The Science of Miracles

by Joe Nickell

  Alas, there is nothing to credibly connect the Sacro Catino to a first-century grail, and the same may be said of other supposed grail vessels. Indeed, observes Barber (2004, 170), “there is little or no evidence that anyone claimed in the thirteenth century to possess the Grail.” Certainly, claims for all such vessels date from after the period when most of the grail romances were penned: between 1190 and 1240 (Nickell 2007, 60). This realization should put an end to fanciful grail quests, but it probably will not: witness the popularity of such books as The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2003) and the book on which its author drew heavily, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent et al. 1996)—silliness all.

  For centuries the site of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain has been a place of reputed miracles, including revelations and healings. Today, among its visitors are New Agers who consider the cathedral “a reservoir of powerful positive psychic energy,” some even claiming to see apparitions of earlier pilgrims (Hauck 2000).

  On September 6, 1997, I made my own “pilgrimage” to the historic cathedral. I had been attending the Ninth EuroSkeptics Conference in the nearby seaport city of La Coruña (“The Crown”), and the cathedral was the focus of a Saturday's scheduled sightseeing trip—a secular pilgrimage in the company of scientists and other skeptics, including CSICOP's chairman, Paul Kurtz, and Executive Director Barry Karr. Not only did I appreciate the cathedral's Romanesque architecture, but I also began to delve into its history, steeped in centuries-old myths and pious legends.

  LEGENDS OF ST. JAMES

  The cathedral marks the site of the allegedly miraculous discovery of the remains of St. James the Greater, so named to distinguish him from the other apostle of that name. (There were also various other Jameses in the Christian Gospels, including one of Jesus’ brothers [Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55].) James the Greater was a son of Zebedee. Jesus found him and his brother John mending nets by Lake Genesareth also known as the “Sea of Galilee”) and called them to his ministry. (This was just after he had similarly invited Simon and Andrew, promising to make them “fishers of men” [Mark 1:16–20].) In the early history of the church, James was the first disciple to be martyred (Acts 12:1–2). He was executed by King Herod Agrippa I in 44 CE. According to one legend, his accuser repented as the execution was about to occur and was beheaded with him (Jones 1994).

  By the seventh century, another pious legend claimed that James had taken the Gospel to Spain. Subsequently, still another legend told how Herod had forbidden the burial of James's beheaded body, whereupon that night several Christians secretly carried his remains to a ship. “Angels” then conducted the vessel “miraculously” to Spain, and the body was transported to the site of the present-day cathedral.

  The apostle's body lay undiscovered until the early ninth century (about 813 CE). Then, according to still another miracle tale, a pious friar was led to the site by a “star,” in much the same manner as the wise men were supposedly guided to the birthplace of Jesus in the New Testament (Matthew 2:1–12). The supernatural light revealed the burial place. The local bishop accepted the validity of the friar's discovery and had a small basilica built over the supposed saint's sepulcher. It was destroyed a century later in a Muslim raid, but in 1078 work was begun on the present cathedral. It was mostly complete by 1128 (McBirnie 1973; Coulson 1958; El Camino 1990, 2–3, 36–37).

  The alleged discovery came at an opportune time. After the Moors conquered Spain, only its northwest corner remained independent, and it was from there that the drive to reconquer the country for Christendom was launched (“Santiago de Compostela” 1960). The supposedly divine revelation of the relics seemed to endorse the quest, and St. James (Santiago) “became the rallying figure for Christian opposition to the Moors” (Jones 1994). Miracles began to occur at the site, resulting in “an extensive collection of stories” that were “designed to give courage to the warriors” fighting against the Moors. There were even stories of the saint appearing on the battlefield at crucial moments, and he was sometimes known as Santiago Matamoros, that is, “St. James the Moorslayer.” The tales also bolstered the pilgrims who began to wend their way to Compostela (El Camino 1990, 3, 36–37; Cavendish 1989).

  MAGICAL RELICS

  Medieval pilgrims were attracted to holy places, including churches that hosted powerful relics. In Catholicism a relic is an object associated with a saint or martyr (such as a bone or piece of clothing). According to Kenneth L. Woodward's Making Saints (1990), “Just as the soul was totally present in every part of the body, so, it was popularly believed, the spirit of the saint was powerfully present in each relic. Thus, detached from the whole body and separated from the tomb, relics took on magical power of their own.” As well, mere proximity could be enough: “the medieval pilgrim was satisfied if he could but gaze on the tomb of his cult-object” (Pick 1929).

  At the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the relics of St. James now began to work wonders, and various “prodigies, miracles and visions” multiplied there (El Camino 1990, 3). Many made the pilgrimage to Santiago to be healed of an affliction (Gitlitz and Davidson 2000), but perhaps most did so for the experience itself and to be compensated by “indulgences,” remissions of punishment due a sinner (El Camino 1990, 4). “In the Middle Ages,” notes one reference work (Kennedy 1984), “it was possible for the faithful to buy such pardon for their sins, and unscrupulous priests saw the selling of indulgences as an easy way of raising money.” (Abuse of indulgences was among the criticisms that led to the Protestant Reformation.)

  PILGRIMAGES

  There were many roads to Compostela, but one of three major medieval pilgrimage routes remains popular today, inviting not only religious supplicants but also historians, art lovers, adventurers, and others. It is a nearly five-hundred-mile trek called the Santiago de Compostela Camino—or just “Camino” for short (meaning the road or way). Beginning in France, it winds across the Pyrénées, and then traverses northern Spain westward to Santiago (Gitlitz and Davidson 2000; MacLaine 2000).

  Among those who made pilgrimages to Compostela were such historic notables as St. Francis of Assisi and the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. More recently there was Shirley MacLaine. The acclaimed actress—sometimes disparaged as “the archetypal New Age nut case” for her belief in past lives, alternative medicine, and other fringe topics (Neville 2000)—wrote about her experiences along the pilgrims’ way in The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit. Although the book was published in 2000, she actually made the trek in 1994, as shown by her compostelana (pilgrim certificate of Santiago de Compostela) reproduced inside the book's covers.

  The Camino is more than merely a record of MacLaine's inward and outward journeys; it is a veritable catalog of her mystical notions and fantasy experiences. Never religious, she says, she adopts a New Age mantra of “opting instead to seek spirituality.”

  On her trip she soon feels that she is “visited by an angel named Ariel,” who, she writes, “began to talk to me in my head.” Ariel told her to “learn to have pleasure as you experience it.” She reflects on some of her alleged past-life memories or “revisitations” (her past lives included one as a geisha in Japan and others as inhabitants of India and Russia). When she is “not really dreaming” she has an “intensely real” experience in which a monk appears to her, announcing, “I am John the Scot.” She is able to converse with him about the “science” of astrology and about “karma” (supposedly the consequences of a person's deeds that carry over and help shape his or her next reincarnation). They also discuss “ley lines” (imaginary connections between supposed sites of power, such as megaliths, ancient monuments, holy wells, temples, and so on) (Guiley 1991).

  Occasionally, reality intrudes. Once, seeking to relieve herself, she squats over an anthill! Sometimes she is admirably observant:

  In every village I was awed by the opulent richness of the churches, while the poor people who attended them gave every last penny they had to the collection plate. One priest s
old holy candles to the peasants, which they lit, placed on the altar, and prayed over. When they left, the priest put them up for sale again. They had paid for the privilege of praying.

  Midway through her narrative MacLaine pauses to decide “whether to include the ensuing events” that promise to take the reader “off the Camino path and to the edge of reason.” Then she launches into another of her “dream-visions” in which John the Scott guides her on an odyssey to the legendary lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. There she learns that the latter was “an advanced colony of Lemurians” and that they in turn had received input from extraterrestrials who have surveyed Earth for millennia (MacLaine 2000, 187, 213).

  Eventually, she arrives at the cathedral to pay her respects to Santiago de Compostela—Saint James—or, as she describes him, “the saint with no head,” adding, “I felt the same way” (MacLaine 2000, 294). There, in a practice familiar to countless visitors, she climbs the stairs that lead behind a Romanesque painted-stone statue of the seated apostle and, as directed by custom since the seventeenth century (Gitlitz and Davidson 2000, 344), she hugs the effigy (see figure 23.1). She does not mention whether she then descended to the crypt to view the reliquary that supposedly contains the saint's bones, but—after a priest ritualistically bathes her feet—she is soon out of the cathedral and on a flight to Madrid. She reflects on her odyssey of imagination and reality: “Perhaps all of it is simple. We came from the Divine; we create with that imaginative energy until we return to it. Lifetime after lifetime” (MacLaine 2000, 306).

  Although the Camino pilgrimage has declined over the past few centuries, one reviewer predicts MacLaine's book “will change that” (Neville 2000). But even before her visit, pilgrims had begun to multiply, and now, according to The International Directory of Haunted Places (Hauck 2000), New Age visitors to the cathedral consider it “a reservoir of powerful positive psychic energy.” Indeed, “they sense the spiritual energy and devotion to the divine that tens of thousands of pilgrims brought to this site, and sometimes they even report seeing the apparitions of those dedicated souls making their way through the city to the holy shrine.”

  INVESTIGATION

  But are the relics of St. James—the central focus of the shrine and indeed its very raison d’être—genuine? And if they are not, what does that say about all of the reputed miracles there—the alleged revelations, healings, apparitions, and other supernatural and paranormal phenomena?

  Few contemporary historians believe St. James ever visited Spain. According to one guidebook, Roads to Santiago (Nooteboom 1997, 201), “The fiery resplendence of Santiago and all it inspired came about because people believed they had found the grave of the apostle James in that town, events therefore that were set in motion by something that perhaps never took place at all.” One dictionary of saints (Coulson 1958) explains some of the reasons for skepticism:

  Tradition asserts that James brought the gospel to Spain, but because of the early date of his death, this claim is quite untenable. In the Acts of the Apostles it is Paul who is depicted as the pioneer missionary, and James was dead before Paul's activity began…. In fact, the tradition only appears in written form for the first time in the seventh century, arising from a Greek source of doubtful historical credentials, but it was a century later, when a star miraculously revealed what was claimed to be the tomb of James, that popular belief spread. This shrine at Compostella (probably derived from Campus stellae: the field of the star) rivalled Rome as a center of pilgrimage.

  But did the legend of the star give rise to the name Compostela, or was it the other way around? According to an official Spanish government guidebook (El Camino de Santiago 1990, 2), the place chosen to deposit St. James's sarcophagus was “at exactly the spot where a former compostum (cemetery) lay, which in the course of time became Compostela.”1 In fact, excavations beneath the cathedral have yielded “remnants of a pre-Roman necropolis” as well as “remains of a Roman cemetery,” together with “an altar dedicated to Jupiter” (Gitlitz and Davidson 2000, 346, 351). In this light, it seems plausible that Compostela might have derived not from Campus stellae (“star field”) but from Campus stelae (a stele being an inscribed stone), which is to say, “field of monuments” or “gravestone field.” Another possibility is that it is a combined form of compositus (“orderly arrangement”) and stelae (“tombstones”). Even more likely (according to Kevin Christopher, CSICOP's publicity director, who has degrees in classics and linguistics) is the possibility that compostela is simply a diminutive form of compostum.

  If any of these alternate interpretations is correct, it would suggest that a name that originally meant “graveyard” was mistranslated as “star field,” which in turn prompted the little tale purporting to “explain” the name.

  This process—by which a folk etymology apparently leads to the creation of a legend—is well known. One example is the name of a British tribe (Trinovantes), which seems to have been corrupted to Troynovant, or “New Troy,” prompting a legend that remnant Trojans had settled a then-uninhabited Britain (Howatson 1989). Again, the name of a class of “miraculous” Christ portraits, vera iconica, or “true images,” became known as “veronicas”—hence apparently inspiring the legend that a pious woman of that name gave her veil to Jesus to wipe his face as he struggled to his crucifixion (Nickell 1998).

  As we have seen, there were numerous other legends about St. James, as of course there were about other religious figures and subjects. Many factors contributed to the manufacture of saints’ legends. For example, speaking specifically of Santiago, one source observes that “many of the great romances of the middle ages developed from the tales told by the pilgrims to while away the tedium of the long journey to this remote corner of Spain” (“Santiago de Compostela” 1960). A more sinister view of the entire affair regarding St. James and his legends is given by Hauck (2000):

  The discovery of his relics was apparently a hoax perpetrated by the Church to attract pilgrims and take the region back from Arabian settlers [the Moors]. It is known that the Cathedral of Santiago sent hired “storytellers” to spread the news of miracles associated with the relics, and their tactics seem to have worked, for by the twelfth century, this was the most popular pilgrimage site in Europe.

  Of course, discrediting the legend of the relics’ miraculous discovery, and even debunking the alleged missionary work of St. James in Spain, “does not dispose of the claim that the relics at Compostela are his” (Coulson 1958). Yet how likely is it that the apostle's remains would have been arduously transported to northern Spain in the first place, and then have remained unknown until they were allegedly revealed nearly eight centuries later?

  There are additional doubts stemming from the fact that the discovered remains of St. James were accompanied by the skeletons of two others. While that would not be surprising at the site of an ancient cemetery, how would the pious legend makers explain the two extra bodies buried with the apostle? They simply declared them to be the relics of “two of his disciples” (McBirnie 1973, 94).

  Further suspicion about the authenticity of the relics comes from the climate of relic mongering that was prevalent in the Middle Ages. As demand for relics intensified, “a wholesale business in fakes” grew in response (Pick 1929). Alleged relics included the fingers of St. Paul, John the Baptist, and the doubting Thomas. Most prolific were “relics” associated with Jesus himself. No fewer than six churches preserved his foreskin. Other relics included hay from his manger, gifts from the wise men, and vials of Mary's breast milk. From the crucifixion various churches had thorns from the crown of thorns, while the Sainte Chapelle in Paris possessed the entire crown. There were some forty “true” shrouds, including the notorious Shroud of Turin, which appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century as part of a faith-healing scheme (Nickell 1998).

  In the case of St. James, there is even a question about the exact nature of the relics. McBirnie (1973, 106–107), in his The Search for the Twelve Apos
tles, declares as a certainty that James's body was buried in Jerusalem. However, he believes it possible that later “some of the bones of the Apostle, perhaps the body” might have been removed to Spain with the head remaining in Jerusalem. On the other hand, there were alleged portions of the body elsewhere. For example, at Constantinople was enshrined “a silver arm encompassing a relic of St. James the Greater,” which was later (after the capture of Constantinople in 1204) taken to Troyes, France (Gies and Gies 1969). Another relic, the saint's hand, is supposedly preserved at the abbey in Reading, England (Jones 1994). Still another relic is claimed by an Italian cathedral (McBirnie 1973, 96).

  Of course, the relics could have been subdivided, a common medieval practice (McBirnie 1973, 107), but even the presumed link between the relics that were supposedly revealed miraculously in the early ninth century and those enshrined at Compostela today is questionable. Reports Gitlitz and Davidson (2000):

  Actually, Santiago's bones were hidden several times in successive centuries to keep them out of the hands of various threatening parties, such as Drake, who wanted them for England, and various Spanish monarchs, who coveted them for the Escorial. Eventually their exact location was forgotten altogether, although pilgrims continued to venerate an urn on the altar that they believed held the bones. Excavations in 1878–9 unearthed some bones that—when the discoverer went temporarily blind—were held to be those of the Apostle. Six years later Pope Leo XIII issued a bull verifying the validity of the relics, thus—at least officially—ending all controversy.

  In short, there are some bones at Compostela whose provenance cannot credibly be traced to James the Greater. As The Penguin Dictionary of Saints concludes, there is “no evidence whatever as to the identity of the relics discovered in Galicia early in the ninth century and claimed to be those of St. James” (Attwater 1983). But if the relics are bogus, as the evidence strongly indicates, how can we explain the reported supernatural and paranormal events there? Can they actually have naturalistic explanations? Indeed they can. For example, supposedly divine cures may simply be due to the body's own healing ability eventually proving effective, or to an abatement of the illness (known as “spontaneous remission”), or to the effects of suggestion (the well-known placebo effect). A reduction in pain—caused by suggestion or by the physiological effects of excitement—may also give the illusion that a miracle “cure” has taken place (Nickell 1998). (See part 3 of this book.)