Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
d'Arc in France, St Bridget in Sweden, and Girolamo Savonarola
in Italy. But more appropriate for our purpose are the apparitions
seen by shepherds and peasants and children. In a world plagued
by uncertainty and horror, these people longed for contact with
the divine. A detailed record of such events in Castile and
Catalonia is provided by William A. Christian Jr in his book
Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (1981).
In a typical case, a rural woman or child reports encountering
a girl or an oddly tiny woman - perhaps three or four feet tall -
who reveals herself to be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
She requests the awestruck witness to go to the village fathers
or the local Church authorities and order them to say prayers
for the dead, or obey the Commandments, or build a shrine at
this very spot in the countryside. If they do not comply, dire
penalties are threatened, perhaps the plague. Alternatively, in
plague-infested times, Mary promises to cure the disease but
only if her request is satisfied.
The witness tries to do as she is told. But when she informs her
father or husband or priest, she is ordered to repeat the story to no
one; it is mere female foolishness or frivolity or demonic hallucination.
So she keeps quiet. Days later she is confronted again by
Mary, a little put out that her request has not been honoured.
'They will not believe me,' the witness complains. 'Give me a
sign.' Evidence is needed.
So Mary - who seems to have had no foreknowledge that
evidence would have to be provided - provides a sign. The
villagers and priests are promptly convinced. The shrine is built.
Miraculous cures occur in its vicinity. Pilgrims come from far and
wide. Priests are busy. The economy of the region booms. The
original witness is appointed keeper of the sacred shrine.
In most of the cases we know of, there was a commission of
inquiry, comprising leaders civic and ecclesiastic, who attested to
the genuineness of the apparition, despite initial, almost exclusively
male, scepticism. But the standards of evidence were not
generally high. In one case the testimony of a delirious eight-yearold
boy, taken two days before his death from plague, was soberly
accepted. Some of these commissions deliberated decades or even
a century after the event.
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