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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
improving civility and obedience to canon law; and confirming
the faith of the pious. The fervour of pilgrims in such shrines
was impressive; it was not uncommon for rock scrapings or dirt
from the shrine to be mixed with water and drunk as medicine.
But I'm not suggesting that most witnesses made the whole
business up. Something else was going on.
Almost all the urgent requests by Mary were remarkable for
their prosaicness - for example, in this 1483 apparition from
Catalonia:
I charge you by your soul to charge the souls of the men of the
parishes of El Torn, Milleras, El Salent, and Sant Miquel de
Campmaior to charge the souls of the priests to ask the
people to pay up the tithes and all the duties of the church
and restore other things that they hold covertly or openly
which are not theirs to their rightful owners within thirty
days, for it will be necessary, and observe well the holy
Sunday.
And second that they should cease and desist from blaspheming
and they should pay the usual charitas mandated by
their dead ancestors.
Often the apparition is seen just after the witness awakes.
Francisca la Brava testified in 1523 that she had gotten out of bed
'without knowing if she was in control of her senses', although in
later testimony she claimed to be fully awake. (This was in
response to a question which allowed a gradation of possibilities:
fully awake, dozing, in a trance, asleep.) Sometimes details are
wholly missing, such as what the accompanying angels looked
like; or Mary is described as both tall and short, both mother and
child, characteristics that unmistakably suggest themselves as
dream material. In the Dialogue on Miracles written around 1223
by Caesarius of Heisterbach, clerical visions of the Virgin Mary
often occurred during matins, which took place at the sleepy
midnight hour.
It is natural to suspect that many, perhaps all, of these
apparitions were a species of dream, waking or sleeping, compounded
by hoaxes (and by forgeries; there was a thriving
136