The Sabbatean Prophets

116 The Sabbatean Prophets
the hands of the Inquisition. 81 Sabbatean women were mainly spared from
this sort of exposure as frauds because they were in the midst of a community
as enthusiastic as they were.
One beata of Ávila, an intense ascetic who joined the Dominicans in her
youth, was known from an early age as a seer. She was believed to be in almost
constant relation with God.
Trances were frequent in which she lay as one dead, with arms outstretched
and stiffened in the form of a cross, and on emerging from them she edified
her hearers with wondrous accounts of her heavenly experiences. Although
ignorant of Scripture she was said to be equal to the most learned
theologians. . . . Sometimes she asserted that Christ was with her, sometimes
that she herself was Christ or that she was the bride of Christ. Often
she held conversations with the Virgin in which she spoke for both. 82
Such visions, trances, and possessions were common throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries among Spanish spirituals, mainly women,
but occasionally men as well. Some wrote pietistic tracts, a number of which
became quite influential. The mechanism of these visionary states was usually
the practice of recojimiento, abstraction of the faculties in a state of fasting,
self-mortification, and isolation. 83 One can hardly avoid the conclusion
that these practices were strongly influenced by the techniques of Sufis and
perhaps kabbalists—yet they were performed by the ignorant and learned
alike. The Spanish visionaries constituted yet another early modern prophetic
group with physical symptoms resembling those of the Sabbatean lay
prophets, extensive participation of women and children, and other common
features.
Were these parallel cases of prophetic possession simply coincidental There
are cultures around the globe in which trances and possessions with almost
identical symptoms are part of everyday life and have been for many centuries.
Sometimes the subjects are purported to be prophets, but usually not. 84
Even within the European and Mediterranean spheres it is disingenuous to
compare ecstatic Sabbatean possession symptoms only to those of prophetic
groups. The enormous explosion of spirit possession cases in early modern
Europe consisted mainly of demonic possessions. 85 Many of these were connected
with witchcraft. The symptoms were almost indistinguishable from
those of the prophets with whom we are dealing—performance of seemingly
impossible physical and mental feats; fainting into apparent death;