Consumers and Interpreters of Prophecies
It is hard to know how many Basque country people were interested in the visions of the end of the world. But people like Padre Burguera, Juan Bautista Ayerbe, and Tomás Imaz dwelled more in the realm of prophecy than in the everyday. We can follow their interest in letters and see how they placed the Ezkioga prophecies in the wider and older tradition, on the one hand, and continually speculated about their applicability to current events, on the other.
Sebastián López de Lerena, the wealthy electrical engineer from Bilbao, wrote a defense of the apparitions in the summer of 1933. For him they announced the end of time:
There [at Ezkioga] and in various other places, the Most Holy Virgin truly appears with the main purpose of preparing the world for the Reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is imminent and will not come without enormous universal chastisements, apparently inevitable…. Ezkioga is the confirmation of innumerable ancient and modern prophecies of the greatest authority, and in consequence, it is the precursor … of the most transcendental and most moving events of human History…. Hence the unlimited variety of material in the visions: … [including] announcements of great chastisements, of miracles, of what they call the "Great Miracle," of universal application and which will be the occasion for a general conversion, the Great Monarch, an era of peace before the Antichrist, his reign, the end of the world.[49]
López de Lerena, "A propósito de Ezquioga."
A man in Madrid who was "a fervent devotee of the holy apparitions" wrote a long letter to Ayerbe, which I include in the appendix. It shows how these semiprofessional vision consumers, like modern semiologists, could organize into an apparently coherent pattern whatever ideas came down the pike. The letter reveals the subculture of religious excitement that maintained continuity and gave meaning to religious apparitions and linked them with the mysticism of the convents. This kind of audience needed specific dates connecting the general pattern to the here and now. One seer led Ayerbe to believe, for instance, that the Sacred Heart of Jesus would begin his reign on 25 April 1934.[50]
Ayerbe to Cardús, 9 November 1933.
So our seers and their patrons returned to the specific political-historical visions of the first summer of the visions, now rerouted through the complex chronology of the end of times.Some of the Ezkioga seers delivered a professional level of prophecy. Ayerbe circulated a prophetic update of the Chilean priest Echeverría Larrain, who was touring Europe spreading apocalyptic warnings and spoke at a church school in San Sebastián about 1933. It reads much like the output of Benita.
He said that the renovation is coming very soon, is imminent. He did not give the date, but he did say that by the year 1935 the world would be completely reformed, within two years or before. A third of the world will die. The Virgin will come with a legion of angels and many priests at her side will absolve those who want to convert.
That then only the good would remain in the world and there would be peace until the end of time. That the church would triumph more than ever. He said that soon there would be a war or a revolution and that in a moment all the communists and soviets would come out to destroy all the nations, trying to triumph by any means, and then would occur the chastisement that God has prepared for us, and in an instant the world would be transformed in peace with the good people until the end of the world.
He said that there is a prince in the desert doing penance who is the descendant of the ancient Bourbons. No one will know where he comes from and he will live and rule from France, but not from Paris, because Paris will no longer exist. It will be destroyed and burned for its great sins and crimes, and more cities as well. It will be a horrible chastisement never been known before, and it will be terrifying. France and Germany are going to get caught up in a war very soon, and soon after will come the terrible chastisement of this unfortunate mankind for the great sins it has committed.[51]
"Fragmentos de una Carta—Terribles predicciones" and "Profecías de Bug de Milhas," 2 sheets, dittoed, unsigned, n.d., AC 458. After the date 1935 there is a handwritten note: "It appears the chastisement has been delayed."
The similarity of Echeverría's conclusions to those the prophets of the Basque uplands reached deserves attention. López de Lerena contrasted the elevated concepts in the Ezkioga visions and the background of the seers:
These and other transcendent themes are the subject of the daily conversations of the Most Holy Virgin with the seers, very humble country people, all of them honorable, simple, sincere, and with no learning. God loves and takes pleasure in the humble. Nowhere is this so clear as in Ezkioga, and for us it is a new and evident "criterion of certitude."
Such wonder that a peasant or a child knows what she or he could not be expected to know is an ancient commonplace. Thomas Martin, Catherine Labouré, Mélanie, and Bernadette in France and David Lazzaretti and Eusapia Paladino in Italy were recent examples. With the high rates of literacy in contemporary Europe the wonder is often unjustified. Enthusiasts tend to present these adults and children as less tutored, less well-read, and less intelligent than they really were. In my experience persons who have religious visions have a great hunger to understand what is happening to them and they have to respond to insatiable
demands from those around them for more and more heavenly material. Those with little background in these matters can receive a rapid and substantial education by carefully reading the books and pamphlets that enthusiasts or spiritual directors inevitably give them.[52]
López de Lerena, "A propósito de Ezquioga." Staehlin, Padre Rubio, 109-110, for the voracious reading of the seamstress Josefa Menéndez.
At Ezkioga quick studies like Benita, Evarista, Cruz Lete, Luis Irurzun/Pedro Balda, Pilar Ciordia, and Patxi were the seers who could best satisfy those needing to know about the end of time.These messages of crusader-like crucifers and apocalyptic battles might seem to be guarded ways of talking belligerently about the internal enemy in Spain and preparing for a civil war. But the emphasis on the Soviet Union and international communism in the contemporary literature about Ezkioga and even a dozen years earlier in that about Limpias points to the deeper perception that a cataclysm was shaking the very roots of civilization. For many Catholics the Cold War began with the Russian Revolution. For them the threat of communism was nothing less than the devil's dominion of the world. This threat was on a different order of magnitude than that posed by Freemasonry or liberalism. Apocalyptic scenarios existed before, but communism gave them actuality on a global scale. For the Ezkioga believers the chastisement was not, in fact, the Spanish Civil War, and the reign of the Sacred Heart did not begin in 1939 with Franco. Indeed, even after the fall of communism the Ezkioga believers still wait for the chastisement of the immorality they see around them.
This prophetic tradition is the basis on which many people make decisions. Thus it is as important for a statesperson, political scientist, or historian to know this line of belief as it is for an economist to understand unlikely economic theories—not because they correctly predict or represent reality but because others use this tradition to take actions of lasting consequence.
For believers in the visions, especially those who stuck with the seers into 1932 and thereafter, these prophecies were deadly serious. I spoke to families of believers in Ormaiztegi, Urretxu, and Portugalete who for many years had special candles and matches ready for the days of darkness, and two families showed me typed or hand-copied instructions for what to do when the chastisement began. The instructions appear to have come from the Barcelona followers of Enriqueta Tomás, who through the 1930s and 1940s developed the cult of the Virgin of the Twelve Stars—alas, another story. Note the open involvement of Saint James as well as Saint Michael:
On the Dark and Stormy Night (Observations of Another [Female] Seer)
1. Daniel Clairin is the devil.
2. About eleven in the morning it will begin to get dark as if there were an eclipse of the sun.
3. In one or two hours the devils will go out.
4. Shut the doors and windows tight, and whoever gets caught in the street must stay outside. For the devil will take advantage of good
people, like family members who call at the door. If the door is opened the devil will come in with them, and all in the house will be lost. So that, without compassion, once the door is shut, open it for no one. The devil will even imitate the voices of people to gain entrance.
5. There will be sounds like an army on patrol, and it will be San Miguel and Santiago who will come down to earth.
6. With the blood of the dead Santiago will mark the doors that he finds closed, so that the infernal enemy may not enter, as with Moses and the Israelites on the mountain of the forefathers.
7. Prepare five candles and five pictures [estampas ] of the Virgin of the Twelve Stars, and keep them lit for the forty-eight hours that the slaughter, the screams, and the gases produced by the collision of stars that makes fire in the clouds will last.
8. On Sunday the sun will come out brightly, but because of so much death produced by the collision of the stars, one will not be able to go out.
9. On Monday there will be a strong wind that will clear the atmosphere, and on Tuesday people can go out, and they will see a great many dead.[53]
"Sobre la noche obscura y de tempestad," 1 page, dittoed, n.d., AC 14.
Many people I talked to recalled that seers predicted the worldwide triumph of communism. An older woman told me, "Our milk-woman said that there would be a river of blood from Izaga to Ezkioga, and that the Russians would be in control." Those witnessing the visions of chastisements remember them vividly:
They saw balls of fire; they wept; it was a spectacle.
They said there would be fire; they screamed; terrible things. We went away terrified.
They were always promising macabre, lugubrious, apocalyptic things … The Jehovah's Witnesses say the same things.[54]
For river of blood: woman about age seventy in Zumarraga, May 1984. Izaga, the section of Zumarraga closest to Ezkioga, was partial to the visions, and the seer Marcelina Mendívil spent her last years there. Quotes from (1) woman from believing household in Ezkioga, age about fifty, August 1982; (2) woman from Ordizia, age seventy-two, December 1983; (3) man from believing household, Urnieta, June 1984. The overlap of predictions with those of the Jehovah's Witnesses led at least one Ezkioga cuadrilla to defect. Arrinda and Albisu draw the comparison in Jehovatarrak (Jehovah's Witnesses), 11.
Persons in Zaldibia and Urretxu told the same story, which may be apocryphal. Once when seers announced a date for the Last Judgment, a farmer counted up his hens and ate them one by one, so that on the fatal day none would be wasted. The real-estate broker Tomás Imaz gave away all he had. The children of Juan Bautista Ayerbe grew up in Urnieta thinking the end of time could come at any moment. An uncle converted all his money into silver and buried it under a tree. Their mother expected an exodus of Catholics to the desert and had all her valuables in two suitcases ready to leave at a moment's notice. During the Civil War a thief walked off with them.[55]
Daniel Ayerbe, Irun, 13 June 1984, confirmed by his sister Matilde, in San Sebastián the next day.