Visionaries: the Spanish Republic and the reign of ChristEscrito por William A. Christian

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(Sobre Agapito Milln)The first to compare the Ezkioga visions and spiritism in print was Agapito Millan in ElLiberal (Bilbao) in September 1931. After a skeptical account of three seers he hadwatched, he set out his own idea of the spirit world. There were, he said, natural or highapparitions, which were those that occurred at the initiative of ghosts, suffering souls,and "high entities of the astral world," and also artificial or low ones, which humansinitiated. The high, natural apparitions, he held, always occurred for a good reason, oneimportant either for the spirit or the visionary. For the spirit they might serve to attainliberty, tranquility, or even happiness in the other world. For the living they might serveas a warning of imminent danger. Here we see congruence between the traditional beliefin the apparitions of the dead and the new beliefs of the spiritists. Millan merely addedto traditional notions the idea that "higher astral bodies" might appear. He claimed thatlow, artificial apparitions were provoked by experimenters by means of hypnotism,magnetism, and somnambulism, who put their subject sensitives to sleep, and once they areprofoundly so, double them and project their "double," or astral body wherever or as faras they want. In 1918 a good "subject," put to sleep in Bilbao, sent [his or her] double, in afew instants, to Paris and places on the French front, where it talked with soldiers and wasvisible to them.

This kind of experiment was going on throughout Europe and the Americas in anattempt to apply positivist methods to the spiritual realm. Scientists like the Nobel Prizewinner Santiago Ramon y Cajal had participated in Spain, and Millan thought thesessions could explain what was going on at Ezkioga:

Why could this same result not be produced now, having a "double" with the appearanceof a Saint, the Virgin, or a farmer appear in Ezquioga or anywhere else, so that those presentwould see and even hear them?... The Ezquioga events appear to be sessions of lowspiritism.45Interest in the afterlife, sensitives, and astral projection was not unusual for republicans.For instance, El Heraldo de Madrid reported in August 1931, when it was ignoring thevisions at Ezkioga, that a waiter in a Madrid cafe who was a "seer, astrologer, and areader of palms" claimed that his body "doubled" while he was asleep or in trance andtraveled across the world and into the future. Similarly, the republican Voz deGiupuzcoa, which mocked the Ezkioga visions, found a book entitled Revelation of theMystery of the Beyond "impressive" and recommended enthusiastically a "wiseprofessor of occultism and spiritism." The professor, Hadji Agaf, had settled in Irunwhere he received about two hundred letters a day requesting his help in matters of"luck, health, love, business, etc." Even the Voz de Navarra accepted advertisementsfrom a personal magnetist.

Agapito Millan epitomized this cultural experimentation. He was born in 1893 and as achild in the minefields of eastern Bizkaia peddled clothes, made scapulars for sale inreligious fiestas, and cleaned ore. A novel by Tolstoy inspired him at age seventeen tojoin a revolutionary republican party in Bilbao and struggle against "the oppression of

the regime and of the sinister clergy." But he soon turned from violence toward "morehumane and spiritual" pursuits. During World War I he tried to interest the French andBritish embassies in his esoteric powers. He became a vegetarian, a Freemason, and aleader of theosophy. In his travels throughout the north as the salesman of heavymachinery, camomile, and postcards, he handed out broadsides about spiritism andagainst the death penalty and promoted a sideline as professor of occult science whocould find buried treasure, locate lost relatives, give business advice, and avoid theattacks of enemies. In June 1931 he was also a leader of the Radical SocialistRepublican Party in Bilbao.46

In 1934 Spaniards read about the duende of Zaragoza, a female voice that answeredquestions through a stovepipe. From the first days attention centered on a servant girl,Pascuala Alcober, who observers suggested might be a spiritist medium. Both the headof the Zaragoza insane asylum and the son of Ramon y Cajal gave credence to thecapacity of mediums for psychokinesis. For two weeks in late 1934 the press of allstripes, even the Times of London and Fox Movietone News, featured the Zaragozaspirit. Famous psychics visited the site; theosophists went from Madrid and Barcelona;priests sprinkled holy water; the residents of the building went to the shrine of El Pilarto confess, just in case; and a whole busload of observers went from Bilbao. The civilgovernor eventually judged that the servant girl had produced the voice as"unconscious, hysterical ventriloquism." El Pueblo Wasco did not fail to compare theZaragoza duende with the apparitions at Ezkioga. "The spirits in each case take adifferent form and use a different technique. But almost never does it turn out that thespirit exists."47

But just as freethinkers made fun of Catholic apparitions, Catholics mocked theesoterica of the freethinkers. The correspondent of Euzkadi from Orio liked theenthusiasm Ezkioga aroused and contrasted the piety of the Basques with the "dissoluteideas, hatred of the church, impiety, and irreligion" of the Spaniards. The impious, hewrote, "pretend not to believe in God or his church, and at the same time lowerthemselves in their beliefs and practices to the most absurd black magic and the mostextravagant monstrosities and aberrations." Similarly, Rafael Picavea in El PuebloVasco pointed out the inconsistency of an anticlerical who opposed the Ezkioga prayersessions yet attended the spiritist seances of a barber in Irun.48

Both Catholics and spiritists were searching for meaning in death as well as contactwith dead relatives and friends. Both believed in apparitions of the dead and bothadmitted access to higher entities. According to a Spanish Dominican, spiritism waspopular because of "the natural desire to explore the mysteries of the afterlife and tocommunicate with dear ones that death has taken away." The English Jesuit HerbertThurston pointed to the convergences, citing persons who converted to Catholicism afterseances with saints as spirit guides. Spiritist writers held that what passed for seersamong Catholics, including Christ himself, were powerful emissaries who came to helpthe living from the land of the dead. A French spiritist held that Jeanne d'Arc was amedium and a messiah one of thosewho always come at moments or crisis.

The similarity between Catholic and spiritist beliefs meant that spiritism was an easyway either to explain the Ezkioga phenomena or to dismiss them. A priest in ruralCatalonia thought that Salvador Cardus and his wife were spiritists, "very bad people"

who had "magnetized" Anna Pou i Prat. Villagers vandalized their automobile forprovoking the girl's madness. Another priest lumped spiritists and Masons together withEzkioga and Soledad de la Torre as part of a conspiracy. When Padre Burguera wasforced to address the question, he distinguished the willful tapping of the devil's powersin spiritist or Masonic sessions from the almost routine, unbidden tempting of the seersby the devil in the course of their visions. He invited those who believed that Ezkiogawas spiritism to compare the spiritist sessions at the Club Nautico in San Sebastian withan Ezkioga vision.50

The assertion of the Bermeo soul in 1924 that there was no hell points up a basic changein ideas about the other world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century on bothsides of the Atlantic there was a concerted challenge to rigorist notions of a vengefulGod. The spiritists denied that hell existed at all. GenerousCatholic theologians argued that God was merciful and good and sent very few peopleto hell. The Sacred Heart of Jesus itself was at its origin a message that God wasmerciful. Marie Therese Desandais, "Sulamitis," placed mercy and love at the center ofher revelations.51

Liberal commentators reacted sharply to the dire and grim side of the visions atEzkioga. And the people of the Goiherri had radically differing reactions when told bychild seers that so-and-so was in hell or would go there. A split between followers of arelatively severe deity and followers of a relatively benign deity

seems to have run right through Catholic society from top to bottom. A dispositiontoward mercy or justice, generosity or rigor, was probably one of the key ways peoplewere (and are) different from one another. Juan de Olazabal of La Constancia publisheda notorious editorial explaining the disastrous floods of 1934 as God's punishment onfarmers who worked on Sunday. He was a kind of captain of the rigorist side; RafaelPicavea of El Pueblo Vasco could not believe that "his" Virgin would frighten people invisions. He was a leader of the more liberal contingent. Antonio Amundarain was on theformer side, his assistant Miguel Lasa on the latter. Padre Burguera was clearly arigorist, but Raymond de Rigne and Marie-Genevieve Thirouin, who advertised herpoems as "dedicated to all the souls who seek God in love and not in fear," were on thegenerous side.52

A photograph of Agapito Milln Estefania pasted on a souvenir of hisMasonic lecture, "My childhood, my life, my ideal," 1934. CourtesyArchivo Historico Nacional, Guerra Civil, Salamanca