Ama Felisa, Courier for Souls

The connection between the living and the dead was especially strong for children whose mothers had died young (the case of Anna Pou), for mothers whose children had died young (the cases of María Agueda and the mother of Conchita Mateos), and for those whose close relatives had died suddenly in accidents (the cases of the girl from Albiztur and the man from Madrid). These deaths came outside the normal pattern of things and interrupted intense relations, which were left unresolved.^[23]

This kind of vision has many parallels elsewhere, from the dream visions of Giovanni Pagolo Morelli in fifteenth-century Florence (Trexler, Public Life, 161-186) to my acquaintances in the present day.

After the church banned public vision sessions, people's ongoing desire to maintain contact with the dead permitted some of the seers to work as intermediaries with the other world. In 1944 Juan Bautista Ayerbe described the seer Marcelina Mendívil: "No longer does she beg door-to-door for her house, which burned down in such an unusual fashion, but she does circulate a lot, we have learned, to take messages from the Virgin and from the souls in purgatory with whom, above all, she is much in contact."^[24]

J. B. Ayerbe to an abadesa, 1 July 1944, 10 pages, p. 3, AC 423.

Mendívil formed part of an extensive consulting service about the dead which depended largely on the incessant activity of one woman. For many in the Goiherri Felisa Alcorta Goenaga, variously known as the Bread Lady from Zumarraga, Ama Txikixa [Little Mother], or Ama Felisa [Mother Felisa], came to personify the Ezkioga cult from the late 1930s until her death in 1954. Born about 1882, Ama Felisa operated a bakery from a farm to the north of Zumarraga. For four years her family employed as a servant the woman whose children were later the first seers at Ezkioga, so Ama Felisa took a special interest in the visions. We see her in photographs raptly observing and caring for seers and proud at the ground-breaking of the chapel. After the cult went underground, she led prayer sessions at Ezkioga at night. It may have been through her that several other bakers in the zone converted and attended visions in Ordizia and Ormaiztegi.^[25]

The first seers' mother was the niece of a neighbor in Ama Felisa's hamlet. For Ama Felisa see her son Domingo Plazaola Goenaga and wife, Zumarraga, 8 April 1983.

Believers, including her own family, thought Ama Felisa had a gift of second sight that enabled her to see things happening elsewhere—she saw the youth from Azkoitia who was posted elsewhere in the Civil War, and she saw one of her own sons in Jaca. She also seemed to foresee events—that a farm building would burn down if its owner did not install an image of the Miraculous Mary in a window, that an anti-Ezkioga priest would be deposed (he went crazy in late 1934), or that Spain would once again be a monarchy. But she herself saw neither the Virgin nor the souls in purgatory, and so she had recourse not only to Mendívil but also to Luis Irurzun, Cándida Zunzunegui, Juliana Ulacia, and above all María Recalde.

Ama Felisa circulated among a regular network of clients, gathering questions for the Virgin or the dead, delivering answers from seers, and collecting alms. Leaving the bakery to her family, she would be gone on foot, by bus, or by train for weeks at a time, staying in the homes of believers. Her regular route included the towns adjacent to Zumarraga as well as Azpeitia, San Prudentzio, Legazpi, Oñati, Aranzazu, Durango, Ordizia, Zaldibia, Tolosa, and San Sebastián. Occasionally she went to Bergara and Mondragón. Her son told me that nothing stopped her, including the Civil War. One nonbelieving observer claimed to me that she or the seers she spoke for coerced peasants into giving money with threats that their houses would burn or their cattle would die. Be that as it may, initiative also came from the believers, who had sons missing in action, problems with farming in hard times, and dead who needed care.

Accompanied by her sister-in-law or other friends, Ama Felisa also paid regular visits to the church of Santa María in San Sebastián and the shrines of Our Lady of Liernia in Mutiloa, Saint Martin of Loinaz, and Saint Anthony of Urkiola in Bizkaia. She would enter the shrine of Our Lady of Aranzazu with a lighted candle and leave many lighted candles behind her. A friar of Aranzazu remembered her visits on the first Saturday of each month and said the students referred to her and her friends as "las iluminadas." Women described her to me

"lighting rolls of wax [for the souls in purgatory], mortifying herself with prickly holly under her knees as she prayed, and on the orders of the Virgin wearing the Passionist habit of Gemma Galgani."^[26]

For visits to San Sebastián, Juan María Amundarain, San Sebastián, 3 June 1984, p. 4; for her route, Juana Urcelay, Pamplona, 18 June 1984, p. 2; for Aranzazu, Franciscan keeper of San Martintxu, Beasain, 4 April 1983; older women, Zumarraga, 29 May 1984, p. 8.

Ama Felisa also played a prominent role in the vision sessions in Ordizia. A Passionist who attended one of them described her in 1950:

There is a female apostle, dressed something like a priest, with a shoulder cape and everything, in the old style of rural clergy. She is advanced in years [by then she was in her late sixties], and they call her "La Ama X." She displays a white silk handkerchief, on which are seen big dark-red spots, which she claims is the blood of Christ.^[27]

Beaga, "O locos o endemoniados," 155. He may be describing a session Juan Bautista Ayerbe attended on 29 October 1947: Ayerbe to "Felipe" (probably his brother in Bergara), Urnieta, 27 November 1947, AC 424.

We get a glimpse of how Ama Felisa worked from a local doctor. Curious about her system, he asks her about the afterlife of a brother who, he said, had died in Bizkaia in the war. She returned after several days saying that a seer had learned that the brother was in purgatory and would go to heaven if the doctor received Communion for nine days with Ama Felisa present. The doctor was a daily communicant anyway, so they went together for nine days. She then checked again with the seer, who claimed to have seen the brother leave purgatory and go straight to heaven while the doctor and Ama Felisa were receiving Communion in the ninth mass. In fact, there was no dead brother.^[28]

Dionisio Oñatibia, Urretxu, 7 April 1983, p. 1.

Ama Felisa cannot have had time to sit in on all the believers' masses and novenas. But by all accounts she was dedicated to helping others and kept none of the alms. Antonia Etxezarreta, the milk-lady, told me that once when she was sick Ama Felisa came to visit, predicted that Antonia's son would have the grace of the Virgin, and seemed to have a vision looking out a window. Ama Felisa was like a pastor to the believing community, looking after their physical and spiritual needs and caring for their souls after death.

There was general agreement that the money Ama Felisa collected went to the needy. Her role as collector of alms and votive money corresponds with an ancient one in Basque and European society—that of the questors for shrines. The woman shrine-keeper (serora ) at the little shrine of Our Lady of Liernia circulated in a wide area. Much of what she collected would have been pledges for prayers that people felt the Virgin had answered. In the years 1928–1929 she gathered about eight hundred pesetas per year in money or in eggs, chickens, or other produce; she could keep half for herself. Questors also circulated for the construction of churches, like that of Urkiola. With portable images that all members of a farm would kiss, questors provided a home delivery of grace probably related, like home delivery of bread, to a multiplicity of sacred places and competition between them. Ama Felisa, the bread-lady, was delivering personalized grace that the Virgin or the holy dead had certified.^[29]

For Our Lady of Liernia see ADV Denuncias, Mutiloa, 1928-1929; for questor visits see Sukia, "El ambiente religioso," 364.

Ama Felisa's son and daughter-in-law told me that she sent some of the alms to a convent in Palencia, where masses for the dead were especially cheap and

she could liberate more souls. Ama Felisa would redistribute some of the alms to the sick and the poor on her route. But believers could also choose to have their money go to missions; she brought this money to María Recalde, in sums of five hundred to one thousand pesetas. María told Ama Felisa that angels took this money away at night from a bedside table for use in a place where missionaries never went. By one account it was a place where people dug for potatoes with their hands. Another believer told me the money was "for places where there was no religion, for example, for the missions. Away. Like to India. For you know there are many places where there is no religion." In 1983 older Zumarraga believers were wondering whether that remote place might have been the moon. In any case where the Ezkioga money went was a mystery.^[30]

For the place of potatoes see Juliana Urcelay, Pamplona, 18 June 1984, p. 1; for India: elderly woman, Zumarraga, 10 May 1984, p. 8; for moon: older believers, Zumarraga, April 1983.

María Recalde was secretive about financial matters, even with her husband and children. She would closet herself with three or four women believers to pray in an improvised chapel. The family knew that Ama Felisa came with the alms, but no one knew what María did with them. On different occasions in Madrid and Mexico, however, María's granddaughter, Mariví Jayo, met people who, when she said she was from Durango, remembered her grandmother well. It seems that María, who belonged to a Basque Nationalist family, generously helped the family members of prisoners in the Durango jail for enemies of the Franco regime. The Durango prison may have been "the place where missionaries had never been." Before she died in 1950 María told her husband that she had twenty thousand pesetas still unspent, a fortune at the time. Mortified, her husband told no one, until on his deathbed he had his children give the money to the Durango priests for masses.^[31]

Lorenzo and Mariví Jayo, Durango, 31 December 1984 and 23 July 1986, and Tafira Baja, 15 June 1985 and 8 December 1989.

Other seers continued to provide news of the dead. As far as I know, the last two of the seers from the 1930s to do so were Luis Irurzun, who settled in San Sebastián, and Rosario Gurruchaga, who settled in Bergara. A believer from Bergara told me, "If they brought a photograph, she would answer where the dead person was." She would also deliver messages or tokens from the dead to the living. In 1980, for instance, she gave flowers to Leonor Castillo from Leonor's deceased brother, Vidal, the operator of the Ezkioga souvenir stand. These semiprofessional intermediaries with the dead were not new with the Ezkioga visions. Specialists in many parts of Spain, known as ánimas or animeros and in Languedoc as armièrs , had long claimed to be able to make such contacts.^[32]

Bergara believer, 12 June 1984, p. 8; Leonor Castillo, Bermeo, 7 May 1984, p. 5; for similar specialists Bethencourt, Costumbres populares, 285-288, at the turn of the century describes a man in Icod de los Vinos (Tenerife) and a woman on the island of Hierro; for Asturias see Cátedra, This World, Other Worlds, 264-268, and for the armièrs of Languedoc see Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 60.