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."