Are “Group Hallucinations” Possible? The Case of Mary.

Several people have asked me about my claim that “group hallucinations” are possible – that is, that a
“vision” can be seen by many people at once.  It seems counter-intuitive: aren’t hallucinations by
definition the inner workings of a person’s mind?  How can more than one person have the same
hallucination at the same time?

Well, I’m not sure how that works, psychologically.  My guess is that there is a strong sociological
component as well – i.e., that something weird is seen by a number of people, one of the persons in the
group nterprets it, and the rest agree that Yes, that is indeed what they saw.  But that’s just my guess. 
Maybe some of the trained psychologists on the blog can tell us.

But in any event, it is a well-documented phenomonen.  Here is the query from one of the people who
asked the question, specifically with respect to the modern-day appearances of Jesus’ mother, Mary,
followed by a brief discussion of the phenomenon taken from my book How Jesus Became God.
 

********************************************************************

QUESTION:  Bart, when you refer above to “the hundreds of people who say they have, at one and the
same time, seen the Blessed Virgin Mary” what apparition or apparitions are you referring to? Can you
give some background details please? Thank you!
 

RESPONSE:  Here is a brief discussion taken from my book:

 

The Blessed Virgin Mary

René Laurentin is a modern-day Catholic theologian and expert on modern apparitions, who has written
many books on the topic.[1]  He has a degree in philosophy from the Sarbonne in Paris, and two PhDs, one
in theology and one in literature.  He is not your average intellect.   And he deeply and sincerely believes
that Mary – the mother of Jesus who died 2000 years ago — has appeared to people in the modern world
and that she continues to do so.  Here I give just two examples from his writings.
In Cua, Betania, in Venezuela, a woman named Maria Esperanza Medrano de Bianchin received peculiar
spiritual powers: she could tell the future, levitate, and heal the sick.  The Virgin Mary appeared to her…

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The Virgin Mary appeared to her several times, starting in March 1976.   The most striking occurrence
involved lots of other people, on March 25, 1984.   After the Catholic mass that morning, a number of
people went to enjoy some time outdoors near the local waterfall, when the Virgin Mary appeared above
it.   This began a series of visions.  Mary came and went, often visible for five minutes or so, the last time
for a half an hour.  Among the observers were doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, engineers, and
lawyers.   People over the weeks to come started picnicking there.  At times up to a thousand people
observed Mary there, bathed in light and accompanied by the smell of roses.  This continued until 1988. 
Later a Jesuit priest, Monsignor Pio Ricardo, who was a professor of psychology at the Central University
of Caracas, interviewed 490 people who claimed to have seen Mary there.   They convinced him.

A second example comes from Cairo, Egypt in 1986, at a Coptic church.  Mary had appeared a number of
times between 1983 and 1986.  Once she appeared on the roof, and four Coptic bishops arrived to
authenticate the vision.   They did indeed see her.   At other times she was seen by (non-Christian,
obviously) Muslims.  In some instances she was actually photographed.   Laurentin indicates that he
actually has a photograph of a similar apparition from another Coptic suburb, from 1968.

My point is not that Mary really is appearing in these times and places.  But people deeply believe she is. 
And it is not just illiterate peasants, but highly educated people.   Terrifically anecdotal collections of Mary
visions can be found in numerous books, such as Janice Connell’s Meetings with Mary: Visions of the
Blessed Mother. [2] Connell provides sixteen chapters detailing visions of Mary, from a believers’
 perspective, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as these are documented from Lourdes, Fatima,
Garabandal, Medjogorje, and so on.  There is, for example, the “cosmic miracle of the sun” that took place
at Fatima on October 13, 1917.   We are told the sun was seen to spin wildly and to tumble down to earth
before stopping and returning to its normal position, radiating indescribably beautiful colors.   The miracle
was seen and attested to by over 50,000 people.
Do such miracles happen?   Believers say yes, unbelievers say no.  But it is striking and worth noting that
typically believers in one religious tradition often insist on the “evidence” for the miracles that support
their views and completely discount the “evidence” for miracles attested in some other religious tradition,
even though, at the end of the day, it is the same kind of evidence (for example, eyewitness testimony) and
may be of even greater abundance.   Protestant apologists interested in “proving” that Jesus was raised
from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted
Blessed Virgin Mary.
 

[1] See, for example, René Laurentin, The Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary Today(Dublin: Veritas,
1990; French original 1988).   The examples that I give below are all drawn from this book.
 

[2] New York: Ballantine Books, 1995.

inShare

On the Accuracy of Oral Traditions

Upcoming Debate!

9
FEB
2016
37
Comments
 37  Comments
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1.
gdb620  February 9, 2016
Mentalist “The Amazing Kreskin” did not believe in hypnosis, but he often demonstrated what he
called “the power of mass suggestion.” I remember him convincing a dozen or so volunteers from
his TV audience that they had seen a UFO. Their excitement as they described their visions
seemed genuine. Kreskin also cited mass suggestion as a possible reason several people
became ill on two occasions within four days, at the courthouse in Monmouth County, New
Jersey in June, 2012. The courthouse was closed for a week, but no physical cause for the
illness was ever found.

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2.
thelad2  February 9, 2016
 Good morning, Bart. For a fascinating account of group hallucinations, read Stacy Schiff’s new
book, “The Witches – Salem, 1692.” A massively researched work detailing the infamous Salem
Witch Trials. The well chronicled inquiries and witch trials are full of eye witness accounts from
the locals, many well educated, as to the witchcraft they experienced first hand and to their
experience of the witches responsible.

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3.
Alfred  February 9, 2016
I think it is important to distinguish between what people say they are experiencing ‘now’ and
what they say they remember later. There may be two different processes at work.

And in the biblical accounts, we don’t know that anyone actually reported their experiences ‘at
the time’. Just that so,some said they did.

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4.
stokerslodge  February 9, 2016
Thank you, Bart. Maybe you can enlighten me on the following: is it the consensus view among
the experts that all of the apparitions referred to above were nothing more than hallucinations?
Or are there other equally qualified people who arrived at a different conclusion?

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o
Bart  February 10, 2016
The scholar I cite in the post thinks they are real.

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5.
Searching_For_Truth  February 9, 2016
Here are some other interesting group hallucinations (or miracles if you’re a believer):

Three early leaders of the Mormon church claimed that they saw an angel come down from
heaven and present a book of gold plates to them (the golden plates Joseph Smith claimed to
have translated the Book of Mormon from). The Mormon church relies heavily on this miracle as
 evidence that the Book of Mormon is true. It’s printed in the front of every Book of Mormon.
(https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/three?lang=eng)
Another example is from a Mormon break off religion called the True and Living Church of Jesus
Christ of Saints of the Last Days. Here’s an excerpt about a vision by two people:

“I had my head bowed, and my eyes were closed. And when I opened my eyes and was
wondering why he was pausing. And then I closed my eyes again and I saw three men walk
through the wall. It was Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball who came
through the veil. And they placed their hands upon my head and revealed many things
concerning my life and my [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to certain things upon this earth that I should do.
And I could see the vision as he spoke. I could see it, and Jim described what he saw, what we
both saw in vision.” (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/21/transcript)
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6.
godspell  February 9, 2016
Happens without any religious basis to it, of course.

The Great Fear of 1789, in revolutionary-era France. With the breakdown of the social order,
paranoia reigned–rumors spread through the countryside that bands of brigands or foreign
soldiers were burning, looting, raping–people would swear that they heard the brigands
approaching, could even see them, and they reacted by running away, or sometimes attacking
the local manor house to get weapons, food, etc.

Just before WWI began, there were rumors that the Germans were sending zeppelins to attack
Britain, and people kept reporting them overhead, even though there clearly were no zeppelins.

UFO’s, reports of aliens, Bigfoot. And of course, Slender Man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man
And that began with the originator of the myth admitting upfront that he was just making it up as
an experiment.

Human minds can be highly suggestible, and this seems to be equally true when no conventional
religious idea is behind it.

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7.
WimV  February 9, 2016
All sorts of things are going on in such mass hallucination situations: people are often being
primed by another person (like a leader), by each other and/or by their surroundings, witness
contamination occurs during and after the event, people passionately want to be part of the
group that sees something and don’t want to look less “chosen” than people who claim to see
 something, etc. A couple of years ago I had a look at the alleged “Marian apparition” at a Coptic
church in Warraq, Egypt, because there is a fair amount of footage that exists of it.I did a video
on it showing the most likely explanation (http://youtu.be/rFZfWWeAGiM): church lights being
turned on in the middle of the night captured with (back then) low-resolution cell phone cameras.
The low-res, overexposed footage was sent around to people because the church lights in the
tower kind of looked like a figure (i.e. pareidolia), and that seems to have gotten the ball rolling.
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8.
fishician  February 9, 2016
I’m sure some of this is the “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon. “I saw it, didn’t you?!” “Well
sure, I saw it too!” No true believer wants to admit they didn’t see the miracle, lest they lose face
with their fellow believers.

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9.
Stephen  February 9, 2016
Actually the more you examine these incidents the more ephemeral they become. Of the three
children at Fatima only one claimed to have actually seen Mary. At the “cosmic miracle of the
sun” incident witnesses reported seeing different things and many reported seeing nothing at all.
And it’s interesting how in the retelling the size of the crowd kept getting bigger and bigger.

Allow me to recommend the late great Oliver Sack’s wonderful book HALLUCINATIONS from
2013. From the blurb:

“To many people, hallucinations imply madness, but in fact they are a common part of the human
experience. These sensory distortions range from the shimmering zigzags of a visual migraine to
powerful visions brought on by fever, injuries, drugs, sensory deprivation, exhaustion, or even
grief. Hallucinations doubtless lie behind many mythological traditions, literary inventions, and
religious epiphanies. Drawing on his own experiences, a wealth of clinical cases from among his
patients, and famous historical examples ranging from Dostoevsky to Lewis Carroll, the
legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks investigates the mystery of these sensory deceptions: what
they say about the working of our brains, how they have influenced our folklore and culture, and
why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.”

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o
Bart  February 10, 2016
Yup, great book!
 reply

o
Pattycake1974  February 10, 2016
Interesting. I may read it.

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10.
christophe  February 9, 2016
Dr Ehrman, do you know some examples of “group hallucinations” in non-christian religions ? For
some reason I have never heard of this kind of things outside Christianity.

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o
Bart  February 10, 2016
I”m afraid I’ve never looked into it!

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o
talmoore  February 10, 2016
Devotees of the late Hindu Guru Sathya Sai Baba claim to see mass manifestations of
him regularly.

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o
flshrP  February 11, 2016
Sam Harris frequently mentions the contemporary India mystic, faith healer and miracle
worker Sathya Sai Baba who performs “miracles” similar to the ones attributed to Jesus
in the NT. See this video for more info

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqjB31xiE9k
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11.
Lawyerskeptic  February 9, 2016
If you search “our lady of zeitoun” on YouTube, you’ll see several videos showing pictures of the
alleged Virgin Mary appearances. They are nothing but an oblong blob of light. If the same thing
appeared at a UFO convention, people would see aliens.
“Hallucination” does not seem to be the right name for this phenomenon. Michael Shermer uses
the term “patternicity” for our tendency to see patterns that are not really there.

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12.
dragonfly  February 10, 2016
What does Mary look like? How do they know it’s her?

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o
Bart  February 10, 2016
It’s a miracle!

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13.
RonaldTaska  February 10, 2016
Before I retired, I practiced psychiatry for 4 decades. During that time, I worked primarily with
psychotic patients and saw hundreds of patients who were having hallucinations, mostly auditory
hallucinations. Visual hallucinations are usually associated with drug abuse. During that time, I
never saw a group having the same hallucination. Hence, I was skeptical about such reports, but
the examples I read in your book are fairly convincing that people actually report such group
hallucinations, especially about Mary. I have no clue about how to understand these phenomena
except people see what they want to see. I have certainly seen groups of people believe all sorts
of weird stuff as part of their subculture. I guess I would call it “indoctrination.”

This reminds me of a past article in National Geographic about a group in Indonesia who used
monkeys in their worship and refused to stop doing this even when the scientific evidence was
clear that the monkeys were spreading a possibly fatal disease among the members of the
congregation.
 I also once saw a psychotic patient who plucked out his eye as the Bible directs. It was pretty
gross and upsetting. .

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o
Bart  February 10, 2016
Ugh. Sounds gruesome…

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o
Pattycake1974  February 10, 2016
I teach in a residential facility where hallucinations are common. Most are auditory as
you stated, and I’ve never seen a shared hallucination.
Speaking of taking the bible literally, my husband who is a paramedic was called to the
scene of a similar situation. He cheated on his wife, so you can guess what he cut off.
Unfortunately, he died.

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14.
Pattycake1974  February 10, 2016
I’d like to know if any atheists shared in these mass visions. I just haven’t found a satisfactory
answer to these types of experiences. I don’t see how it’s possible that people could see the
same thing at the same time if something wasn’t actually there.
Anthony Sukto was 8 years old when he was stabbed by his father. His mother was attacked as
well but didn’t survive. After his father left the house, Anthony said he saw three angels that
helped him survive the ordeal. They lifted him to the phone and helped him call 911. The angels
told him to play dead when his father returned to the house. He was a guest on Oprah several
years back. He’s 18 now and maintains that he did see angels but hasn’t seen any since that
time.

You could say that his brain was helping him cope with the situation, but how do we know that for
sure?

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o
 Bart  February 10, 2016
Yup — no way to know!

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o
Kent  February 14, 2016
I think that there is a large difference between a multitude ‘experiencing ‘ a thing
simultaneously and a multitude ‘recalling or reporting’ a given event.
We have lots of reports of evidence but very little actual evidence.

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15.
flshrP  February 11, 2016
Coincidentally, the PBS “NOVA” program last night (10 Feb 2016) aired an episode entitled
“Memory Hackers” (season 43, episode 6).
An hour of up-to-date info on memory research by neuroscientists in the U.S. and Europe.
I was really interested in the second half hour wherein research on memory reconsolidation and
on implanting false memories is discussed. Appeared to me to be very relevant to the topics
discussed in this thread.

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16.
TubaMike  February 12, 2016
I would imagine, if we were able to record such things, that we would have more than 50,000
people that could attest to not seeing anything (using the “cosmic miracle of the sun” as en
example). In fact, I would guess that the number of those seeing nothing would far outweigh the
number of those who do see these “miracles” in all of these instances.

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17.
Rick  February 12, 2016
Professor, rereading from How Jesus became God I again triggered a question that has nagged.
In discussing apostle’s visions of Jesus you said ” Paul too explicitly states that he had a vision of
Jesus, and I think we can take him at his word that he believes Jesus appeared to him.” And my
question is why take him at his word? And I say that because I’ve often wondered if Paul was not
 seeking respect as a leader in a group and switched groups to advance quickly. Paul to himself:
“Here I am dragging my tired backside down this hot dirty road to Damascus to whip Christians
for old Gamliel’s henchmen and for what – so I can wait 30 years for them to die off to take their
place? You know this Christian thing…. might work a lot sooner – and all I have to do is say I
saw him! Old Cephas he can’t say I didn’t or the others will say he didn’t either!

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o
Bart  February 13, 2016
I suppose historians think he is not fabricating the story because it did not provide any
real gain to him — other than beatings, floggings, being stoned, imprisoned, and
eventually executed; so it’s not like an evangelist who propounds a view because he
makes millions out of it. And in Paul’s case there doesn’t seem to be anything in his
writings to make you doubt his deep sincerity. He may have been mistaken but he
probalby wasn’t lying.

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
VirtualAlex  February 17, 2016
But he didn’t really have a vision of Jesus. He saw a light and heard a voice
(sometimes attributed to epilepsy?). He concluded afterwards that it was a divine
experience perhaps to get in good with the apostles, whose experiences appear to
have been quite different (seeing a man, talking/eating with him).

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18.
Monty  February 20, 2016
I have sometimes thought that had Paul not had that vision, Christianity would not exist as we
know it. There is a good chance, I think, that it would have continued to exist, mainly because
ideas die hard, but I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t be very different, possibly considered an
obscure sect of Judaism. There wouldn’t have been the Galatians argument with the Jerusalem
apostles about circumcision, and perhaps gentile Christians would simply be circumcised
converts to this Jewish sect. And finally, had Christianity not spread like it did thanks to Paul,
what impact would that have had upon Islam? When you think about it from a historical
perspective, the world as we know it would not exist were it not for that vision, hallucination or
not.

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19.
Jana  February 24, 2016
In Tibetan Buddhism as well as Kundalini Yoga which are both my long time practices (over 35
years) a range of phenomena including visions is part of the territory for advanced practitioners.
Having said that, I’ve recently started investigating what’s called “swarm mentality” which occurs
in the natural world frankly prompted by watching a lot of Sir David Attenborough nature videos.
I’m wondering without coming to any conclusion if a similar pattern if not phenomena … “swarm
mentality” exists among groups of people (dare I use the word cults?). Definitely need to study
more about this including mass hypnosis.

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20.
Jana  February 24, 2016

Playing Daniel’s Websters Advocate playfully   you wrote above “My point is not that
Mary really is appearing in these times and places. But people deeply believe she is.” Why
couldn’t the event have been fact?

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o
Bart  February 25, 2016
I’m neither confirming nor denying it; I’m simply saying that conservative evangelical
Christians who claim that group hallucinations are impossible do NOT think that Mary
really appears — and so by definition they DO think that group hallucinations are
possible.

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
Jana  February 25, 2016
Thank you for the clarification. I understand better the dual thinking.

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21.
PeloniAlmoni  February 26, 2016
There are also examples where an individual’s vision report has probably later become reported
as a vision shared by a group of people. This has direct application, of course, to the New
Testament’s literary accounts of appearances to various groups of people at a single time. The
online article here http://tinyurl.com/jhhf6ya provides four examples:
1. Ashurbanipal’s vision of the Goddess Ishtar/Astartes, reported as seen by his whole army;
2. Constantine’s vision seen only by himself (Lactantius) or by his whole army (Eusebius);
3. Alexander’s dream-vision about the siege of Tyre, also had by many Tyrians (per Plutarch);
4. A ghostly vision probably originating with one townsperson, reported as shared by all the
townspeople (Sefer Chasidim).
While it is possible in each case that the underlying ‘experience’ (if any) might have been
‘shared’, I agree that the claim of a mass vision in each case looks like a development in the
reporting of what was originally an individual vision. In either case, the reporting of a mass vision
is a quite understandable development on naturalistic grounds.

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22.
Como  March 20, 2016
A similar event occurred in Lubbock, TX when I lived there in 1988. From the article:

“Then, in the middle of mass, and shortly before dusk, the sun broke dramatically through a
gathering curtain of clouds. Shrieks went up from the lawn, and many of those assembled cried,
prayed and pointed toward the sky. Some said they saw Jesus in the heavens, some saw the
Virgin Mary, some saw the gates of heaven. Others, including a number of priests, stood by,
craning their necks but seeing nothing unusual at all.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/17/us/lubbock-journal-reports-of-miracles-draw-throngs.html
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-10/news/mn-1686_1_virgin-mary-crucifix-guide-dog
http://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/08/15/Between-10000-and-15000-pilgrims-cried-pointed-to-
the/2066587620800/
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/081008/loc_316883103.shtml#.Vu8HD_lVikq
http://lubbockonline.com/life/2013-08-11/westbrook-st-john-neumann-chalked-record-
attendance-25-years-ago#.Vu8Hi_lVikp
http://lubbockonline.com/slideshow/2013-08-08/1988-feast-assumption#slide-1