northern Spain, the people of Bachicabo were used to doing things together and in combination with neighboring communities. They had common land they used for pasture and commons they shared with other villages; they helped one another with harvests; they shared shrines with other villages; and, of course, they prayed together in mass and in the rosary. Whether they themselves or the boy from Sestao had heard of the Virgin of Ezkioga, as is likely, or not, there were precedents in their own local geography for divine visions. They knew that the Virgin de Angosto was supposed to have appeared in ancient times to the shepherd Cecilio and that in a nearby village an image of San Lorenzo was supposed to have returned by itself to its mountain site at night.
What the Bachicabo villagers decided to do was similar to what the people at Ezkioga had done. Every night for at least three months they gathered to say the rosary, led by a youth, while several seers, all of them males, had visions of the "Virgen de Petrás." For the first month they met at the original vision site. Bachicabo had 170 inhabitants (in 1983 there were only twelve families), and at night after supper the village would empty out. One woman I talked to felt so impelled to go that she would leave her fifteen-day-old baby behind alone. People came from the surrounding villages, Barrio, Tobalina, Salcedo, Salinas de Añana, Espejo, and even from the town of Miranda del Ebro. Later, in September, they held the evening prayer sessions in the village itself, and the Virgin appeared to seers in various houses. In late October people were collecting money (probably to build a chapel), but by the winter the visions were over.[3]
"¿Las Apariciones de Ezquioga en Alava?" La Libertad (Vitoria), 26 October 1931, p. 1; "Gobierno Civil," El Heraldo Alavés, 26 October 1931, p. 2; and note in ELB, 27 October, p. 5.
People in Bachicabo most enjoy recalling the funny incidents: the night a seer in trance said, "Boost me up into the pine tree, for I am going to throw myself
down" (they did, he did not); how one seer's announcement, "The Virgin of Petrás is arriving now, wearing sandals," tended to coincide with the flash of headlights on a distant highway; the time they went to the site and found a crudely lettered sign that read, "By the intercession of the Virgin, the spring water of Petrás make you powerfully hungry"; the night a male seer asked the Virgin how she was going to punish those who had spoken ill of him, provoking a lady to have a fit and scream, "O Virgen Santísima, no, for we are all sinners!"; the night a shoemaker from Espejo ordered spectators to come down from the pine trees where they were perched; the time a seer had a vision that everybody had to harvest Eusebio's potatoes (they did). They also recall the night that the seer Ignacio's father announced in the Petrás pine grove, "My son has sent me to say that the Virgin has said that this is more sacred than the church." And they remember that the local priests were against the visions.
Nevertheless people recall that they were fully caught up in the events at the time. One of the women said, "If you did not go to the rosary and to see what happened, it seemed you were lacking something…. It was not something fun, because what they said there was so—I don't know, so serious…. Sometimes it was frightening because of what some of them said they saw."
The seers obviously knew what was going on elsewhere in Spain. One night Ignacio said, "Good evening. The Virgin of Petrás has left for Toledo." And everyone had to wait until she returned, when they said another rosary. We can date this moment with some precision, for in Guadamur, Toledo, children began to have visions at the end of August. The news was in the national press starting 29 August 1931 and in the press of Alava on September 2. Toledo has already shown a marked interest in Ezkioga, and the Catholic newspaper there had published more on the apparitions than any other periodical of the Spanish interior.[4]
Ezkioga material was reprinted in El Castellano in 1931 on 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, and 30 July; 1, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 26 August; 26 September; and 16 and 17 October.
Some Catholics in the province of Toledo had reason to welcome heaven's hand. For instance, they read about class rebellion when socialist farmworkers almost succeeded in throwing the mayor from a balcony of a town hall. They read as well about shootings and stabbings in the meeting of a town council; about riots to protest arrests—in one town of a man who made fun of the mayor and in another of a man who struck a private guard; and about invasions of private estates to cut down trees and to poach.[5]
El Debate, 18 August 1931, p. 2, and El Imparcial of 30 August and 6 September 1931—Quero, Menasalbas, Puebla de Montalbán, Mazarambroz, Lucillos, and Alcaudete de la Jara.
In the wake of the events at Ezkioga people of all persuasions were alert to the idea of supernatural help. On August 18 a republican newspaper reported that a fortune-teller was predicting "great unrest in the future of Spain."[6]
Marqués, HM, 18 August 1931.
And the following day another newspaper, in all likelihood unaware that visions were going on in several other places already, ran a cartoon on the front page suggesting that sleepy villages needed a miracle, "as in Ezquioga," to attract summer visitors.On August 19 El Debate presented a short report about a series of visions that had started a week earlier in the Toledo village of Rielves. The article revealed a community divided into Catholics and socialists, believing women and disbelieving men.[7]
"Aparición en un pueblo de Toledo," El Debate, 18 August 1931, p. 4.
[Dateline Toledo, August 18] We are informed from the village of Rielves that during the night of the eleventh the thirteen-year-old girl Teófila, when she was seated at the door of her house, saw a glow issuing from the window bars of the house of Don Lucio Péerez. She called her mother, Celestina, who said that it was the Virgin Mary with a white mantle.
On the fourteenth Marcelino, the father of the girl, saw a resplendence in the same place and called his wife, saying, "This is what you saw." She answered that it was, indeed, the Virgin, although this time more beautiful, with her outline more clear, with a white mantle and a black blouse. Celestina Parra, the mother of the girl, says she is willing to give her testimony under oath.
On the night of the fifteenth, the vision appeared on the facade of the house of Justo Pérez Díaz and was seen by the girl Amparo, who called her uncle, Agapito Centellas, and her aunt. Agapito was so moved that he knelt and took off his cap, crying, "What do you want, Most Holy Virgin?" but he received no reply. Justo Pérez Díaz also saw her. He is a person who is not a believer and says it was without doubt the bust of an image. Two socialists who were on their way home saw the vision on the window bars of the house of Isidoro Morales. "Look there on those bars," said one of them, moved, and the other replied, "It is the Virgin!" Both told their wives when they arrived home.
The placement of this report on an inside page, the absence of a follow-up report, perhaps even the explicitness with which the article addressed the issue of unbelievers, all indicate to me that what happened in Rielves was something Catholic newspapers would not normally have printed. Given the anxieties of the times, the social strife, and awareness of the events at Ezkioga, however, the story made it over the threshold of acceptance—but even then the paper reported it as an anecdote. The vague, ghostlike luminous sightings by villagers on the bars of various windows were not the stuff of Lourdes. The visions at Bachicabo never made it even that far. Both were episodes that under normal circumstances would have gone unreported; the bigger news from Ezkioga "smoked them out," as it were. We saw how similar visions in Torralba de Aragón in April and Mendigorría in May ended quickly. That the visions at Rielves and Bachicabo were believed and reported was a result of the same tense religious and political climate that nurtured the visions of the Ezkioga children.
The subsequent visions at Guadamur were more successful in attracting attention and respect. Toledo's Catholic newspaper, El Castellano , reported them fully. The diocese of Toledo, then running on collegial leadership after the
expulsion of Cardinal Segura, permitted these reports. Both sets of visions that were permitted major publicity during the Republic were in dioceses where the bishops were in exile.
There was a connection. Two deputies from Toledo, Dimas Madariaga and Ramón Molina, a canon in the Toledo cathedral, went to Ezkioga on 16 August 1931. This was three days after Antonio de la Villa's attack on the visions in the Cortes, and the Toledans went in order to rebut him. Molina described the visions in El Castellano a week later. Another canon of Toledo, Gregorio del Solar, was at Ezkioga for a longer period, until mid-October, dressed in a threadbare cassock and deeply involved in the visions, to the point of learning Basque. Del Solar became convinced at Ezkioga that he was destined for martyrdom. Another canon, the dean of the cathedral, José Polo Benito, who was an unsuccessful candidate in the elections for the Cortes, wrote that the Ezkioga visions and those of Guadamur were "God's offensive."[8]
For Molina at Ezkioga, Altisent (who met him there), CC, 9 September 1931, and Molina, El Castellano, 24 August 1931. Molina organized the Eucharistic Congress of 1926. On del Solar see Juan María Amundarain, who served as his altar boy, 3 June 1984, p. 4; an Ezkioga resident, 7 February 1986; R 35-36, 62, 117; and Rigné's photograph 7 in R of del Solar leading the prayers. Polo Benito, El Castellano, 11 September 1931.
On August 26, two days after Molina's article describing the visions of Benita Aguirre, two daughters of the Guadamur physician came back from their evening paseo saying that they had seen the Virgen de la Soledad in an olive grove near the town. The next evening at the same time a boy said he had had to stop his bicycle on the road near the grove to avoid hitting the Virgin. That night up to five hundred persons gathered at the site. Thirty of them claimed they had seen the figure, slightly raised above the ground. In addition to children, a doctor, town councillors, and young farmworkers were among the seers. This news was published first in nearby Toledo and then in Madrid.[9]
All 1931: "¿Otra aparición en Guadamur?" El Castellano, 28 August, p. 4; "Supuestas apariciones en Toledo," El Debate, 29 August, p. 5; "Las Apariciones de la Virgen y el calor," ELM, 29 August, p. 5.
As a result of the publicity attendance at the visions surged. On the night of August 28, one thousand people went from the adjacent villages and Toledo and on the night of September 2 seven thousand. By then seers included not only adults and children from Guadamur but outsiders from a wide range of surrounding towns, including a "señorita" aged twenty-four from Madrid, where photographs of many of the seers appeared in an illustrated newspaper. On September 1 a speaker mentioned these visions in the Cortes.[10]
Ahora, Madrid, 5 September 1931, p. 16.
The archdiocese of Toledo took the events seriously, and on September 2 after the rosary the boys choir of the cathedral performed in the village. Apparently the left read the visions in political terms, for groups of youths in Toledo's main square harassed the city's pilgrims. While the visions at Ezkioga and Bachicabo occurred in a largely sympathetic environment, those of New Castile faced active hostility and ridicule.[11]
El Castellano, 3 September 1931, p. 4.
The Guadamur visions or the reports of them in turn sparked others or other reports. Republican newspapers delighted in locating new visions. On about August 28 in Sigüenza the head of the telegraph office and his family saw the Virgin on the tower of the cathedral. And on about September 4 in Guadalajara many people gathered near the church of San Gil because children were seeing the Virgin on an arch at the entrance. Apparently unbeknownst to the outside
Guadamur, province of Toledo, August 1931: above, girl seers (photo by
Vilaseca); below, rosary begins at dusk (photo by Contreras). From Ahora,
5 September 1931, p. 16. Courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid
world, there had been some local visions going on in Orgiva (Granada) since April. Following the publicity about Ezkioga, a local leftist newspaper brought these visions to light and the Madrid leftist press followed suit. The press claimed that the visions took place in a cave, that an entrance fee was charged, and that there were sightings of "Saint Joseph, Saint Roch with his dog, Curro Cuchares, Primo de Rivera, Saint John Nepomucene, Juana la Loca, Saint Exuperio, Nebuchadnezzar, and Attila's horse." Madrid newspapers published cartoons making fun of the rash of visions.[12]
"Nueva aparición de la Virgen: Ayer fue vista en una torre de la Catedral de Sigüenza," El Imparcial, 30 August 1931, p. 1. All 1931: "Otra aparición en Guadalajara como tantas otras," ELM, 5 September, p. 5; "La Virgen aparece ahora en Guadalajara," El Imparcial, 6 September, p. 3; Cruz Romero, El Defensor de Granada, 8 September; Constancio, El Defensor de Granada, 11 September; "Apariciones en masa," Crisol, 8 September, p. 4; "La Virgen, su marido, San Roque, todo un cortejo se ha aparecido en Orgiva," ELM, 9 September, p. 5; cartoons by Bagaria, Crisol, 1 September, and Menda, ELM, 6 September; and in the anticlerical La Traca, 5 and 26 September, "Otra vez se nos ha aparecido la Virgen de Villabrutos" and "Se acabaron los milagros—la Virgen de Guadamur."
By this point the visions must have been an embarrassment for churchmen even in Toledo. As at Ezkioga, so at Guadamur: different seers saw different apparitions and there were too many visionaries to control. Although the parish
"Summer Theater": "Step right in folks and see the latest, only two pesetas"; "It's about
to start"; "Apparition of the authentic Virgin, guaranteed against imitations and falsifications."
From El Liberal (Madrid), 6 September 1931. Courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid
priest defended his seers, El Castellano stopped its daily reports on September 11, and the visions slowly decreased. When I went to Guadamur' in 1975, oldsters treated the matter diffidently; the younger generation did not know about it.[13]
The final reference in El Castellano was a letter by Martin Ruíz on October 3. The other Meseta site I know of that fall was near Palencia (see below).
Visions Spread by Contact: The Role of Children
By mid-August 1931, about the same time that the news of Ezkoga began to show its effects throughout Spain, a more local kind of spread was occurring. Returning pilgrims and seers took home the Ezkioga liturgy, emotion, and access to the divine. In adjoining Navarra the same kind of replication spread the visions from village to village. These villages were located in a band between one and two hours' travel from Ezkioga, from which the new shrine was accessible but inconvenient. Seers from the Ezkioga area who worked as servants elsewhere and especially children from elsewhere who had visions at Ezkioga were key vectors in this spread because they could not get to the main site frequently.
The only substantive article on the Ezkioga visions in a Basque republican newspaper, El Liberal of Bilbao, revealed that other visions were taking place in Iturmendi, Bakaiku, and other towns of Navarra south of the Goiherri.[14]
Millán, ELB, 9-10 September 1931.
The Barranca is the broad, high valley of the Arakil river, with high mountains to the north and south. Its inhabitants do not live dispersed in farmhouses, as in most of the Basque Country, but rather clustered in tight villages, as in Alava to the west. But unlike the people of Alava, those of the Barranca speak Basque, and in particular the dialect of their neighbors in Gipuzkoa. As in much of PyreneanSpain and France, the house is the major unit of identity. People belong to a given house and are identified by their house names. The houses are passed on through impartible inheritance, and noninheriting children who marry have to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In 1931 the wealthier households included servants and farm laborers.
From the Barranca two roads wind down into Gipuzkoa: the main highway from Vitoria to San Sebastián, which passes through Altsasu and enters Gipuzkoa at Zegama, and a smaller road from Arbizu through the mountains to Ataun. These roads and countless trails have served traditionally as conduits for frequent contact. Sheep from the mountains of Navarra came down to winter in the milder climes of Gipuzkoa; young women from the Barranca found homes in the convents of the river towns and young men jobs in the factories. The high valley is less than an hour from Ezkioga by car, bus, or truck. But its people—mostly farmers and shepherds, apart from workers in an industrial enclave around Altsasu—were more isolated and poorer, cut off linguistically from the prosperous cities of Estella and Pamplona to the south or Vitoria to the west. They were also devout, and in the first decades of the century the towns received frequent missions, given particularly by the Capuchins in Altsasu.
In the first weeks of the visions the road through Ataun brought constant bus-and truckloads of Navarrese pilgrims to Ezkioga. José Miguel de Barandiarán, the Basque ethnographer from Ataun, remembered them passing in front of his house and once stopping nearby because a girl from Navarra said she was seeing the infant Jesus on a rock in the river.[15]
José Miguel de Barandiarán, Ataun, 9 September 1983, p. 2.
In July Navarrese seers at Ezkioga included a man from Lekunberri (on July 15) and on July 16 a boy from Errotz (near Izurdiaga) and a girl from Arbizu. And when the canon Juan B. Altisent stopped in Arbizu to ask directions, he was told that several children of the village had been lucky enough to see the Virgin.[16]On August 18 in Altisent, CC, 6 September 1931.
In June 1984 I drove to the Barranca to search for memories of what had happened fifty years before. In some towns the atmosphere was tense. The district has been a stronghold of Herri Batasuna, the political party supporting the ETA fighters who from 1968 have kept up a campaign of violence to force Basque separation from Spain. The day before I arrived a demonstration in Etxarri-Aranatz had left one man dead. In Arbizu my guide was Francisco Mendiueta Araña, expert in accordion, harmonica, singing, and whistling. He remembered the truck that came at dusk to take people down to Ezkioga. People were packed into it like upright candles in a box; many were carsick.
The visions in Arbizu started at Ansota, about one and a half kilometers north of the town center, in higher pastureland belonging to the township. The first seers were girls, who were tending cows, but boys had visions too. The visions would start in the late afternoon and go into the night, when the townspeople came and everyone would say the rosary. When I asked Francisco Mendiueta, eight years old at the time of the visions, whether before then anyone had ever
seen witches, he said yes, that with his father at the same place he had seen fireballs on Mount Aitzkorri. The visions at Ansota lasted about a month and then shifted to a new site, still to the north of town, on the road at a place named Baldasoro, where there was a garage and a large ash tree. Finally, they moved to a walnut tree at the cast end of the village. There people prayed with great faith at an altar put up against the Zubaldi house, and one after another the seers would keel back into trance. The visions continued for a couple of months and then petered out. Of the seers Francisco could name four girls and two boys aged seven to twelve, the children of farmers and masons, but he said there were more. A priest native to the village did not believe and said it was witch-stuff and a lie.
It was hard for Francisco and his friends to remember what the seer children saw, apart from the Virgin and the village dead in heaven and hell. What most surprised them was that their pals could perform little miracles. They remember one boy in vision, who somehow knew that Francisco and a friend, out of sight, were rattling a heavy metal ring and called out, "Paco and Blas will go to hell!" And particularly they remembered the seer children, when the visions were over, holding out invisible candy given them by heavenly beings, then eating it. They heard the crinkle of the candies being unwrapped but saw nothing.[17]
Francisco Mendiueta Araña and friends, Arbizu, 15 June 1984.
These stories, like those from Bachicabo, are at once delightful, like homemade fairy tales, and moving. They reveal children and young people who found an opening and accepted an unprecedented gift of authority and usefulness in the village arena. In these backwaters the stakes were less titanic than at Ezkioga, where rural children and adults were eventually negotiating with the gods for the future of the nation and humanity before an audience of thousands. Here the miracles and stakes were often on a smaller scale, involving bread-and-butter questions of daily life among neighbors.
Francisco Mendiueta took me to Torrano (now Dorrao), where we ended up in the large dark house of Felipe Rezano and Felisa Lizarraga. They first went to the visions in other villages and then were intimately involved in those of Dorrao, still believed in them, and talked about them directly, simply, and without complexes. But they said these events were something they had largely forgotten.[18]
Felipe Rezano (b. 1911) and Felisa Lizarraga (b. 1922), Dorrao, 15 June 1984.
The main seer in Dorrao was Inés Igoa, who was about seventeen years old in 1931. Inés would fall into trance during the rosary in her house or outdoors with most of the small village present. She narrated what she was seeing in her trance ("ahora ha salido no-sé-qué"), including, they remember, the Virgin and the Heavenly Father, and she would tell them things "as in a sermon." As for the content of the sermons, they recalled only that she foretold a civil war with the death of many sons. On the whole, they preferred the predictions of Inés to those of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
The only other Dorrao seer was Felisa's brother, José, then twenty years old, but he did not have his visions in a trancelike state, and for Felipe, at least, they
"The five seers on the stage, at Echarri-Aranaz. The first has fallen in catalepsy." Photo by Carlos
Juaristi published in Diario de Navarra, 25 October 1931. Courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid
carried less authority. Felipe was one of five youths chosen by the Virgin through Inés as "angels" to help organize the visions. One of their jobs was to cut pine trees, bring them to the village, and set up an altar for the visions. He was a little embarrassed about his being an angel—"How do I know if it was true or not? We said, this cannot be true because we are the worst in the village. What do we know?"
As children Felipe and Felisa both wanted to have visions and went to various sites trying to see. But neither could. At most, they remembered their friends noticing stars that were especially bright. One imagines children, teenagers, and adults peering intently into the heavens at night. Felisa's father and grandfather were great devotees of the Virgin. They took Felisa, who would have been only nine or ten, to Ezkioga three times after the visions in Dorrao had begun.
By a year after her first vision Inés's messages, as reported by Padre Burguera, were quite sophisticated and included references to Freemasonry, Christ the King, the reign of Jesus and Mary in Spain, and a chastisement. Inés also suffered the crucifixion. She was well aware of the government offensive in the fall of 1932.[19]
B 621-623.
At Iturmendi the seers were two boys, aged nine and ten, the sons of farmers. They had their visions on the flat threshing ground called Martinikorena, on the edge of the village, where there were some walnut trees. They too would fall into vision during a rosary at which much of the village was present. In Iturmendi the parish priest forbade an outdoor altar. By identifying some of the village dead in hell these boys caused deep rifts in the town. Not everyone believed their visions, and "some wise guy made a jack-o'-lantern out of a sugar beet with a
Victoriano Juaristi, ca. 1931. Courtesy Carlos Juaristi
candle inside and put it in the cemetery." People remember that the visions lasted two or three months.[20]
Interview with villagers, Iturmendi, 17 June 1984. There were already bandos (factions) in many of these towns, probably based on lineages, and in some places opposing attitudes toward the visions probably formed along these cleavages. See Olabarri, "Documentos." Don Juan Estanga Armendáriz, from Iraneta, was part of a set of local professionals opposed to the visions; the group included his niece, the schoolteacher in Urdiain; the Urdiain parish priest, from Etxarri-Aranatz; and the parish priest of Bakaiku, a village native (Santiago Simón, town secretary of Iturmendi and Bakaiku from 1932 to 1938, Pamplona, 18 June 1984).
At Etxarri-Aranatz a number of seers were having visions by early October. Victoriano Juaristi, president of the Colegio de Médicos of Pamplona, a distinguished psychiatrist and man of letters, was sent there by the bishop of Pamplona when the visions had already built up momentum. On 25 October 1931 he published a critical article in Diario de Navarra . Juaristi's son Carlos, also a doctor, took photographs, and his photos of Etxarri-Aranatz and Unanu, however dark and blurred, are the only, precious, visual evidence I could find of a brief period in the Barranca in the last half of 1931 in which every night children took control.[21]
PV, 18 October 1931, p. 5, named a ten-year-old girl seer at Ezkioga who had already had visions in Etxarri-Aranatz; on Juaristi see Ceballos Vizcarret, Victoriano Juaristi; Blasco Salas, Recuerdos, 159, 203-205; Carlos Juaristi Acevedo, Pamplona, 17 June 1984; Juaristi, DN, 25 October 1931.
Victoriano Juaristi described five or six girls of Etxarri-Aranatz on a low stage separated from the onlookers by barbed wire. During the rosary, "they fell back on their backs one after another, like dolls in a carnival shooting gallery." When Carlos Juaristi fired a magnesium flash, the villagers screamed, apparently thinking the devil was about to appear, and then roughed him up. One man exclaimed, "Coño! Pues eso se avisa" or, approximately, "Shoot! Give us some warning."In Etxarri-Aranatz I spoke with José Maiza Auzmendi, an old believer who had gone on foot to Ezkioga and to other towns in the Barranca to witness the visions. In his town the visions took place on the south side of the highway to Altsasu, before an altar of sorts. After two or three months people gradually stopped going, and the child seers ordered a cross to be placed there. When the parish priest refused to permit a cross, Maiza's father, father-in-law, and uncle
put a cross up in the village cemetery. On the whole, the attitude of the village priests was neutral, he said. The anecdotes townspeople recall confirm the local flavor of the visions. One girl seer relayed news that Serafina, a woman who had died young, was in some difficulty in the afterlife because of an unkept promise. An older woman had been dubbed "Santa Rita" for the saint she was always seeing. And one night the Holy Family appeared with a spirit donkey, and children and adults followed them with lighted candles and lanterns.[22]
José Maiza Auzmendi, Etxarri-Aranatz, 17 June 1984. He also went to Fatima and the more recent apparitions at Monte Umbe near Bilbao. For Holy Family see Francisco Argandoña, "Apariciones de Lizarraga," citing his cousin from Etxarri-Aranatz, Leopoldo Quintana.
The visions in Bakaiku began by the river and the train tracks, where there were poplar trees. According to El Liberal this was in mid-August.
At Bacaicoa the infant Jesus appeared and spoke to a villager who made doughnuts [churros ]; but the man could not reveal what he heard as it was a secret. Nevertheless he says he has it all written down in a sealed envelope. The doughnut man made a penitential promise not to speak at all and to go for several days to the apparition site barefoot and with his head hanging down.[23]
Millán, ELB, 9-10 September 1931.
The writer observed that children were usually playing at the place the infant Jesus appeared, and he commented cynically that the doughnut business was doing very well. He said the Virgin was seen in "another nearby village" walking in a poplar grove along the banks of the river.
The visions were still in full force on 17 November 1931 when Padre Burguera arrived. He was particularly impressed with María Celaya, who kept a notebook entitled "Las Apariciones de Bacaicoa," starting with her first vision on October 16. Burguera accompanied her to Ezkioga and observed her again in her home village. In all he named eleven seers there: a woman aged 58; girls aged 17, 12, 11, 11, 10, 9, 9, 8, and 5; and a boy aged 8. These children included two sets of siblings.[24]
B 663-664. Burguera used Celaya's notebook when preparing his book; the notebook is probably with his papers in Sueca. B II 628, 636-637.
According to Burguera the visions had begun with two eight-year-old children, a boy and a girl, playing by the river. There they met a strange child and gathered mulberries with him. The child told them that he was named Jesus, his mother was named Mary, and they should go to Ezkioga where his mother was waiting for them. They noticed that his hands, unlike theirs, did not become stained by the berries and that he walked on the water of the river. A wealthy female relative duly took the children by car to Ezkioga, about thirty kilometers away, and there they saw the Virgin, who confirmed their vision by the river and gave them secrets. More children went to the river site and had visions of Mary and the child Jesus, whom they referred to as the Infant Jesus of Prague, after the Carmelite devotion popular in the zone.[25]
Child sodalities were founded to the Infant Jesus of Prague in Vitoria in 1905, San Sebastián and Pamplona in 1908, Villafranca in 1910, Elizondo in 1917, and a number of villages in Navarra in 1922 and 1923 (Doroteo, Historia prodigiosa, 168-229). Arte Cristiana of Olot, a major factory for religious images, started making the Infant Jesus of Prague in 1905 (company records).
At Bakaiku the visions received a boost from some of the village elite, including the wife of the civil engineer and politician Wenceslao Goizueta, and the schoolteacher, Francisca Setoáin. When Burguera went to the school, eight children went into trance for him. He referred to the teacher as a "tireless
apostle." Perhaps in the vision messages there is an echo of her interest, for the first two seers said that the Virgin told them the visions were for the people of Spain, "who honored God so much and now officially dishonor him." Messages like this should alert us to the bias of oral testimony based on memory. No doubt local people are much more likely to retain anecdotes anchored in kinship and place and less likely to remember messages of political or theological importance. By contrast, the written reports of ideologues like Burguera would likely leave out the more local meanings. These seers were speaking simultaneously to both levels.[26]
B II 634-637. The teacher was the village representative for the children's religious magazine, La Obra Máxima (January 1931, p. vi).
The seers also ran into opposition, especially from some of the men of the village, which María Celaya described in her notebook. For a while their visions attracted spectators from a wide radius, but as more villages had their own seers, with messages more specific to their neighbors and problems, fewer people went to Bakaiku.[27]
B 664.
People I talked to remembered the Lizarraga visions beginning after those of Bakaiku, Lizarraga-ergoien was on an excitement route, the road from Lezaun and the Estella region of Navarra, which sent many busloads of pilgrims to Ezkioga in the months of July and August 1931. Such routes became corridors of enthusiasm. Francisco Argandoña, who as a boy went from Lezaun, said that after an outdoor rosary all the children, agreeing with whoever spoke first, saw the saints arrive from over the mountains. The night he was there, the procession began with Saint Joseph, centered on the infant Jesus, and ended with Saint Adrian on a white horse. The next morning he was taken to a girl who said she played with the infant Jesus whenever she wanted to and who handed him an invisible baby Jesus so small it could fit in the palm of her hand.[28]
Francisco Argandoña (b. 1924), "Apariciones de Lizarraga," 4-5.
By late November, as at Ezkioga, the visions had taken a turn for the macabre and apocalyptic. Burguera saw twelve seers from seven households: a woman aged 21; girls aged 12, 12, 11, 11, 10, 9, and 4; and four boys, all of them younger brothers of girl seers, aged 13, 8, 7, and 6. Another observer put the number of seers at more than thirty and wrote:
The seers seemed to be petrified, first supplicating with their eyes upward and their hands joined, then horrified by what they were seeing in their terrible and tragic vision, sometimes giving screams of fear for the catastrophe that they saw coming in the war and other chastisements that would occur in the world.
As in the other villages, the seers had an altar on the threshing ground and an enclosure for their visions, and adults brought chairs and benches to sit on. Some visions were right out in the road. One boy had a vision on top of a delivery van; when it drove off, the boy fell off but was unhurt.[29]
B II 628; quote from Pedro Balda, the Iraneta town secretary, to Guerau de Arellano, 9 November 1937, AC 264; Burguera (B 662) mentions a redondel in which seers prayed; for delivery van, Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 8 April 1983, pp. 8-9.
The Lizarraga seers said the devil attacked them. According to the psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi, adult seers saw Saint Michael struggling and tried to help him
by hitting the devil with a candlestick. Seers said that on the highway the devil tried to get them to throw off the many rosaries, medals, and crucifixes they were wearing for the divine to bless. Burguera himself at least twice gave his rosary to the seers to hold when they were seeing the infant Jesus. A town official eventually forbade the visions. One household with four child seers resisted and the matter ended in a lawsuit. This family was still holding visions at home in the fall of 1933.
From Lizarraga the visions spread to adjacent Dorrao and then down the road to Unanu. While people in Unanu refused to speak of the visions in 1984, they were open with Juaristi in October 1931. He left a striking account and a valuable photograph that shows an altar decked with pine boughs like that of Dorrao.
We are at the foot of the pointed peak of San Donato, which looks like a gigantic altar. And above the green and black floor of the valley, next to the cliff base, there is a circle of weak, reddish light, which has drawn to it about fifty persons who are kneeling. In the middle of the circle there are four children and an equal number of women, kneeling as well, facing the base of the cliff, whence the light comes. An eldery man, thin and erect, recites with a dry, firm, clear voice a litany that the women answer; then he gets up and leads them in a hymn.
The light is hidden in the boughs of some high bushes, formed into a strange kind of multicolored oven shape; it seems to be some kind of altar. Suddenly, one of the girls opens her arms out like a cross, throws her head back, arcs her body, and goes stiff, the moonlight bathing her pale face, her eyes, as if dead, staring unblinking into the infinite. Immediately a boy, younger, and another boy fall into a similar cataleptic state, and two women with white coifs hold them. The prayers continue without interruption.
We are filled with awe, spectators in the dark at a rite like that which must have been the moon cult of the ancient Vascones.
The children come back to life, first the older girl, then the others. The girl says she has seen the Virgin with a blue mantle and a silver crown, barefoot and with golden rays in her hands, and the Virgin told her … that we should go and have supper! The spell is broken and we mix with the spectators, who get up. Some friendly words in Basque serve to relieve their fear and distrust, and the children (the youngest is barely four years old) answer our questions as any children would, their mothers filling out their replies.
The girl is lively and communicative, and she is aware of the authority she wields among her kind. Always "by order of the Virgin," she says how much they have to pray, and who has to do it; she orders that the Daughters of Mary spend Sunday making paper flowers and that people come in the evening. She recounts struggles between Saint Michael, dressed in gold with his flashing sword, and a blackened, horned devil. To a request for more details, she says that the devil wears a black jacket, goes without pants,
"The altar and those praying in Unanua," October 1931.
Photo by Carlos Juaristi published in Diario de Navarra,
25 October 1931. Courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid
and uses a staff. She describes macabre processions, identifying the dead of the town as they go past. Behind the dead walks a young idiot girl who used to work with a hatchet; she carries it in the funeral procession as well and limps because she wounded herself with it trying to open the gates of heaven. She blesses pacharanes , or bilberries, so that the sick can eat them and get well.
Time and again she falls into a new fit, followed by the other children. Then we are able to observe them as doctors and notice all the signs of a neurosis.
The parish priest, whom we visit, is an educated man with common sense who gives us interesting information and is happy that we doctors
have intervened to set right something he always thought was pathological and harmful to true faith. But his counsel and his sermons along these lines have fallen on deaf ears. The seer girl has "her" church; she wants nothing to do with the "other," or with the priest. And the mothers consider themselves happy for the "celestial" favor that their children have received.[30]
B II 635 n. 59, 632 n. 55; B 662-663; Juaristi, DN, 25 October 1931.
Juaristi presented visions as neurotic and pathological. In Pamplona he was something of a liberal, a black sheep who did not attend church and who the bishop knew in advance would not sympathize with the phenomena. In his article Juaristi pointed out that waves of hysterical behavior were common in all times and that in the past the seers would have been accused of witchcraft. Yet his observations do not appear to have been skewed, for the setting and the social dynamic he described are similar to what we know about in other villages.
Like José Antonio Laburu's lectures, Juaristi's article bore the authority of science. Pedro Balda, the Iraneta town secretary and scribe for another seer, described for a friend its impact on the Barranca:
Finally a doctor declared that it was not ecstacy but instead a sickness called "neurosis," and that it had occurred in a similar form in Germany before the European war. It did not take much for people to lose the fervor of the first days, and many who were believers in the supernatural [aspect of the visions] became enemies of the mysterious phenomena…. If they fed them well, some said, the neurosis would disappear immediately. Others said that with a good beating every day, they would stop having visions at once. Most said that it was a "farce." That is why most of the believers withdrew from attending what had attracted the attention of so many thousands.[31]
Balda to Gerau de Arellano, [Iraneta], 9 November 1937, AC 264.
There were visions in two other Barranca villages, Lakuntza and Iraneta. In Lakuntza a seventeen-year-old Bakaiku youth who worked in the lock factory told people about the visions in Bakaiku and led them down the railroad line to the regular site there. When he got there, he claimed to see the Virgin in the poplars by the river.
Two boys, sons of farmers, claimed to see the Virgin in Lakuntza in an oak tree near the railroad tracks, on the road to the mountain, and on a door-latch in the village. According to one witness, the people of the town attended for a while, but on one night when the boys announced a vision at two in the morning in the pouring rain, an elderly man announced that he was going to stay home, dry and in bed; that seemed to put things in perspective and no one went.
Lakuntza seems to have turned against the visions rather quickly, perhaps because of its factory workers but in part because of Blas Alegría, a priest born in the village. He was outspoken against the visions, maintaining that "the Virgin is in heaven, and she does not leave it." The man I spoke to most in Lakuntza had another reason for not believing. He was twenty-nine in 1931 and worked
in the factory with the seer from Bakaiku. He kept pressing the boy, who finally told him, "Well, when a lot of people go, I say that I see because they pay me; but when just a few people go, I don't see and I go home."[32]
Emilio Andueza (b. 1902), Lakuntza, 15 June 1984.
Six kilometers east of Lakuntza lies Iraneta. This is the Barranca town in which the visions lasted the longest, primarily because of the special alliance between a seer, Luis Irurzun, and the town secretary, Pedro Balda. I talked to Balda in the old-age home in Alkotz and to Irurzun in San Sebastián. Balda, born in 1894 in Iraneta, where there were about sixty houses, was the eldest of seven siblings in a poor family without land. His father was a pastry and chocolate maker and his mother took in laundry, made bread in people's houses, and did agricultural labor. Before her marriage, Balda's mother cleaned and decorated the church for a parish priest who belonged to Luis Irurzun's "house." The priest took an interest in young Pedro Balda, made him an altar boy, and taught him to sing the mass in Latin. Starting when he was ten years old Pedro worked as a farm laborer, and he barely learned to read and write until his military service, during which he studied and rose to be a sergeant. In 1923 he became the town secretary.
Balda took a keen interest in all matters religious and went to Ezkioga on 18 July 1931, one of the big days. Then, when the visions started in the Barranca, he visited several sites, particularly Lizarraga. His self-education, rare in a town secretary, gave him perhaps a more independent frame of mind and left him closer to the people. Similarly, his informal training in the church, like that of many sextons, demystified for him the opinions of the clergy. He paid little heed to the first seer in Iraneta, a girl about eight years old named Inocencia who saw the Virgin in late September and told people to pray the rosary. Others began to have visions at the outdoor site, including a disbelieving adult relative of the girl, María Arratibel, who saw Saint Michael the Archangel. On September 29 another woman, Juana Huarte, aged thirty, also saw the Virgin and Saint Michael, whose shrine on Mount Aralar dominates the Barranca.[33]
B 650 gives the Huarte vision as Iraneta's first, but Irurzun (San Sebastián, 5 April 1983, p. 2) and Balda (Alkotz, 8 April 1983, pp. 17-18) were firm that Inocencia started everything. I base my account of Iraneta on these interviews in addition to the other citations.
Luis Irurzun, a youth aged eighteen, from a prosperous house, was not one of the persons who went to the visions. He liked to dance and play the accordion, which stricter members of the community considered "the devil's bellows." On October 12, when the Ezkioga visions were attracting large crowds and the Cortes was debating the separation of church and state, Luis was on his way with seven or eight youths to the fiestas of Lekunberri to see traveling puppeteers. They stopped briefly at the vision site in a field by the road, where a rosary was getting started. Luis was smoking, and a woman named Petra pulled the cigarette from his mouth, saying, "When you pray, do it right." Luis started to smoke again and suddenly lost consciousness.
Balda had been at the visions in Lizarraga that afternoon, and he claimed to me that the seer Nicasia Lacunza, aged twenty-one, had told him that Luis would have visions. On his return Balda heard what happened, and he found Luis at
home in a stupor. The next day Luis had a vision of the Virgin with twelve stars around her and thereafter at three in the afternoon he had daily visions. As a friend and favored client of Luis's house, Balda was affected profoundly.
There were other new seers, including a contemporary of Luis's.[34]
The other youth was Francisco Diego Jamós, B 650.
Balda remembered the two marching in unison as soldiers of the archangel. I wondered how much Balda himself, as a significant member of the audience and the only one keeping a record, helped to elicit bellicose visions. He had been reprimanded by the governor of Navarra because at the first town council meeting after the Republic was declared he had said, "We are in mourning." When recalling the visions, he emphasized the predictions of war.Luis had a flair unmatched in the Barranca. He was capable of delivering sermons while in trance for up to two hours in a voice that could be heard across the fields. In spite of other new seers, he was indisputably the central figure. He claimed not only to know future events but also to read people's consciences and thereby provoke conversions. As he put it to me, "I had a grace to be able to look at someone and to know what was wrong with him—sickness and sins and everything."
Balda's family frequently drove Luis to Ezkioga, and his visions there and in Pamplona, Bilbao, and throughout Gipuzkoa spread his fame. Joaquín Sicart sold his photograph. Carmen Medina and Juan Bautista Ayerbe befriended him, and for a time Padre Burguera was his spiritual director. Luis was friendly with several seers, including Patxi, whom Carmen Medina took to Iraneta.
According to Luis, about a month after his visions started, in mid-November 1931, all the seers received orders from the governor of Navarra to submit to a medical examination. Then, at the height of his popularity, Luis went to Juaristi's clinic in Pamplona. In 1983 he told me that after twenty-five days the doctor confessed that medical science could not help and asked for his intercession with the Virgin. Luis also said that in Pamplona his companion from Iraneta, an atheist, tried to take him to a brothel, but when he saw the women inside he fell down the stairs unconscious.
Luis's visions continued on his return. He told me that at that point every day there were eight or ten buses of spectators, some of them from Pamplona, as well as those who came on foot. His fame increased because of a kind of miracle announced by Saint Michael in one of Luis's visions three days in advance. During the Litany on 8 December 1931 in the church packed with spectators, Luis's hands and shirt were suddenly covered with blood. Luis announced solemnly that the blood was "the tears of the Virgin." Marcelo Garciarena, the parish priest, who had no truck with the visions, snapped, "Shut up, fool." Still apparently in vision, Luis announced that the Virgin wanted him carried home, with the Salve to be sung along the way. As they carried him singing, Balda remembers that a woman came out of her house, furious, and said, "Throw him on the fire. That'll
Luis Irurzun at home, late 1931 or early 1932; on the ribbon at the left are the words "Blessed
is She who appears" and on the altar is a card of a Rafols crucifix. Photo by Carlos Juaristi
wake him up!" Balda saved the shirt as a relic and eventually Padre Burguera collected it.[35]
B 651-652.
Most town councils in the Barranca had opposed the Republic in April 1931. By the end of 1932, however, many of them had town councillors who defined themselves as republicans.[36]
Virto, Elecciones, 157-214. For politics in these towns also Ferrer Muñoz, Elecciones y partidos, 92, 98, 161-163, 507-508.
The modus vivendi with the Republic worked against the visions. The church also came down against the visions, and most people in Iraneta sided with the parish priest. Some people found incongruities in the content of the visions. At first most spectators were from Iraneta and Ihabar, and one Iraneta woman stopped believing when in vision Luis said, "The Virgin has said that the girls from Ihabar should sing a hymn." The Iraneta woman saw no reason why the Virgin should single out the girls from Ihabar.[37]Maritxu Güller, San Sebastián, 4 February 1986, p. 10.
Nevertheless, Luis's visions survived the longest in public of all those in Navarra. In March 1932 Governor Bandrés called him to Pamplona and told him he would have no more visions, which earned the seer a headline and, doubtless, more followers. Irurzun told me he assured the governor that he was having visions at 3 P.M. every day and offered to return at that time, but the governor declined (in panic, Luis thought). He said the governor threatened him with jail but in fact did nothing, and Luis went home. At this point the Navarrese were still going to Ezkioga itself, some in buses from Pamplona and others on foot from the Barranca, praying out loud as they went. When the governor ordered the last outdoor vision stages and altars in the province dismantled, Iraneta was one of the holdouts. In October 1932 Luis was still having visions, and seers and their families from other places went to see and have visions with him. An occasional bus brought spectators from the city.[38]
"A un vecino de Irañeta se le prohibe ver visiones," PV, 27 March 1932, p. 2; advertisements for bus trips on Good Friday, 25 March 1932, in VN, 24 March, p. 2; for Barranca, Andueza, LC, 11 March 1931.
In March 1933 Bishop Muniz y Pablos of Pamplona sent a circular to the priests of the valleys of Arakil and Burunda that forbade attendance at the visions and denied that they had any supernatural character.[39]
Muniz y Pablos circular of March 23. B 267-268, 365-369. Díaz Sintes, "Tomás Muniz de Pablos," makes no mention of the visions or the bishop's attitude.
José Maiza remembered being mocked in Lakuntza and Arbizu when he would walk to Iraneta from Etxarri-Aranatz. And the two families who were the last to go from Arbizu had to do so secretly, so much had public opinion there changed.In May 1933 Raymond de Rigné brought J. A. Ducrot, a journalist from the French photo magazine VU , to Iraneta. By then Luis gave vision sermons in his house. Ducrot saw Luis fall backward "as if hit on the chin," for a while maintain a praying posture, eyes closed, but then begin to preach like a seasoned orator. "His voice, resonant, swells, takes on a poignant tone. Little by little he gets more deeply involved, and he lives what he describes." Luis then acted out a battle between Saint Michael and the devil, "like a tempest that shook the house." It ended as suddenly as it began. Luis answered Ducrot's questions, and from Luis's instructions the reporter made a sketch of the devil and Saint Michael. Luis told him that in the great chastisement "the sword of Saint Michael would kill people at the rate of two million every five minutes, and the earth would be almost depopulated in several hours." Luis's story constituted most of the third and concluding installment of Ducrot's report on Ezkioga. The cover showed Luis just as he had fallen to the floor, held by Pedro Balda and two other young men.[40]
Ducrot, VU, 30 August 1933.
Five months later there were only twenty-two spectators, and in May 1934 people attended from only four households.[41]
Pedro Balda (distributed by J. B. Ayerbe), "Visión del joven labrador Luis Irurzun ... 12 de octubre, 1933 a las 17:15," AC 233. By then Balda had recorded over four hundred vision sermons. [Pedro Balda to Juan Bautista Ayerbe], "Dos cartas interesantes de Irañeta," 18 May 1934, AC 246.
Attendance was even sparser when Maritxu Erlanz arrived as the new schoolmistress, probably in 1935, and Pedro Balda took her to a secret session. By that time it was considered sinful to attend and Maritxu had to be careful not to be seen. The visions were no longer held daily. Only five men were present: three from Iraneta, one from Lakuntza, and the vision promoter Tomás Imaz. They said the rosary and the Litany and then Luis gave a cry in Basque and fell down. He was propped up with a pillow, his face began to sweat, and he delivered a long, disjointed, sermonlike speech in
Luis Irurzun on floor of his house, ca. 1933
Spanish. He told of the call-up of conscripts, of a coming war, and of bodies in roadside ditches, with an admixture of biblical material. The highlight for Maritxu was that he seemed briefly to levitate, but her overall impression was a certain lack of spontaneity, a feeling that the vision was prepared, and she did not return. She told me that comparing Pedro Balda's version of Luis's sermon with what Luis actually said, it seemed that Balda was dressing up the language and adding things. Balda confirmed to me that in his enthusiasm he had interpolated material in the texts and that for that reason they should not be published.[42]
Maritxu Güller (maiden name, Erlanz), San Sebastián, 4 February 1986, pp. 1-6. "There were many things which I later realized that I added myself": Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, p. 8.
Balda's interpolations raise the difficult question of how to reconstruct what any of these visionaries said or what they wanted to say. Almost inevitably we are restricted to describing the multiple mirrors—the hopes and anxieties of the listeners—that distorted the messages. For instance, Balda included in his wide correspondence poems of his own, such as the one he vigorously recited to me at age ninety, composed in 1933 or 1934. I translate the last quatrains:
The right and the left laugh
at the Holy Apparition.
If they keep it up
they will be sent to hell .
What sorrow! What bitterness
will some day be felt
when God casts his sword
and shakes the world .
"That day is not far off"
the seers are saying,
and at the divine warnings
the people are laughing .
The laughter will cease
when the great fright comes,
and all the happiness
will change into tears .
For our enemies
that day will be horrible;
it will be a day of fulfillment
for the sons of Mary .
Hear the voice of Christ
who will come to reign soon,
for if Christ did not come
the world would be ruined .[43]Variants of this poem, entitled "Voces en el desierto" or "Avisos de la Santísima Virgen de Ezkioga," are on four of J. B. Ayerbe's circulars. The only dated one is 5 January 1934, AC 235, 235 a, b, c.
Derechas e izquierdas se ríen
de la Santa Aparición,
si persisten en su empeño
tendrán la condenación.
Qué tristezas! ¡Qué amarguras!
algún día se han de ver
cuando Dios lance la espada
que al mundo haga mover.
"El día no está lejano"
van diciendo los videntes
y de los avisos divinos
se van riendo las gentes.
Las risas se acabarán
cuando llegue el gran espanto
y todas las alegrías
se convirtirán en llanto.
Para nuestros enemigos
será espantoso ese día;
será día de ventura
para los hijos de María.
Escuchad la voz de Cristo
que pronto vendrá a reinar
que si Cristo no viniera,
el mundo se iba a arruinar.
Although Pedro Balda refined the written messages, it is clear that Luis not only took people aside to tell them (whether correctly or not) their private sins
but also announced that certain people, like the male schoolteacher, would die. Pedro Balda wrote the vicar general Justo de Echeguren in Vitoria and over a back fence informed a priest in Iraneta that seers had foreseen their untimely end. These announcements were not well received, and many villagers came to look at Luis askance.
For what Luis and others were doing was risky. People knew they had visions of and struggles with the devil. If their predictions turned out to be accurate, the question could be posed: Did they act or speak with the devil's help? The fear of malevolence that led to accusations of witchcraft three hundred years earlier was still alive in the twentieth century. Rural folk were alert to the power of curses and of quasi-religious rituals to maim and kill. Once the church denounced the visions, not a few people, like the parish priest of Arbizu, judged them to be sorcery and shunned the seers. If the seers were wrong in their predictions, they could be labeled charlatans. The psychiatrist Juaristi opened yet another line of explanation: mental illness. In the long run his diagnosis may have helped to relieve seers of opprobrium, but in the short run it tended to isolate them, for Juaristi described the illness as contagious.[44]
For Luis's predictions of deaths: Maritxu Güller, 4 February 1986, p. 12, and Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, pp. 2, 14. For varieties of malevolent power: Barandiarán, "En Ataun," AEF, 1923, p. 114; Barandiarán, "En Orozco," AEF, 1923, p. 5; in Zegama, Gorrochategui and Aracama, AEF, 1923, p. 107. Evarista Galdós claimed to predict the dates of death of the sister of a believer, a priest, and a boy from Azkoitia (B 715, 719, 721). She thought of this as a kind of holy knowledge, like that of nuns who announced the date and time of their own deaths; but some people I talked to saw it as a bad kind of knowledge. Gábor Klaniczáy discusses the danger of charisma for women in "Ambivalence of Charisma."
There were other mini-Ezkiogas in the near vicinity. One sequence of visions took place in a pair of villages to the east of the Barranca, Izurdiaga and Irurtzun. According to one source, the Izurdiaga visions began on 11 October 1931, that is, at the height of those in the Barranca. At the beginning of December a priest, Marcelo Celigueta, reported to the vicar general of Pamplona on behalf of the pastor of Izurdiaga, his brother Patricio. For more than a month there had been three seers in Izurdiaga, two girls aged seven and ten and a boy aged eleven. Watched by about thirty children and ten adults, they were having visions every day during prayers to the Blessed Sacrament. The schoolmistress led these prayers in the church prior to the evening rosary. Perhaps because one of the girls was his niece, the parish priest was sympathetic.[45]
Boniface, Genèse d'Ezkioga. ADP Fondo Parroquias: Izurdiaga. Marcelo Celigueta. presbítero, al Provisor y Vicario General, Pamplona, 1 folio, 2 sides, manuscript, dated "Aibar, Fiesta de San Xavier [3 December] de 1931." This folio has holes punched in it and may have come loose from a binder relating to the 1931 events. It was the only item relating to the 1931 visions in the parish correspondence files for all villages where I knew there had been visions.
The youngest girl had been to Ezkioga. There the Virgin had said that she would make herself visible whenever the girl prayed a Hail Mary. Then the three children had visions on a hillside in Irurtzun for several days, attracting a thousand spectators. The littlest girl said the Virgin had given her a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which she gave to her schoolmistress to keep. The Virgin said there that those who kissed the little girl's hand or received the blessing of the other girl could receive Communion the following day. Like seers of the Barranca and at Ezkioga, the children saw an apocalyptic battle between devils and Saint Michael. There had been Irurtzun children who had had visions as well, but their parents had treated them harshly. The Izurdiaga seers learned from the Virgin that those parents would be punished. By December the Irurtzun outdoor visions had ended.
The sessions in the Izurdiaga church were similar to those in the rest of the Barranca. When the children first began their prayers, they would fall into
"ecstasies" (Marcelo Celigueta's word) lasting up to an hour. They would offer flowers to the Virgin and at the end of the session distribute the flowers by name to the persons that the Virgin indicated, even if they did not know them. They did so on their knees and without removing their gaze from the Virgin.
Marcelo described other aspects of the visions as well.
Other times, after having put on behalf of the Virgin much fear into some child who was not praying or who was distracted, they would mark out with the petals of the flowers a kind of cloud that when they returned to their normal senses they explain is the perimeter of the aura, like that of the sun, around the Virgin; and within this they mark out another circle, like that which a person occupies when standing, and they do not let anyone go there or step there during the apparition.
They are given rosaries and medals so that at the end, when the children say the word "Bendición," the Virgin blesses them several times, or perhaps blesses several people in particular. And as the Virgin does it, the children once or several times make a perfect cross in blessing. Normally the rosaries in question are already blessed by a priest. One day they gave a rosary like the others to the girl when she was in ecstasy, and she rejected only this one. A priest, who had the authority to do so, made the sign of the cross and blessed it; and they gave it to the girl and she was not sure whether to accept it. She finally took it, and without waking up from her ecstatic sleep or whatever, she gave it by name to the girl it belonged to. After the session they asked her, "Why did you not accept the rosary the first time and then accept it later?" "Because the Virgin did not want it because it was not blessed." "And why later?" "Because it had been blessed." "Then who blessed it?" "I don't know, but the Virgin said it was now blessed."
During the ecstasy, their eyes are always fixed on something; their retinas are motionless in spite of the sharp glare of a light put before them, and when their bodies are pricked they feel nothing. The first days they appeared to be frightened and wept because the Sorrowing Virgin wept, and later they are seen smiling because she does not weep. You can see them speaking to the Virgin and answering. A person close to them can follow the conversation. Then they say something like, "Virgen Santísima, Save Spain," and after finishing, they say that the Virgin will save Spain.
Asked on someone's request if certain persons have been saved, of almost all they say yes—of one they said that he needed two Rosaries for his soul. A woman asked that the Virgin give the name of one of the souls that was saved . "That question should not be asked; [the woman] knows the name." Another time they asked where three (deceased) persons were, and the children understood, as with the previous woman. The response, that "the ones who are dead are in heaven, but do not ask about the other one because you know he is alive and in what village he lives," was true.
Celigueta also wrote that the children in vision used flower petals to make on the altar a perfect design of a monstrance and a decorative host with a cross
in the center. And he said that "most persons present noted an intense fragrance of lily [azucena ]." When asked, the children said it was the scent of the Virgin. Other days they played on their knees with the infant Jesus and their flowers. Sometimes the devil wanted to take the flowers away. "Not for you, ugly; these are for the Virgin," and they would chase him away with the sign of the cross, making fun of him.
Marcelo Celigueta was dubious about much of what he described, which he called "the dark side of the picture." He singled out the time the children claimed to have gone to heaven.
One day they wanted to go to heaven with the Virgin, and helped by those present, they got up on the altar, respecting the sepulcher, and there they stood forming a tight group, kissing each other. They were asked how they had done this, even though they were in ecstasy. "Because the Virgin had taken them to heaven"—where they said they had been, and the little one added, "I was so happy in heaven that I did not want to come down!"
Many aspects impressed Celigueta: the way the children in trance seemed to know names and persons and who was dead and who still alive, the physiological aspects of their states, the artistic beauty and exactness of their floral decorations (these especially impressed Balda when he visited), and their consistency—in spite of frequent and separate questioning they did not seem to contradict themselves or one another.
Again evident in this report is the immediate political relevance of the visions. At Izurdiaga the Virgin told the children that all persons who entered the church should dip their hands in the holy water and repeat:
Sacred Heart of Jesus, Save Spain
Virgin of El Pilar, Save Spain.
Sacred Heart of Jesus, in you I trust.
Virgin of El Pilar, in you I trust.
Both Juaristi and Bishop Muniz y Pablos of Pamplona spoke of the political moment as a major factor contributing both to the visions and belief in them. In his 1933 circular the bishop wrote,
Historically, in times of serious social strife like the one we are experiencing, it is common that these seers appear and multiply, and there are usually two causes attributed to this: the first is the anguish and disorientation normal in simple souls who, not finding an easy solution either in the human order or in the ordinary paths of divine providence, aspire and believe to find it in the supernatural, in God acting directly on society and not through intermediate causes; the second cause is that the spirit of evil himself suggests these aspirations, whether so that people will relax in the hope of extraordinary solutions and not work diligently to solve things on
their own; or to stifle the faith, as they stifle it in those persons who believe in these visions and prophecies and then see that they do not come true.[46]
Tomás Muniz y Pablos, "A los Rvdos. Sres. párrocos y sacerdotes de los valles de Araquil y Burundi," 23 de Marzo de 1933 (in B 366-367).
In Izurdiaga, as in Bakaiku, the schoolteacher encouraged the visions. Pedro Balda remembered that she tried to get reports into newspapers and even spoke to the bishop. She seems to have relayed to her charges adult issues. Six months before the visions began, she got the boys and girls to write the director of a mission magazine. Their letters convey the mix of adult and child-like elements which made all the children's visions possible and attractive.
Izurdiaga, 31 March 1931
As soon as our new schoolmistress told us how to rescue the soul of an unbeliever, we gladly deprived ourselves of treats in order to contribute to save souls. We drew lots, and it fell to me to send you this letter, and I want [the pagan child] to be called Francisco Javier. Later we will send you used stamps. I ask for your blessing for all the boys of this school, without forgetting our schoolmistress, and kiss your holy scapular in the name of all of us.
Francisco Satrústegui
Izurdiaga, 6 May 1931
We, the girls of this school, who will not let the boys outdo us, have saved by not buying sweets the 10 pesetas needed to baptize a little Chinese girl, and we send them very gladly. Since we collected the money in the month of May, we wish to offer a rose to the Virgin to make very holy, and we want her to bear the name Rosa María, and Soledad for that is the name of the girl to whom it fell to write the present letter. On Ascension Day we will receive into our hearts for the first time the Baby Jesus, and we will beseech him to make us missionaries so we can save many souls. Pray, Father, so we will be conceded this grace. Bless us all, without forgetting our dear schoolmistress, and kiss your scapular in the name of all of us.
Soledad Antolín[47]
Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 8 April 1983, p. 8; La Obra Máxima, September 1931, p. 281, and October 1931, p. 312.
These letters are little different from those of children in other schools in the magazine. But they share aspects with the subsequent visions: the children joining in a common sacrifice for the conversion of others; the role of the schoolteacher as a facilitator; the motif of the Eucharist; and the awareness of issues far beyond school and village. On 9 and 12 December 1931, at the height of their visions, these schoolchildren sent more money. One of the letters was signed by a twelve-year-old girl who was a visionary both at Izurdiaga and Ezkioga. The money was "to rescue a little pagan girl from the power of the devil" and have her named María Pilar. In a similar letter on behalf of the schoolchildren of Piedramillera dated 26 April 1931, twelve days after the Second Republic was
proclaimed, Lidia Gastón sent money for a "paganito" to be named Nicasio, "who is the patron saint of our village and to whom we fervently pray to intercede very extraordinarily in favor of our Spain, now in bitter and difficult straits." Magazines such as these and schoolteachers brought the children into the bigger picture.[48]
La Obra Máxima, May 1932, p. 150, and September 1931, p. 281.
The Izurdiaga seers were still having visions a year later on 11 September 1932 when Padre Burguera saw them in a chapel in a private home in Pamplona. There he marveled that the girl claimed to know that a certain flower came from a convent of nuns who were disbelievers. He describes the seers, much like those who followed Bernadette at Lourdes, running around on their knees unusually fast with their eyes fixed on a flower that they considered the Virgin as Burguera carried it from room to room and hid it from them. They subsequently underwent vision crucifixions, their vision lasting four hours in all. Sessions like these were held in these years in Pamplona convents, the asilo of the cathedral, and private houses, including the home of the parents of the Carlist leader Jaime del Burgo. There is no evidence that politicians in any way provoked the visions, but there can be little doubt that in Navarra the climate was propitious.[49]
B 167-169.
Finally, there were also little Ezkiogas in Gipuzkoa. One set of visions occurred simultaneously with the visions in Navarra in the fall of 1931 and indeed may have been a kind of replication of the Navarrese visions. At a house named Kaminpe, close to a road into Urretxu, child seers from the house itself and from Urretxu and Zumarraga gathered with parents and neighbors. The seers included siblings from three different families for a total of at least nine children, four boys and five girls, aged four to thirteen. Almost all of them had had visions at Ezkioga.
A woman who went as a spectator recalled that the seers distributed roses blessed by the Virgin. People lit large numbers of candles and the children fell down into a vision state and later chased the Virgin, who once hid from them under the sink. Once many people went up a nearby mountain when the children announced visions there; those attending included an invalid wrapped in blankets and riding in an ox cart and parents carrying sick or handicapped children.
One argument against the visions here was that the children who were seers later led lives just like the others—seer girls even rode bicycles, for instance. As a child aged seven or eight, my informant did not treat the visions of her playmates with the same importance that the grown-ups did. As in the Barranca, where the children sometimes played with holy dolls, it seems adults were taking seriously what for children had a component of fancy or play. But in any case the Kaminpe visions were a neighborhood affair; they did not attain in Urretxu the status of those in Navarra, which drew entire villages—and sometimes polarized them—for weeks or months. Presumably for the seer families it was simpler to go to Kaminpe than walk to Ezkioga, but later several children resumed visions at the main Ezkioga site.[50]
María Teresa Beraza, Hernani, 2 May 1984; Justa Ormazábal, Zumarraga, 10 May 1984, who was older, went twice.
Twenty-five kilometers from Ezkioga by road in the hills above Tolosa, Albiztur was a more durable satellite. In 1931, as today, it was a rural township with just a few houses near its church at the bottom of the valley and with farms on the mountainsides. The pious pastor, Gregorio Aracama, had prepared Albiztur's children and adults well to believe the Ezkioga visions. Deeply devoted to Mary, he dedicated his first sermon to her when he arrived in 1921 and put something about her in each sermon until he left in the late 1950s. Aracama asked parents to add the name María to the names of girls and boys he baptized, promoted Mary's month in May, and organized the sodality of San Luis Gonzaga for boys and the Daughters of Mary for girls. Before the visions, Aracama had led his parish in pilgrimage to Lourdes and had told and retold the Lourdes story in sermons. His sense of duty was so strict that when he heard a report of minor misconduct on the part of a girl, he was capable of going to her home to tell her parents. This alienated him from some families.
It was Aracama who arranged for a bus to take his parishioners to Ezkioga, and he went every Sunday. People from Albiztur went as early as 8 July 1931. An Albiztur girl, eight years old, had visions there on July 15; a second, thirteen years old, two days later; a third, fifteen years old and a sister of the first, on July 25; and a fourth, nine years old, on August 15. What they saw was retold in loving, enthusiastic detail in the Albiztur column of Argia by the local correspondent, "Luistar" (Juan Múgica Iturrioz), poet, barber, maker of espadrilles, and sexton. Like the priest of Izurdiaga, he too was the uncle of a seer. In his 2 August 1931 column he compared one of the girls to Bernadette. In subsequent visions, they saw the Virgin of Lourdes, Bernadette, and Bernadette's sheep.[51]
See Luistar, "Albiztur," in A: 19 and 26 July; 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30 August; 6 and 27 September; and 22 November 1931. His personal collection of Argia with handwritten corrections is in Instituto Labayru, Derio.
Three of the girls were from farms; the father of another worked in a pharmacy in Tolosa. There were, however, child seers of poorer people in the village. One of these, a girl whose father had only two cows and who worked in the quarry, first began to have visions in Albiztur proper. At the time, I think early 1932, she was caring for the baby of another family. She began to fall into vision by the road near the center of the village, and the woman who cared for the church went and prayed with her, attracting other followers. One day the schoolmaster chased them away, and they moved to the covered area of the church porch. Gradually more girls—only girls—began to have visions there, including three of those who had had visions at Ezkioga. Villagers can name ten, aged six to thirteen, who were seers. In this group were two leaders, an older one whose visions started late and especially the young one, the eight-year-old who had been the first to see at Ezkioga.
As elsewhere, the believers brought flowers that the seers redistributed in vision. The girls also saw the souls of the village dead and found out what prayers or masses they needed. Believers thought the girls could read unspoken thoughts and answer unspoken prayers, and I have talked to persons who were led to repent their sins in the sessions. People from neighboring towns went to
Albiztur seers posing on hillside above town. From VU,
30 August 1933. Photo by J. A. Ducrot, all rights reserved
see the children, but the sessions never reached the newspapers. The parish priest prayed discreetly at a distance, but afterward the girls went to his office and dictated what they had seen. These sessions coincided with outrage in the town over the removal of the image of the Sacred Heart from the exterior of the town hall.[52]
LC, 24 March 1932, p. 6, and 20 May 1932, p. 6.
Luistar, the sexton, was a Basque Nationalist. He was devoted to the Virgin of Lourdes, but not to the "Castillan" Virgen del Pilar. He went to Ezkioga fifty-three times starting on 8 July 1931. His last trip was on 30 June 1932, before the arguments of Laburu converted him from the visions' chief supporter to their chief opponent in Argia . The town as a whole split for and against the visions (the split eventually coincided roughly with the split between Carlists and Basque Nationalists), and little by little the girl seers and their families became isolated. "They thought we were fools," one steadfast believer told me.[53]
Luistar, A, 2 October 1932. He went on to write twenty pieces against the visions, the last on 1 October 1933.
In May 1933 the vision sessions on the church porch were still going on, with about thirty persons gathering at dusk to say the rosary and accompany the seers. By then the girls also held afternoon sessions at a little makeshift chapel their families had set up on the hillside above the village, at a site called Partileku. They posed there for J. A. Ducrot, the French photojournalist from the magazine VU . The bishop inevitably found out about the visions and threatened to deprive Aracama of his parish. So sometime in 1933 the girls stopped holding
the sessions in public. At least one girl continued in the intimacy of her family until 1940.[54]
For May 1933, Ducrot, VU, 30 August 1933; and for after that, relatives of girl seers from two houses, Albiztur, June 1984.
Each public mini-Ezkioga, like the "pre-Ezkiogas" of Torralba de Aragón and Mendigorría, had original aspects. In Albiztur all the seers were girls, in Bachicabo all were boys or young men, but in most places there were both boys and girls. In some places it appears that one seer led the others but that the leader might be older or younger. In some places local elites were sympathetic, and where there was a favorable priest or schoolteacher, the visions lasted longer. In some places, like Dorrao, Unanu, and Bachicabo, the Virgin insisted on worship outside the church. Certain divine beings, like Saint Rita, showed up more in one place than another. The Sorrowing Mary was common to many places, but Mary's avatars varied. Saint Michael and the Infant Jesus of Prague appeared more in the Barranca, where such devotions were strong.
There were also innovations in places. Invisible candy wrappers, the naming of five angels, a vision boulder, a Virgin who played hide-and-seek, visions as sermons, apparitions on house facades, and visionary flower designs were special twists that made each sequence of visions unique. And of course what made each unique was that the seers were members of the local population seeing divinities who had chosen that particular place and landscape.
Except for some sites of "unsuccessful" visions—the ones that drew no following—all these locations are rural. But the "successful" vision sites are well placed. Just as the visions of Ezkioga were just off a main highway, within a long walk of Zumarraga's three train stations, so the village vision sites were on or near main roads, many of them in or near village centers. Those in inconvenient places, like the Fuente Petrás of Bachicabo or the mountainside above Arbizu and Lakuntza, soon shifted.
As we will see for Ezkioga, however, the sites tended to incorporate emblematic elements of the landscape: a pine tree and a spring at Bachicabo; olive trees at Guadamura; a cave and spring at Orgiva; first a sacred mountain at Arbizu, then a walnut tree; pine trees at Dorrao and Unanu; a river a poplar trees at Bakaiku and Lakuntza; walnut trees at Iturmendi; a mountainside at Irurtzun, Albiztur, and above Kaminpe. When the visions were forced indoors the flowers remained as a link to the land.
The visions that were exclusively "urban," or architectural, as at Torralba, Mendigorría, Rielves, Guadalajara, and Sigüenza, were the most fleeting, perhaps in part because there was too much church and social control. The governor and the bishop of Palencia quickly checked a girl who in November 1931 tried to move her visions from the outskirts of the capital to a city church. In the provincial capital where public visions would have had the best chance, Pamplona, the bishop was too close for comfort. Conversely, in the cities of the north coast—Irun, San Sebastián, Bilbao, in all of which there were habitual seers—the hostile secular Republic was too close. In Tolosa sometime around 1933 two
middle-aged women of humble extraction were able to attract people to visions outside the town in a big meadow, where they placed a picture of the Virgin on a tree. But those visions lasted only briefly.[55]
El Día of Palencia had given ample coverage to Ezkioga and by mid-November 1931 the fourteen-year-old daughter of a building constructor was having daily visions of the Virgin, who arrived as at a séance preceded by loud knocks. The girl announced an apparition in the chapel of Our Lady of the Sorrows in Palencia for 10 A.M. on Sunday, November 22, just one hour before a public meeting of the anticlerical Radical Socialists, but the bishop refused to open the chapel and issued a statement dismissing the visions. All 1931: ELM, 20 November, p. 9; HM, 20 November, p. 4; El Día (Palencia), 24 November, p. 1; El Debate, 24 November, p. 1; ELM, 24 November, p. 9. At a vision session in or near Palencia in mid-May of the next year, an Ezkioga believer saw a girl, perhaps the same one, divide among the thirty or so persons present an apple she had received from the Holy Family. "Apariciones en Palencia," letter from Florentino Sánchez, Hornillos, 16 May 1932, typed excerpt, 1 page, private collection. For Tolosa, elderly male eyewitness, San Sebastián, 13 May 1986.
Almost all visions produced a reversal of power, with initiative and control in the hands of children or unmarried youths. And although this reversal coincided with an ancient southern European pattern, it may have had a particular significance for the period: the fear that the youth would lose their faith. By the same token, this fear may have provoked the marked increase in religious imagery directed at the young by missioners, parish priests, lay catechists, and schoolteachers. In the process, young and old alike became aware of the enhanced status of children in the distribution of religious power. Only in such an unusual ambience could a priest or schoolteacher have tolerated the kissing of child seers' hands, a youth seer's appointment of "angels," the use of a child seer's blessing to forgive sins, or the child's provision of sacred berries for healing. By obeying the minors, people were obeying and humbling themselves before the divinities for whom the minors spoke.
At Ezkioga, at center stage, as far as we know no one gave orders to harvest another's potatoes. The mini-Ezkiogas, however, were more domestic versions, like local-access cable studios rather than national networks. But within vision cuadrillas at Ezkioga, the same precise allotment of grace and favor took place, with flowers going to X and not Y and private messages delivered to certain persons in the knots of believers. The local seers of Navarra and Gipuzkoa were largely in synchrony with changes in vision motifs at the Ezkioga center. As at Ezkioga, struggles of Saint Michael and the devil occurred in the summer and early fall of 1931, seer crucifixions started in the winter of 1932, and seers' crucifixes "bled" in 1932 or 1933. There was clearly enough contact between the different groups to keep everyone up to date.
Visions Spread by Persecution
As the dioceses of Vitoria and Pamplona moved step by step toward denunciation of the visions, it became increasingly difficult to hold sessions in public. And in any case as the audience shrank large outdoor venues were unnecessary. Those surviving became restricted, private séances, many with seers who had retreated to their hometowns or to safe havens protected by sympathetic priests.
In May 1933 the only public, outdoor vision site left was at Albiztur, and its days were numbered:
While it is true that only small, isolated, furtive groups now go to Ezkioga, and although the protagonists of this affair try to be forgotten by the authorities, one should not conclude that everything is back in order. Far from it, for now it is at home, in a little group, that the seers have their ecstasies. With their holy place ruined, they have dispersed, gone to ground,
but they have hived off. In every valley, there have thus formed little clusters of believers who keep the faith, in spite of persecution and defections. One by one the church denies them the sacraments and excommunicates pitilessly even little children.[56]
Ducrot, VU, 23 August 1933. Strictly speaking, seers and believers were not excommunicated.
Sometimes only the seer and the family held sessions, but in the years 1932 to 1936 in the cities of Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Pamplona and in the towns and villages of Astigarraga, Legazpi, Legorreta, Ordizia, Ormaiztegi, Pasaia, Urnieta, Zaldibia, and Zegama there were regular secret meetings for persons outside the immediate family.
The visions of Ezkioga aroused exceptional interest in the large rural townships to the southeast, in the mountains on the Navarrese border. Zaldibia and Zegama were devout Carlist breeding grounds for priests. Both showed early interest in the visions, and photographs of seers at Ezkioga show people from these townships as close, attentive spectators. Farm families from Zaldibia told me of rushing through the day to finish their chores early in order to be able to get to Ezkioga for the evening rosary. There was equal interest in the village center, where believers held all-night rosary sessions.
The earliest seers from Zaldibia were two teenage girls. María Luisa was a foster child on a small farm. She was not believed in her house and eventually had to take refuge elsewhere. Inés worked as a servant in Ordizia and eventually became a nun. Neither achieved the fame of the seers from Ataun. By July 1933 a married farm woman, age thirty-four, Cándida Zunzunegui, had begun to have visions, first at Ezkioga, then elsewhere, including the Echezarreta house in Legorreta, a shop in Ordizia, and her farm. I think it was to her that the schoolteacher of Zaldibia referred in La Voz de Guipúzcoa on 11 November 1933:
A NEW LOURDES OR A NEW EZQUIOGA?
The apparitions of the Virgin increase daily. Recently she seems to have begun appearing in Belgium, according to a Madrid weekly.
The Virgin is also being seen here. Here too there is a female seer who sees her. She was left unemployed at Ezquioga by church decree, but it seems she has found in her home village a place where she can continue to exercise the same "profession."
There is no lack of people. Some day we are going to wake up and find ourselves not in Zaldivia, but in a new Lourdes, among the noisy sirens of buses arriving full of people.
The teacher, apparently not a Basque, was answered a month later by the Zaldibia correspondent of El Pueblo Vasco , who wrote, "The Basques have been losing their culture ever since teachers like him have come to colonize us." In Zaldibia the visions were associated with Basqueness.[57]
Schoolteacher of Zaldibia in La Voz de Gipuzkoa, 11 November 1933; "Desde Zaldivia," PV, 5 December 1933, p. 7, and similarly 19 December, p. 9.
Zaldibia believers faced the stiffest opposition in the diocese. The parish
Cándida Zunzunegui of Zaldibia in
vision, 1933. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
priest Martín Elorza was the cousin of Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria and he took the matter personally. In 1984 I spoke to an elderly priest in Zaldibia who knew Elorza well. On the wall was a panoramic photograph of a huge diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes led by Múgica and including Elorza. Elorza was a stern man. His sympathies were with Hitler, whose picture he had on the wall of his study and whose ideas on racism he defended with vigor. But the day he read Pius XI's declaration on Danzig, he tore the picture in two, saying, "I have been wrong." Because he was so strict with himself, he demanded the same obedience from his parishioners and tirelessly preached against Ezkioga. The priest said Elorza lost ten years of his life because of the Ezkioguistas.
The Zaldibia believers were the most combative and stubborn of all. When the governor in 1932 and Bishop Múgica in 1933 prohibited seers from going
to the vision site, the Zaldibia followers accompanied the few seers who went, specially Cándida, Juliana Ulacia of Tolosa, and a girl from nearby Gainza. Even Burguera could not dissuade them. They told me how they would go on foot from Zaldibia in small groups of four or five and sneak in among the apple trees after the guards had passed. People whistled or laughed at them on the way. Sometime after July 1934 Elorza began to deny Communion to those who went. The believers told me that he sent a nephew and four or five Zaldibia seminarians to Ezkioga to take the names of those who turned up there.[58]
LC, 4 January 1933, listed seven seminarians from Zaldibia. One in early 1935 wrote about the stubborn devotion of many families to the apparitions: Sukia, "El Ambiente religioso," 371.
When the Zaldibia believers went to take Communion in the church Elorza would refuse to give them the host in a ritual of authority and disobedience acted out at every Sunday mass for a decade. When they stepped up to receive communion, Elorza or his assistants would say, in front of everyone,
"Do you go to Ezkioga? I say this to you before Christ."
"Yes. I go to Ezkioga to pray."
"Well, I will not give you Communion."
"Well, somebody else will."
At least a dozen persons were denied Communion in Zaldibia for up to twelve years, although not all had the courage or stubbornness to present themselves and be refused regularly.[59]
Elderly male believer, Zaldibia, 31 March 1983, pp. 5-11.
At least one Zaldibia cuadrilla was arrested. In late January 1935 Gipuzkoa was under martial law in the wake of the October Socialist uprising and all unauthorized gatherings were illegal. The military commandant announced that he would jail all those participating in "the reappearance of new activities in Ezquioga," since the diocese had explicitly forbidden them. The next month La Voz de Guipúzcoa reported, "The Civil Guard informed the governor that a clandestine religious meeting, possibly 'Ezquiogan' in nature, had been discovered in the house of the mayor of Zaldivia. The matter has passed to the jurisdiction of the military." Apparently the civil guards merely took down the names of those present. The matter cannot have troubled the military commander seriously; he set modest fines of fifty pesetas. When the Zaldibia believers asked through a seer whether they should pay the fines, the Virgin said no. The government insisted and the Zaldibia town council finally paid for them.[60]
All 1935: La Noticia, 22 January, and ED 23 January; ED and VG, 24 February; Sarasqueta, VG, 28 February.
The believers told me that during the Civil War Martín Elorza had the group arrested again. Civil guards went to the regular Sunday session at Cándida's farm and took the whole group to Zumarraga, Bergara, and finally the Ondarreta prison in San Sebastián. Legend has it that Cándida in vision was so heavy the guards could not budge her until she came to her senses. There was also a political angle. From at least 1933 the town was bitterly divided between Carlists and Basque Nationalists. The two groups competed in public piety and the result was
a kind of devotional spiral. When Franco's troops occupied Gipuzkoa, the Carlists turned in the vision group as separatists. The Carlists had been irked by seers who would stand up in town council meetings and announce what the Virgin wanted done.[61]
The son of one of those arrested gave the date of the raid as 7 January 1937. In the parliamentary elections of 1933 the Basque Nationalists received 210 votes, the Carlists 350, and the Republicans 6 (PV, 21 November 1933). These proportions held for almost all of the rural towns in Gipuzkoa with important groups of believers, with the exception of Ataun, Legazpi, and Ezkioga, which in 1933 swung to the Nationalists. The rural towns with industries had more Republican votes, but not many (see also Granja, Nacionalismo, 415-439). Zaldibia had been further polarized by the open partisanship of Elorza, who on occasion displayed the Carlist flag in church. On 5 June 1933 Carlists in Zaldibia and Ordizia clashed violently with Nationalists and Republicans (ED, 6 June). On competing piety: Sukia, "El Ambiente religioso," 367. For political arrests: son of seer, Zaldibia, 20 August 1982, p. 2; for town council: elderly priest, 10 September 1983, pp. 2-3.
The cuadrilla arrested had five women and six men, ranging in age from about thirty to about sixty. Four were relatives belonging to three farmsteads. They included a young man, unmarried, in his late twenties, his aunt and her son, and a third male cousin. In addition, there was an older male neighbor of the youth, Cándida and her husband, a man and a woman from an Ordizia store, and a man and a woman from the Zaldibia village proper. In jail, where they were held for not paying still larger fines, they felt quite out of place with the political prisoners. A farmer whose brother was jailed told me,
There they said, "But how can this be? How did you people come to be here?"
"As Catholics."
"What do you mean, Catholics? These other people are Communists, or Modern, or Anarchists. How can they denounce people for praying? Don't you have anyone on your side, anyone who will speak up for you and clear this up?"
"We have no pull anywhere."
Nine were freed when the government confiscated property to cover the fines; three others, who had no property in their own names, remained incarcerated for sixteen months until their case came up. The wife of one prisoner died while he was in prison and he was not allowed to go to the funeral. They say that when the judge released them, he said those who denounced them should have been the ones in jail.
In Zaldibia the lines between believers and nonbelievers remained drawn until the late 1940s at least, and the conflict worsened when a new seer moved in. For Martín Elorza, the seers' defiance of his authority—including back talk in front of the congregation and visions in the waiting room of the rectory—was intolerable. With the word straight from heaven seers felt no qualms about confronting the priest. And according to them, he, in his anger and rigidity, slandered them publicly and even fell into heresy, as when he said, they claimed, that in the celestial hierarchy the Virgin Mary was lower than the worst priest.
Fifty years later the older Zaldibia clergy and the old-time believers were still traumatized although generally at peace. They all agreed that Elorza's rigor had been counterproductive. A believer put it this way,
Faith, yes, it is good. But a faith that is persecuted has more strength, because love takes on more firmness. And when the enemy attacks, there is a
reaction, "Well, no; it is this way, and it has to be this way." Little by little they began to let us do what we wanted, and little by little we left off going to Ezkioga. We still go, but less.
Said the priest, "We made abundant mistakes. It has been demonstrated that in the towns and villages where there was the most repression, the believers stayed the strongest. The more we hit them, the more they resisted. By violence it could not be done, for these are delicate matters."[62]
Interviews, Zaldibia, 31 March 1983, p. 10, and 10 September 1983, p. 5.
Denied Communion in Zaldibia and Legorreta, many seers and believers went to Ordizia, where the parish priest was more lenient. Ordizia was a market center for the Urola valley farmers and was less industrial than neighboring Beasain. Rural seers and believers had two kinds of ties to Ordizia: they were clients of its merchants and they were servants. In March 1934 there were restricted vision sessions in the house of the branch bank director, whose servant was a seer from Zaldibia, and in the flat of relatives of another seer. But most frequently the believers met in a small room behind a grocery store run by a fervent believer, Juana Usabiaga; they called the room "El Rinconcito" (the nook). The secret sessions there on market day, Wednesday, were already taking place in early 1933 and went on for at least twenty years. Believers and seers attended from as far away as San Sebastián, Oñati, and the Barranca.[63]
The seers included Cándida Zunzunegui, Juliana Ulacia, Luis Irurzun, Marcelina Mendívil, and José Garmendia.
On the wall of El Rinconcito there was a picture of the Christ of Limpias taken from a box of candles. When the journalist Ducrot visited in May 1933, he was assured by the proprietress that it had bled in prayer sessions six times since the beginning of the year. Ducrot saw dried blood on the image. When he asked why it was not kept behind glass, she said that through a female seer the Virgin had forbidden it. A picture of the image was on sale at Ezkioga, and in 1982 I talked to a believer in Zaldibia who still kept fragments of the blood.[64]
VU, 23 August 1933.
People in Zaldibia described a typical vision session.
[Male believer:] In a vision you have to pray a rosary of fifteen mysteries, the stations of the cross and all those things. Then we get messages or errands, the person who has the visions explains them—you have to do this or that, and then [the divine figure] blesses the crucifixes that people bring and flowers, too. And the seer then hands out the flowers, giving explanations, to each person by name, although the seer had never seen the person before. And they passed on the messages—for the wife, for the children, for the good or the bad they had done.
[Female believer:] And those flowers would generally be good for healing. My father had bad eyes. And the seer said, "Here are some roses; sprinkle them with water from Ezkioga, and go with them to your father." It healed his eyes. We would be happy to get those flowers.
Always when the seer was in vision we lit candles or wax. When [the divine figure] began to appear, they would say that it said, "Make light for me, even if it is just matches." And so we always had candles or wax handy.[65]
Elderly male believer, Zaldibia, 31 March 1983, pp. 15-16.
An Ormaiztegi woman whose mother went regularly to Ordizia attended once herself. She remembered especially the pain of kneeling. The believers would enter at nine in the evening and leave at six in the morning. Some stayed on their knees all night.[66]
Ormaiztegi nonbeliever, 9 September 1983, pp. 3, 10.
In these sessions the divine figure, or, if you will, the seer, became a spiritual director. No longer confessing with the parish priest, these believers felt themselves to be under direct divine scrutiny, judgment, and penance. Through the seer the believer was a member of an intensely scrupulous community where every doubt about the past and the future could be answered.In 1946 Dionisio Oñatibia, doctor in Urretxu, and Juan María Galarraga, assistant priest there, went to one of these sessions out of curiosity. Oñatibia told me that about twenty-five persons were present, men and women. After a large number of rosaries and stations of the cross, two seers, a man and a woman, went into a lengthy and "photogenic" (the doctor's word) trance state and announced that Ignacio de Loyola was celebrating mass. The seers would narrate the mass, step by step, "Now he is going to read the Gospel, everybody stand up." And the seers and believers received Communion; that is, they extended their tongues as if receiving the sacrament, though he and the priest saw no host. When the seers were in trance, Oñatibia took their pulse and observed their pupils; both were normal. At a given moment their hands appeared bloody (like those of Luis Irurzun at Iraneta). Unimpressed by the blood, Oñatibia was impressed by the prayers: "They prayed tirelessly. It was remarkable. Prayer, patience, and penance, that was the watchword." When the session was ending a woman stood up and called out in Basque the motto of Saint Michael the Archangel, "Nor Kristo bezelakoa, Nor Kristo bezelakorik" (There is no one like Christ, no one else like Christ). Sometimes at the end a stuffed pigeon, as the Holy Spirit, was passed around and kissed.[67]
A composite account from three witnesses: Dionisio Oñatibia, Urretxu, 7 April 1983, pp. 2-3, 5; elderly woman, Zumarraga, 29 May 1984, p. 2; and Ormaiztegi nonbeliever, see n. 66 above. In a magazine of the Passionists of Bilbao a former believer in the visions described an Ordizia session in which Gemma Galgani appeared (see P. Beaga, "O locos o endemoniados").
The Ordizia store became a clearinghouse for messages, prophecies, and dates of the chastisement. The town also was the point of departure for the peripatetic vision sessions of Tomás Imaz which kept different cuadrillas in touch.
Tomás Imaz and the Vision Trips
Tomás Imaz Lete, a thin bald man in his early fifties, first came to the public eye when he was arrested and fined for making a scene with Marcelina Eraso on the train. By then, October 1932, he had been a leader in the vision community for at least seven months. The believers nicknamed him "Tximue" because of a certain chimpanzee-like quality to his face and ears; they heard rumors that he was connected to high church officials. Imaz was a real-estate broker based in San Sebastián. While he was not a publicist, he was very much an organizer, and he was one of the few believers to follow his convictions to their logical consequence. If indeed the world as everyone knew it was going to come to an end, and soon, with a great chastisement and a great miracle, there was no point in
Tomás Imaz, on left, with José Garmendia in vision at
Ezkioga, winter 1931–1932. Photo by José Martinez
selling real estate. So he liquidated his assets and slowly spent his funds on the seers and the believers.
Starting in June 1932 Imaz rented buses and invited seers on pilgrimages. He took several trips to Zaragoza to speak to Hermana Naya, venerate the Rafols crucifixes, and pray for Spain to the Virgen del Pilar. The French author G. L. Boué met the seers, including José Garmendia and Benita Aguirre, on their return from a trip on 25 June 1932 in which Benita had visions of the Virgin and Gemma Galgani. José Garmendia's declarations on these expeditions would have confirmed Burguera's worst fears about uncontrolled seers and uncensored messages:
BLOOD OF THE DEVIL
Declaration and vision on this day taking place on the fifth pilgrimage organized by D. Tomás Imaz with seers of Ezquioga to the Santo Cristo Desamparado of the Venerable Madre Rafols in Zaragoza.
Zaragoza, 22 September 1932
On the way, after passing Tudela in the bus, the Most Holy Virgin made me aware that although she had forbidden the devil from bothering us pilgrims on this trip, he had come close to the bus, and Saint Michael had wounded the brazen devil with his sword on the right side of the neck, and from that wound fell two great drops of blood that stained the outside of the windshield of the bus; and when the infernal dragon returned
again later, Saint Michael hit him again, and blood spattered the hood of the bus. All these bloodstains remained very visible for two days, as all the pilgrims present have been able to confirm.
The seer José Garmendia Tomás Imaz; Jesús Imaz, priest; Rosario Gurruchaga; María Luisa; José Antonio Múgica; Juana Múgica; Martí Berrondo; José Azaldegui; Marcelina Eraso; Vicente Gurruchaga; Francisco Otaño, priest .[68]
Boué, 60, 78-79; Ducrot, VU, 23 August 1933; B 561, 711; Benita to García Cascón, 28 June 1932, in SC D 113-114. Garmendia vision in SC D 52-53 and ARB 216.
Here we have another rare glimpse of a clandestine group. Besides Garmendia there are at least five second-rank seers, the two (unrelated) Gurruchagas, María Luisa of Zaldibia, and Marcelina Eraso, Juana Múgica was a believer from Zaldibia, and José Antonio Múgica was the baker from San Sebastián detained two weeks later with Tomás Imaz and Marcelina on the train. The baker and his brother frequently accompanied Garmendia, and Marcelina stayed at their house in San Sebastián. Jesús Imaz Ayerbe had been a missionary overseas; he had moved to San Sebastián in 1928, where he was the chaplain to a community of nuns. On 18 July 1931 he had been cured of a chronic stomach ailment at Ezkioga. Otaño we know as Ramona Olazábal's spiritual director. Martín Berrondo and José Azaldegui were believers. So we have a gathering of seers and believers, priests and laypersons, urbanites and rural folk, men and women. There was a mix of class as well. The real-estate man and the retired missionary were listening intently to farm girls and barely literate factory workers. As for the blood of the devil, it is no coincidence that it was seen on a trip to see the crucifix of Madre Rafols; that crucifix was supposed to have been found with blood on it. Believers proudly showed the stains on the bus to townspeople in Ordizia.[69]
For J. Imaz, BOOV, Guía Diocesana, 1931, p. 116, and B 301. For garage, Ducrot, VU, 23 August 1933, p. 1331. The devil appeared by the bus just beyond Tudela in the Ribera, the domain of the left.
Since Tomás Imaz spoke Basque, he could connect better with the rural seers than Burguera or the Catalans could. At the vision sessions he frequently led the rosary. His special protégées in 1932 were Esperanza Aranda and Conchita Mateos, in addition to José Garmendia. He introduced Juan Bautista Ayerbe to them and accompanied him to their séances. Tomás's belief in the apocalypse made him fearless in defying the government, the church, Burguera, and social convention. Burguera concluded that Imaz was doing the work of the devil. José Garmendia eventually had a revelation that "the seers who go with I[maz] are betraying her and us."[70]
For Imaz fearlessness, Ayerbe to Cardús, 5 May 1934; Garmendia's vision against Imaz, 24 June 1933, B 639; also one of Esperanza Aranda, 20 April 1933, to halt trips to Zaragoza and Aralar, B 711, B 282 n. 1.
Imaz's trips were a way to avoid parish, diocesan, or governmental control. He took seers to places like a sympathetic convent in Alava where, with discretion, they could have visions in peace. Later he was reduced to leading pilgrimages on foot to Aralar or Urkiola. And when his last money was gone and the world had not yet come to an end, he lived on the charity of the believers.[71]
Seers also went to Limpias and Lourdes, possibly with Imaz.
The shrine of San Miguel de Aralar is near the peak of Mount Aralar between the Barranca and Gipuzkoa. For the seers and followers this isolated site was always a safe haven, and with or without Imaz they made numerous trips there, even when it was snowbound. At that time San Miguel de Aralar was the great shrine of Basque Navarra. In an annual ritual of great emotional impact its thaumaturgic image of Saint Michael was carried from town to town in the province; this veneration stitched together the fabric of Navarrese identity. In each town the image would be met with a procession and would be carried to the parish church and to the houses of invalids. In Iraneta devotion to Saint Michael was "terrible ," according to the town secretary, Pedro Balda, who described annual fiestas during which the town council went to the shrine on foot. As a youth, Balda himself carried the image down from the shrine and from Iraneta to Irurtzun. In Betelu too there was "a blind faith in the Saint Michael of the Basques." On the Gipuzkoan side of Aralar there was also devotion, if not so thoroughly programmed. The parish church of Ezkioga, dedicated to Saint Michael, has a sixteenth-century plateresque reredos with reliefs of the apparition of Saint Michael at Monte Gargano. In Ataun people made promises to the saint and used ribbon measurements from Aralar for healing. In Oñati a youth dressed as Saint Michael, complete with sword, walked in the Corpus Christi procession, as did boys in Good Friday processions in Andoain and in Azkoitia.[72]
Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, p. 7; Lidia Salomé, Betelu, 7 June 1984, pp. 2-3; Barandiarán, AEF, 1924, pp. 165, 168; and Etxeberria, AEF, 1924, p. 71.
People thought of Saint Michael as a precursor of the end of time, a warrior captain against the enemies of the church. At Ezkioga the photographer Joaquín Sicart distributed a picture of the saint with these words: "This image, approved by His Holiness Pius IX in 1877, represents the Archangel Saint Michael, sent by the holy spirit to remove the obstacles to the reign of the Sacred Heart."
Saint Michael's shrine at Aralar was a symbol for all Catholics of the region. When he was bishop of Pamplona Mateo Múgica wrote a stirring pastoral letter in praise of the saint. It opened with Apocalypse 12, verses 7 and 8: "And there was a great battle in the sky: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the great dragon was slain, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil." In the letter the bishop discussed the cult of angels and the apparitions of Saint Michael in Italy, in Normandy, and in Navarra. (In the year 707 the saint was said to have appeared to a noble warrior living on Mount Aralar as a hermit in penance for having slain his wife.) Bishop Múgica's predecessor had revived the shrine's brotherhood and Múgica himself had built a road, brought electricity, and planned an illuminated cross for the remote site. He had seen the thousands of Navarrese and Gipuzkoans who gathered at the shrine on May 8, September 29, the last Sunday in August, and the first Sunday in September. He concluded the pastoral letter with an intemperate attack on blasphemers, adulterers, those who work on Sundays, young libertines who attend theaters, movie houses, and dance halls, overtolerant parents, indecently dressed girls (those with bare arms and short skirts), makers of short skirts, drunkards, skinflints, thieves, exploiters
Saint Michael: top left, patron saint of Ezkioga parish church (photo
by Joaquín Sicart); top center, boy saint Michael from Good Friday
procession, Andoain, 1915 (from Anuario de Eusko-Folklore, 1924,
courtesy Fundación Barandiarán); top right, holy card sold at Ezkioga,
ca. 1932 (printed by Daniel Torrent, Barcelona); bottom, the devil and
Saint Michael as seen by Luis Irurzun and drawn by J. A. Ducrot (from VU,
30 August 1933, all rights reserved)
of workers and the poor, gossips, proud and worldly people, spiritists who worship the devil, as well as apostates, heretics, schismatics, and sectarians. On all of these he called down Saint Michael's sword.
Writing in El Pensamiento Navarro on 17 July 1931 a cathedral canon equated Michael of Aralar's struggle with the dragon and that of Catholics with the Second Republic. In doing so he anticipated by one week the visions of Patxi and others. For the canon Saint Michael of Aralar was
the shrine of our beliefs and the bastion of our traditions, whence resounds the old triumphant cry, "There is no one like God!" whose echo, rolling from peak to peak and spreading from valley to valley, has gotten the sacred militia of your brave men on their feet, ready to struggle fearlessly with the dragon until they slay it or cast it, defeated, in its cave.[73]
Múgica, "San Miguel"; Mugueta, PN, 17 July 1931.
For conservative Basque Nationalists too Aralar was a rallying point. Luis Arana Goiri, the brother of the founder of the Nationalist party, had Saint Michael named the patron saint of the party. In August 1931 party ideologue Engracio de Aranzadi wrote that the shrine was "the point of vital union of all Basques" and he warned people not to abandon "their invincible Chieftain, the Angel of Aralar, at a time when the race needs the help of all its members in order not to succumb before the number, power, and hatred of its eternal enemies." The great advantage of Michael of Aralar as party patron saint was his attraction for the Navarrese, doubtful members of a greater Euskadi.[74]
Aranzadi, EZ, 20 August 1931. At the Nationalist fiesta at Aralar on 20 August 1933 about a third of the eighteen thousand persons were from Navarra; PV, 25 August, p. 8.
The visions of Saint Michael battling dragons and devils in the sky at Ezkioga pointed to Aralar as a place of contact between the celestial and regional landscapes. Michael figured prominently in the visions of the seers from both slopes of Aralar, those from Ataun and those from the Barranca. In the visions Michael was the Virgin's great auxiliary, and when the great miracle was to occur, it was he who would explain it and later carry out the chastisement. So when vision meetings were forbidden at Ezkioga, Aralar became a logical alternative for Tomás Imaz and the seers.
There were other private vision places. In February 1933 police arrested the inhabitants of a flat in Bilbao because people were going there to see a miraculous Christ. By 1934 there were also regular meetings of believers in San Sebastián. And two male seers held sessions in the house of José María López de Lerena in Portugalete the first Fridays of every month. In Oñati women from town and farms said the rosary in a chapel of the parish church of San Miguel and embroidered a banner with the Virgin of Aranzazu and Saint Michael. Thus they prepared for the day of the great miracle, when they would come into the open and show their colors.[75]
Bilbao: "La Policía descubre un Ezquioga establecido en un quinto piso," VG, 12 February 1933, p. 5; San Sebastián: Sarasqueta, VG, 10 April 1934, refers to "a certain San Sebastián gathering-place for the pious"; Portugalete: lifetime servant of the López de Lerenas, interviewed by telephone, 7 May 1984; Juana Urcelay, Pamplona, 18 June 1984, p. 4.
In Ormaiztegi a wealthy lady held prayer sessions almost continually in her large house; she had a chapel-like prayer room with an altar and stations of the cross. Seers, two of them young women servants, would go into trance. On special holy days the dozen or so believers might hold a procession in the walled garden and sing hymns. Those attending included shopkeepers from Urretxu and Zumarraga. Persons involved in this circle describe a closed, intense world where every illness was treated with holy water from Ezkioga and every death lit by candles that had previously been lighted and blessed during visions. Some families were divided, and believers had to pray extra hard and have extra masses said so nonbelieving relatives would not go to hell. The sick offered their illness to God as sacrifices, and some who died were considered saints and intercessors in heaven. The believers contributed money and jewels for liturgical ornaments and a chalice for the shrine planned for Ezkioga. The host died in 1966.
Zegama was another center of support for the Ezkioga visions. This large township had a big new Carlist community center, complete with movie theater and bar. Relics and a statue of the Carlist general Zumalcarregui were in the parish church, where the boys in catechism class could put on the general's beret and the best one got to touch the relics. The religious activity of children was highly organized, both informally in fiestas and by the church in sodalities.[76]
The poet José Azurmendi, San Sebastián, 4 February 1986; Gorrochategui, AEF, 1922; and Gorrochategui and Aracama, AEF, 1924, pp. 108-109.
In 1924 a priest reported that only ten persons did not go to church at all, but he was alert to the railroad, the paper mill, and the alcohol factory as threats to community morality. The women were devout, but most men were indifferent. The clergy worked hard to counter the inroads of modernity: from 1918 to 1924 almost every house enthroned the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In this effort the clergy could bank on Zegama's strong Marian traditions, which included an overnight pilgrimage on Pentecost Sunday over the mountains to Our Lady of Aranzazu.[77]
Gorrochategui and Aracama, AEF, 1924, p. 103. For Aranzazu see Guridi, AEF, 1924, pp. 99-100; and Gorrochategui, AEF, 1922, p. 51.
In 1931 several of the many diocesan priests born in Zegama supported the visions. One of them, the parish priest, took down the messages of Zegama seers Marcelina Mendívil and the eight-year-old boy Martín Ayerbe. Burguera was much impressed by the boy's visions of dead children: "He gives minute details about them to their families, which is why these families and others who know about the prodigies believe him."
Martí Ayerbe had visions both in Zegama and at Ezkioga, where his picture was sold on postcards. Like the other seers, he saw not only the Virgin, but also Christ, Saint Michael, other angels, and Saint Paul (walking among the people with sword in hand, a crown on his head, in white clothes and white shoes). The parish priest was intrigued by Martín's visions of a book the Virgin was reading that the devil wanted to destroy; he assumed it was the one Burguera was writing. The boy's vision on 17 October 1931 shows one way the visions could spread among children. He told a farm girl, aged twelve, from
Martín Ayerbe of Zegama in vision, ca. 1932. From Nouvelle
Affaire, fig. 27. Photo by Raymond de Rigné, all rights reserved
Zumarraga that the Virgin had appeared over her head and instructed him to tell her to pray six Hail Marys on her return and to go every day to Ezkioga, where she too would see the Virgin.
In January 1933 when Martín was in vision in catechism class in a chapel, he saw a crucifix in a corner bleeding. According to Burguera, the other children and persons who came in, including two priests, saw the blood too. On Martín's advice, the parish priest notified Bishop Múgica, not yet in the diocese, instead of Echeguren, the vicar general. When the French photojournalist Ducrot went there in May 1933, other children as well were having regular visions before an altar in the chapel.[78]
For Marcelina Mendívil, Boué, 60, who cites a vision in Zegama on Easter Sunday, 1932, and R 59. Ducrot in VU, 16 August 1933, p. 1289 (photograph). For rest on Martín Ayerbe, B 624-628. Francisco Otaño, curate of Beizama, wrote Cardús from Beizama, 25 March 1933, "The priests of Cegama received orders from Vitoria prohibiting access to the place, but then a counter-order a few days later permitted access and asked that the bishop be informed of whatever occurred."
Finally there was a vision substation in the mountains of Urnieta coordinated by the town secretary, Juan Bautista Ayerbe. In 1933 and 1934 Conchita Mateos, Esperanza Aranda, the servant Asunción Balboa, and others sporadically held sessions in houses there. Gradually Ayerbe became more daring. The first news
came from the local stringer of El Pueblo Vasco on 1 December 1934, under the leader "Another Ezquioga?"
It seems that part of the stream of tourists has been diverted to this town. We are assured that several persons frequently go to a certain place between the hermitage of Azcorte and Mount Buruntza, among them several from this town, and even that some go up barefoot. The visions take place not only at this site but also in two or three houses in town.
The correspondent added details the next day, reporting that the seers were adults, that some were from San Sebastián, that people went daily from Urnieta, and that after the visions the believers gathered to talk about them at a nearby farm, where the farmer was one of the seers. Few households in Urnieta were involved actively, but the correspondent named Juan Bautista Ayerbe and "Señor Imaz" of San Sebastián. Ayerbe denied the charge, and an angry lady visited the newspaper office in San Sebastián and said in broken Spanish, "Do not mess with the apparitions. Leave us in peace. We will follow the Virgin anywhere."[79]
Kale'tar bat [a man from the street, or town center], PV, 1 and 2 December 1934.
Clearly there was more than visions at stake, for three days later an explicitly political diatribe against the correspondent appeared in La Constancia . The author, I think Ayerbe himself, admitted only that the farmer and his friends were praying the rosary and doing the stations of the cross at the chapel. With the kind of vehemence that can best be aroused in small towns, he pointed out that the Pueblo Vasco correspondent was a Basque Nationalist and attributed his derision of the devotional practices to politics. By then Basque Nationalists had become allies of the Republic, and he tried to attribute their opposition to the visions to anticlericalism.[80]J. B. Ayerbe, LC, 5 December 1934.
The correspondent replied that in Nationalist homes throughout Urnieta, rural and urban, people still prayed the rosary and that monarchists like Ayerbe did not have a corner on Catholicism. He alluded to two years of visions in Ayerbe's home and cited a brief exchange that gives a sense of how difficult it was for persons going about their daily lives to contend with others who believed that the end of time was at hand.
Not long ago an assiduous male devotee of Ezquioga went up [toward Mount Buruntza] with a lady, and when they came to a farm and saw that its inhabitants were quietly eating their afternoon meal, they snapped, "What are you doing eating? The Virgin is appearing up there."[81]
Kale'tar bat, PV, 12 December 1934.
With martial law in force, all meetings required government permission. Ayerbe recklessly continued the sessions, and civil guards surprised a group praying at the chapel of the Santa Cruz de Azkorte. Three persons were fined. When the military commandant consulted with the diocese, the archpriest of the zone asked him to ban all meetings in the chapel. At Urnieta the Republic thus
came to an understanding with the church to suppress visions, and this understanding was applied in Zaldibia.[82]
PV, 15 December 1934, p. 1 (also LC, p. 8, and ED, p. 1); PV, 16 December 1934, p. 1.
Only a week later Ayerbe reconvened his group in Tolosa, where on 23 December 1934 the poor seer Asunción Balboa talked over the crackdown with the Sorrowing Mother. The Virgin told her the Basque Nationalists were to blame and would be punished and warned that bad men would throw bombs into convents. The unusually explicit politics of this cuadrilla comes out in Balboa's conversation with Jesus, who told her that King Alfonso would soon come back to reign in Spain. She also saw Thérèse de Lisieux, Gemma Galgani, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, who said that because of the group's prayers twenty-five souls would leave purgatory the next Saturday. There was still time for many private messages for individuals.[83]
J. B. Ayerbe, "Visión de Asunción Balboa, 23 Dicbre. 1934—En Tolosa," 2 pages, typewritten, AC 213: "No quieren que reine el Rey Alfonso pero Tú dices que ha de reinar en España ... Pero sí reinará. No tardará mucho tiempo."
Starting then in 1932 Gipuzkoa had a number of groups that maintained their own parallel Catholic rituals, firm in the knowledge that a civil war would occur and that sooner or later there would be a great chastisement. Each cuadrilla met in secret, but everyone in the zone knew that such groups existed. As far as I can tell, apart from some intransigent priests, few people felt moved to do anything about them. One exception was a potter from Zegama who stood up on the vision stage at Ezkioga and shouted, "I believe in Christ but not in this nonsense!" After all, the majority of Catholics in the Basque uplands were hopeful at first that the visions were true, and huge numbers had been devout and enthusiastic spectators. Later, instead of denouncing the seers and the believers, people either tolerated or laughed at their delusions, often with grudging admiration for their piety.[84]
For Zegama man: Francisco Ezcurdia, 10 September 1983, p. 3.
I was told stories about the believers which, true or not, demonstrate how some of their contemporaries dismissed them. Women in Zumarraga told me about a couple from Zaldibia who were convinced by visions, their own or others', to reenact the flight of Mary and Joseph to Egypt. They borrowed a child and set off walking with a donkey. When they reached Valencia and found they would have to cross an ocean, they turned back. In Legorreta, I was told, a great fear swept the town one election day when a man came down the steep mountainside above the town with a blazing pine torch, and people were convinced Saint Michael the Archangel had finally descended to separate the just from the unbelievers.[85]
For Legorreta: José María Celaya, OFM, from Legorreta, Aranzazu, 1 June 1984; his father carried the torch.
But what nonbelivers, whether indignant, mocking, or tolerant, all seemed to ignore was the zest of the believers. Paradoxically, while having visions of dire events in their closed secret cells, the believers were having a wonderful time, creating pockets of social space full of goodwill and good humor. For them their rosaries, their hymns, and their vision messages were a taste of heaven on earth. In these groups the mixing of unrelated men and women, of wealthy and poor, of merchants and farmers, of San Sebastián sophisticates and rural Basque speakers, of adults and children, led to a kind of exhilaration that comes with
the breaking of taboo and convention. Rural women were suddenly on an equal footing with educated urban men, who served as their secretaries.
These people now recall their arrests as heroic. One day in October of 1937 or 1938 Juliana Ulacia and her group were caught at Ezkioga, put in a truck, and detained in a vacant house in Zumarraga.
[Woman:] How we prayed and sang! [laughs] From morning to night!
[Brother:] From that empty house they wanted to make it to heaven! [laughs]
[Woman:] Then they brought us to testify. Even the guards had to laugh. They didn't know what to do. We did nothing but pray and sing. But they had their job to do. We spent eight days like that; then when they got tired of our praying and singing, they gave us food and said, "All right, you can go home now."[86]
Elderly Zaldibia believers, 31 March 1983, pp. 10-12.
The old-time believers, their faces alight with pleasure, remembered these groups with great fondness.
Visions and Accusations of Witchcraft
In the 1930s many people drew comparisons between the Ezkioga apparitions and the great Basque witchcraft epidemic of 1608–1617. Cultural ecology may have facilitated the spread of the two phenomena.
The witchcraft accusations started near the border as a direct result of prosecutions nearby in France. The more the Spanish Inquisition got involved, the more witches were accused, mainly by children, until the entire zone of mountain Navarra, Gipuzkoa, and eastern Alava was sensitized to the pattern and the fear.
The accusations featured fear and suspicion; the visions, at least at first, featured hope and enthusiasm. The beings seen in the visions were generally good and beneficent, not maleficent, as in the accusations. Whereas the witchcraft scare was a chain reaction of ill will, the visions at first were a chain reaction of benevolence and grace, toward individuals, families, towns, regions, and nations. In both situations the proximate paradigms were French, from the Labourd region for witchcraft and from Lourdes for the apparitions, but both built on older local traditions as well. And both ended with an ecclesiastically imposed silence.
Children and teenagers played important roles in both sequences of events, testifying to the persistence both of their lack of power and their reputation for innocence. In 1611 people accused witches of corrupting children. When the enlightened inquisitor Salazar traveled around undoing the damage, he found that 1,384 of 1,802 persons whom he allowed to retract witchcraft accusations or confessions were children, girls under twelve or boys under fourteen. In 1931
children were considered more likely to have visions because of their moral innocence. In both sequences adults granted children an unusual credibility. In 1611 the adults projected onto children their fears and in 1931 their hopes. The children themselves quickly took advantage of the new opportunities that high-culture witchcraft (in 1611) and Lourdes-type vision prophecy (in 1931) accorded them. By providing the reports that adults wanted to hear, they temporarily reversed the order and hierarchy of their little societies. In 1611 the children verified that they were victims of the devil, who defiled them, or of witches, who sucked their blood. In 1931 children proclaimed themselves God's messengers and God's willing victims. The spread of the phenomena in both cases was helped by the flexible nature of children and their more fluid notions of reality.
The children's accounts of strange experiences were especially convincing because they made contact with the spirits in an altered state: in the case of witchcraft, as far as we know, a fictional or dreamed one; in the case of most seers, a real one (although one that was uncommon). In both sequences the new powers were double-edged. Witches might be agents of the devil, but there were teenagers like Pedro de los Reyes of Oiartzun who had a divine gift for unmasking witches. Some of my less educated informants accused various Ezkioga seers of having powers from the devil, not from God, and considered those seers witches.[87]
For children as accusers of witchcraft see Henningsen, Witches' Advocate, 117-119, 129, 140, 209, 254, 301, 326, and Monter, "Les Enfants au sabbat." Both witchcraft persecutions in the 1607-1617 period and apparitions in 1931-1936 occurred in the Barranca. See Staehlin, Apariciones, 86-90, 389-390, for provoked collective visions in children. I am grateful to Gábor Klaniczáy for pushing me to make this comparison.
Promoters helped the spread of both epidemics; in the case of witchcraft local elites and learned inquisitors pressed people to confess and with their edicts and questions standardized the patterns of belief; in the case of the visions, informed enthusiasts convoked the seers and parents, and parish priests and schoolteachers communicated to seers their own hopes and anxieties. In both cases, servants, children, and the less privileged elements of society gained a temporary advantage.
Witchcraft accusations and visions spread with equal ease through dispersed farms and grouped settlements, but both developments seem to have done better in the countryside than in the cities, in the uplands than in the lowlands. And the events had their greatest effect in the areas of Basque language. The visions in Spanish-speaking Bachicabo and Mendigorría did not spread. Those in the Barranca reached their southern and eastern limits at the first Spanish-speaking villages. The cultural isolation of rural Basque speakers may have left them with fewer defenses against and fewer inhibitions about the spirit world and sheltered them from critical alternatives.
Finally, both proliferations may have had common roots in a landscape people already considered sacred. Witches were supposed to meet in caves. Ancient spirits called sorguiñak were supposed to live in caves as well, whence the Basque word sorguin for witch. In Bakaiku and Lakuntza children had visions along or in rivers, and rivers were one of the dwelling places of attractive but dangerous spirits known as lamiak . And many seers saw beings coming from mountains, both at Ezkioga and in the Barranca, mountains associated with
powerful spirits, whether local gods like Mari, who could send hail and lightning as punishment, or Christian spirits like Saint Michael. But these deep cultural roots are much easier to postulate than to demonstrate; and not once did they appear explicitly in my oral, manuscript, or printed sources. I suspect them because of the intense pressure in contemporary Basque society to provide a primordial local origin for cultural phenomena.[88]
Barandiarán, Mitología vasca. The Virgin Mary seemed at Lourdes to control the local spirits in the river Gave de Pau. During her fourth vision of 19 February 1858 (according to Estrade, Les Apparitions de Lourdes, chapter 9 [Tours: Mame, 1899]), Bernadette, kneeling with her back to the river, "heard a tumult of voices that seem to come out of the depths of the earth and break out on the waters of the Gave; they called one another, intersected, and clashed noisily as if a multitude in struggle. One voice, imposing itself on the others, called out stridently and angrily, 'Go away! Go away!' To this shout, which seemed to be a threat, the Lady had raised her head and wrinkled her brow, looking toward the river. With this simple gesture, the voices panicked and fled in all directions."