Visionaries: the Spanish Republic and the reign of Christ

Escrito por William A. Christian

Pg.342

(Sobre Agapito Milln)

The first to compare the Ezkioga visions and spiritism in print was Agapito Millan in El
Liberal (Bilbao) in September 1931. After a skeptical account of three seers he had
watched, he set out his own idea of the spirit world. There were, he said, natural or high
apparitions, 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 humans
initiated. The high, natural apparitions, he held, always occurred for a good reason, one
important either for the spirit or the visionary. For the spirit they might serve to attain
liberty, tranquility, or even happiness in the other world. For the living they might serve
as a warning of imminent danger. Here we see congruence between the traditional belief
in the apparitions of the dead and the new beliefs of the spiritists. Millan merely added
to traditional notions the idea that "higher astral bodies" might appear. He claimed that
low, artificial apparitions were provoked by experimenters by means of hypnotism,
magnetism, and somnambulism, who put their subject sensitives to sleep, and once they are
profoundly so, double them and project their "double," or astral body wherever or as far
as they want. In 1918 a good "subject," put to sleep in Bilbao, sent [his or her] double, in a
few instants, to Paris and places on the French front, where it talked with soldiers and was
visible to them.
This kind of experiment was going on throughout Europe and the Americas in an
attempt to apply positivist methods to the spiritual realm. Scientists like the Nobel Prize
winner Santiago Ramon y Cajal had participated in Spain, and Millan thought the
sessions could explain what was going on at Ezkioga:
Why could this same result not be produced now, having a "double" with the appearance
of a Saint, the Virgin, or a farmer appear in Ezquioga or anywhere else, so that those present
would see and even hear them?... The Ezquioga events appear to be sessions of low
spiritism.45
Interest 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 the
visions at Ezkioga, that a waiter in a Madrid cafe who was a "seer, astrologer, and a
reader of palms" claimed that his body "doubled" while he was asleep or in trance and
traveled across the world and into the future. Similarly, the republican Voz de
Giupuzcoa, which mocked the Ezkioga visions, found a book entitled Revelation of the
Mystery of the Beyond "impressive" and recommended enthusiastically a "wise
professor of occultism and spiritism." The professor, Hadji Agaf, had settled in Irun
where 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 advertisements
from a personal magnetist.
Agapito Millan epitomized this cultural experimentation. He was born in 1893 and as a
child in the minefields of eastern Bizkaia peddled clothes, made scapulars for sale in
religious fiestas, and cleaned ore. A novel by Tolstoy inspired him at age seventeen to
join 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 "more
humane and spiritual" pursuits. During World War I he tried to interest the French and
British embassies in his esoteric powers. He became a vegetarian, a Freemason, and a
leader of theosophy. In his travels throughout the north as the salesman of heavy
machinery, camomile, and postcards, he handed out broadsides about spiritism and
against the death penalty and promoted a sideline as professor of occult science who
could find buried treasure, locate lost relatives, give business advice, and avoid the
attacks of enemies. In June 1931 he was also a leader of the Radical Socialist
Republican Party in Bilbao.46
In 1934 Spaniards read about the duende of Zaragoza, a female voice that answered
questions 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 head
of the Zaragoza insane asylum and the son of Ramon y Cajal gave credence to the
capacity of mediums for psychokinesis. For two weeks in late 1934 the press of all
stripes, even the Times of London and Fox Movietone News, featured the Zaragoza
spirit. 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 Pilar
to confess, just in case; and a whole busload of observers went from Bilbao. The civil
governor eventually judged that the servant girl had produced the voice as
"unconscious, hysterical ventriloquism." El Pueblo Wasco did not fail to compare the
Zaragoza duende with the apparitions at Ezkioga. "The spirits in each case take a
different form and use a different technique. But almost never does it turn out that the
spirit exists."47
But just as freethinkers made fun of Catholic apparitions, Catholics mocked the
esoterica of the freethinkers. The correspondent of Euzkadi from Orio liked the
enthusiasm Ezkioga aroused and contrasted the piety of the Basques with the "dissolute
ideas, hatred of the church, impiety, and irreligion" of the Spaniards. The impious, he
wrote, "pretend not to believe in God or his church, and at the same time lower
themselves in their beliefs and practices to the most absurd black magic and the most
extravagant monstrosities and aberrations." Similarly, Rafael Picavea in El Pueblo
Vasco pointed out the inconsistency of an anticlerical who opposed the Ezkioga prayer
sessions yet attended the spiritist seances of a barber in Irun.48
Both Catholics and spiritists were searching for meaning in death as well as contact
with dead relatives and friends. Both believed in apparitions of the dead and both
admitted access to higher entities. According to a Spanish Dominican, spiritism was
popular because of "the natural desire to explore the mysteries of the afterlife and to
communicate with dear ones that death has taken away." The English Jesuit Herbert
Thurston pointed to the convergences, citing persons who converted to Catholicism after
seances with saints as spirit guides. Spiritist writers held that what passed for seers
among Catholics, including Christ himself, were powerful emissaries who came to help
the living from the land of the dead. A French spiritist held that Jeanne d'Arc was a
medium and a messiah one of those
who always come at moments or crisis.
The similarity between Catholic and spiritist beliefs meant that spiritism was an easy
way either to explain the Ezkioga phenomena or to dismiss them. A priest in rural
Catalonia thought that Salvador Cardus and his wife were spiritists, "very bad people"

who had "magnetized" Anna Pou i Prat. Villagers vandalized their automobile for
provoking the girl's madness. Another priest lumped spiritists and Masons together with
Ezkioga and Soledad de la Torre as part of a conspiracy. When Padre Burguera was
forced to address the question, he distinguished the willful tapping of the devil's powers
in spiritist or Masonic sessions from the almost routine, unbidden tempting of the seers
by the devil in the course of their visions. He invited those who believed that Ezkioga
was spiritism to compare the spiritist sessions at the Club Nautico in San Sebastian with
an Ezkioga vision.50
The assertion of the Bermeo soul in 1924 that there was no hell points up a basic change
in ideas about the other world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century on both
sides of the Atlantic there was a concerted challenge to rigorist notions of a vengeful
God. The spiritists denied that hell existed at all. Generous
Catholic theologians argued that God was merciful and good and sent very few people
to hell. The Sacred Heart of Jesus itself was at its origin a message that God was
merciful. Marie Therese Desandais, "Sulamitis," placed mercy and love at the center of
her revelations.51
Liberal commentators reacted sharply to the dire and grim side of the visions at
Ezkioga. And the people of the Goiherri had radically differing reactions when told by
child seers that so-and-so was in hell or would go there. A split between followers of a
relatively severe deity and followers of a relatively benign deity
seems to have run right through Catholic society from top to bottom. A disposition
toward mercy or justice, generosity or rigor, was probably one of the key ways people
were (and are) different from one another. Juan de Olazabal of La Constancia published
a notorious editorial explaining the disastrous floods of 1934 as God's punishment on
farmers who worked on Sunday. He was a kind of captain of the rigorist side; Rafael
Picavea of El Pueblo Vasco could not believe that "his" Virgin would frighten people in
visions. He was a leader of the more liberal contingent. Antonio Amundarain was on the
former side, his assistant Miguel Lasa on the latter. Padre Burguera was clearly a
rigorist, but Raymond de Rigne and Marie-Genevieve Thirouin, who advertised her
poems as "dedicated to all the souls who seek God in love and not in fear," were on the
generous side.52

A photograph of Agapito Milln Estefania pasted on a souvenir of his

Masonic lecture, "My childhood, my life, my ideal," 1934. Courtesy
Archivo Historico Nacional, Guerra Civil, Salamanca