CHAPTER 9

Ritual Creativity and Ritual Failure

in Popular Spanish Catholicism: A Case
Study on Reformism and Miracles in La
Mancha

Monica Cornejo

INTRODUCTION
This chapter will focus on a case of religious popular creativity through
the analysis of an episode of Marian visions in Spain, paying special
attention to the failure of syncretistic strategies of ritual innovation.
Syncretism has not always been seen as a coherent pattern or a happy
result, especially by religious stakeholders (Van der Veer 2005: 185)
although scholars are much more likely to criticise religious purity and
orthodoxy in order to disclose the historical origins and political interests
behind essentialism and tradition as social constructions. The outcome
of that criticism is a strong emphasis on successful mixtures and hybrids.
From the wide literature on syncretism and similar topics in Latin
America, Garcia Canclini (2003: 4), Cornejo Polar (2002) or Chanady
(1999) recognised that the failed cases lacked attention, obscuring the

M. Cornejo ( )
Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

© The Author(s) 2017 201

S. Palmisano and N. Pannofino (eds.), Invention of Tradition and
Syncretism in Contemporary Religions, Palgrave Studies in New Religions
and Alternative Spiritualities, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61097-9_9
202 M. CORNEJO

conflicts behind the creative processes and, in particular, the social ine-
qualities behind the public recognition of a syncretistic product. Their
criticism anticipates the radical insight of Monika Reuters (2015: 14):
“there simply is no creativity unless a group of influential people agrees
that it is”. In this vein, this chapter seeks to fill this analytical gap by
assuming creativity and syncretism as a sociocultural phenomenon, which
requires the understanding of failed episodes with special attention being
paid both to the social dimension and the cultural logic. But, what can
we consider as a sociocultural “failure”?
From a theoretical point of view, and considering that ritual practices
are admittedly a sort of symbolic behaviour, we suggest treating failure
in the same way that John Austin treats infelicities in speech acts: “cases
in which something goes wrong”, thereby making the occurrence “not
indeed false but in general unhappy” (Austin 1978: 14). From an empiri-
cal point of view, we can also consider our case as failed because the ritu-
als and practices involved are not celebrated anymore. A third perspective
of religious failures, in our case, introduces a sociopolitical dimension
related to the Church’s routine of refusing the visionaries, the visions,
the messages and the ritual proposals based on spontaneous and popular
revelations (Maunder 1991). Despite this obstacle, the number and vari-
ety of apparitions in Christendom is endless and huge, even if they usu-
ally remain unreported, as William Christian has pointed out (Christian
2009: 153). With this in mind, our case is introduced here as a repre-
sentative example of the myriad of little failed cases beneath the surface
of the Marian Catholic cult.
Choosing an unknown case (without impact on the press and finally
ruined) raises a methodological challenge in order to justify its relevance.
Briefly, our case introduces the failed ritual innovations derived from
several revelations of the Virgin Mary to a young man in his twenties
(José, fictional name), which are events that took place between 1994
and 2002 in Noblejas (a town with around 3000 inhabitants in La
Mancha, Spain). Referring our case to a wider framework would be opti-
mal but, sadly, there is no systematic nor statistical data available about
local Marian visions in Spain or in the rest of Europe, especially if they
are “non-events” (Christian 2011: 288), that is, episodes censored by
the Church and never sought out by the press. Still, there are four sali-
ent cases, none of them admitted by the Church, but well covered by
the press and crowded of pilgrims (including international adherents):
Ezkioga (1931), Garabandal (1961), Palmar de Troya (1968) and El
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 203

Escorial (1980). Beyond these major cases, the larger amount of com-
parative information that we have about these kinds of episode comes
from the works of William Christian (1984, 1989, 1992, 1996, 2009,
2011) in the case of Spain as a whole, and Josefina Roma in the case
of Catalonia (Roma 1989, 1993, 1995, 2002, 2011). According to
Christian, the access to the information usually comes from casual con-
versations, which occasionally reveal a story from the past (Christian
2009: 156). Besides, many visionaries deliberately try to hide themselves
from the public, afraid of being censured (by the Church) or laughed
at (by the press and public opinion), which was the case for José from
La Mancha. In this sense, choosing this case is a matter of opportunity,
an unexpected finding during my fieldwork, although it presents enough
common characteristics with other salient cases to consider it as a signifi-
cant sample. These characteristics include the Marian vision itself, a mes-
sage to a broader community, the formation of a group of devotees, the
(unsuccessful) pursuit of Church approval, the (fruitless) contacts with
the press, and ritual activity for a period of several years.
How we notice Marian visions and local cults in Spain also applies to
broader theoretical topics, such as ritual creativity. There is no inven-
tory of contemporary ritual innovations at the local level to which we
can refer a singular case in order to study its implications. However, for
the general topic of ritual change, we can refer to some background
related to the implementation of the largest reform of the Catholic cult
after the Second Vatican Council. In Spain, under the fascist dictator-
ship that lasted until 1975, the conciliar reforms were received with
ambiguity (Payne 1984: 194–199). According the work of Roma (1989:
518), this particular period in time was fruitful in terms of visions and
messages in Catalonia as a conservative reaction to the new reforms. In
Andalusia, a group of visionaries founded the schism of El Palmar de
Troya (better known as the Palmarian Catholic Church), as a rejection
to the reforms along the theological lines of Marcel Lefevre. In the town
in our case study, Noblejas, there are no reports of visions but there were
episodes of local contestations (Cornejo 2008: 87) similar to those nar-
rated by Stanley Brandes (1976) or Ruth Behar (1990) in other Spanish
rural contexts.1 The ritual reforms, as well as the doctrinal innovations,
were received in rural Spain as “a strange kind of heresy, uttered by the
Church itself” (Behar 1990: 103), which was followed by anger against
the priests and a tough disposition to disobey and resist by doing the
things as they had always been done. Of course, the conciliar reform
204 M. CORNEJO

eventually succeeded, but this background allows us to see that ritual

innovations bring about serious conflicts in a Catholic context (even if
they come from authorised sources) and that these conservative trends
are a fertile ground for failing creativity.
This conservative inclination about rituals and doctrines in the past
contrasts with the rapid change that Spain enjoyed after the dictatorship,
when progressive ideas and liberal attitudes spread as quickly as democ-
racy and economic development. We can appreciate the change in values
considering the big ideological gap between Catholics and the Church
on typical moral issues about sexual and reproductive rights (premarital
sex, contraceptives, divorce, abortion and homosexuality, Bericat 2015:
1401; CIS 2015a). For instance, Spanish Catholics widely accept a key
doctrinal topic, such as same-sex marriage (69% of Catholics accord-
ing Assiego 2015), despite the Spanish Episcopal Conference being
one of the most belligerent against liberal family values (Pichardo and
Cornejo 2015). As Christopher Maunder has pointed out (Maunder
2016: 3), contexts of moral liberalism and changes in values are a com-
mon background to the most well-known episodes of Marian visions
too, especially those with a political message, such as Fatima (1917)
or Medjugorje (1981), as well as the salient Spanish cases mentioned
above (whose messages demanded the renunciation of communism
and the liberal trends of secularism). In the context of the town in La
Mancha being analysed, political and economic changes were even more
radical compared to those on the national scale. Since 1983, when the
Socialist Party took over the local government, Noblejas abandoned its
rural economy and became a regional pole of industry and employment,
improving the family budget, increasing population, changing the urban
landscape and synchronising the town with global trends. Then, after
11 years of rapid changes, the Virgin Mary came to the town to read-
dress the situation.
The aim of this chapter is to analyse the aforementioned case study in
order to discuss how sacred creativity derails and how it can enlighten
our knowledge about religious innovation processes in general. For that,
some considerations about the discussions in which we can understand
religious failure will be explored, starting with the concept of syncre-
tism itself, as a notion akin to so-called “popular religion”. Second, the
case of José’s visions will be explored and discussed, examining the fac-
tors involved in the whole episode and their implications. Finally, we will
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 205

summarise those questions that the study of failed cases answers about
sacred creativity as a sociocultural phenomenon.

SYNCRETISM AND FAILURE AS POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR

IN THE RELIGIOUS FIELD

This chapter started by stating that syncretistic practices are not so wel-
come by religious actors as by scholars of religion. In considering our
case, however, perhaps we should also ask whether syncretism is an accu-
rate concept to understand ritual innovation inside Catholicism. Jacques
H. Kamstra coined the expression “syncretism from within” in order to
describe “the result of alienation in an existing religion” (quoted in Pye
2013: 256) in which some kind of “parallel hermeneutical activity” (Pye
2013: 256) would be present. This insight inherits a theological point
of view that a-critically accepts an orthodoxy, a unique legitimate doc-
trine or worship, against “parallel” and heterodox beliefs and practices.
At first sight, this would be an acceptable frame to analyse Catholic devi-
ances, since we can refer our analysis to a unique authorised source, the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However, considering that
the main treatment of “syncretism” by contemporary scholars in Spain
is especially focused on saints and the Marian cult, it would be distorting
to assume that the cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary is just an aliena-
tion inside Catholicism, since it has been historically and theologically
considered (even defended) as a very important sign of Catholic iden-
tity in the general framework of Christianity. Hence, even if Kamstra’s
expression would be improved by reconsidering the inner diversity in
religions as a positive fact (beyond its theological basis), it connotes
inner diversity better than the usual definitions of syncretism as synthe-
sis, amalgamation, assimilation or symbiosis among different traditions
or “from without” (Stewart and Shaw 2005; Pye 2013; Greenfield and
Droogers 2001).
The positive consideration of inner diversity in Spanish Catholicism in
recent times comes from the 1970s, when two ideological movements
(both present in other Catholic countries) converged: namely, the open-
ness toward local expressions of religiosity derived from the Second
Vatican Council and the rise of “the popular” as a political and analyti-
cal category. However, this openness was not immediately followed by
the use of “syncretism” as a hermeneutical tool to understand Catholic
206 M. CORNEJO

practices in Spain. It required mediation. Until that moment, the con-

cept was widely understood as a Christianisation issue, frequently used by
Spanish scholars in Latin America, but also used by archaeologists on the
Iberian Peninsula (referring to the processes of Christianisation). Beyond
that sense, syntheses or amalgamations were considered at best supersti-
tion and illiteracy; at worst, they were heresies and witchcraft. The medi-
ation would come from the Latin American literature on the topic.
According to Pye, the most significant body of literature on syncre-
tism comes from Latin America and the Caribbean (Pye 2013: 265)
and this corpus has had the most relevant influence on Spanish schol-
ars. Around the 1970s, and under this influence, the old concept of
syncretism merged with the fashionable notion of “popular culture”,
giving birth to categories such as “popular religion” and “popular
Catholicism”, which also combined with sociopolitical identities, such
as “peasants” and “workers”. This fusion gave a new political denota-
tion to the concept, in positive terms, by which the popular masses were
empowered against the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. From
the Latin American experience, Manuel Marzal tried to define it as “pat-
terns of motivating religious symbols, elaborated and reinterpreted by
popular sections of society, who appropriate the technical and official
doctrines and formulas for themselves in order to give meaning to reli-
gious behavior” (Marzal 1975: 78). In the same line that Peter van der
Veer’s observation regarding Asian studies (Van der Veer 2005), Maria
Isaura Pereira also said that syncretism in Latin America (and conse-
quently in Spain) has been recognised as a religious way to express (or
a religious arena to fight for) the dispute among different social groups
(Pereira 1968). Hence, his change of meaning allowed the application of
“syncretism” to the Spanish cases, especially to saints and the Marian cult
(Álvarez Santaló et al. 1989).
Considering the political argument as well as the notion of “syncre-
tism from within”, we can accept that syncretism could be an accurate
concept to address ritual innovation in Spain, and we can improve the
argument exploring other concepts related to cultural creativity such as
bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966) or ethnomimesis (Cantwell 1993). The
metaphor of the bricoleur in Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind
has already shown its benefits in understanding syncretism (Steward
and Shaw 2005: 9). That said, let us highlight why it would be espe-
cially useful to analyse our case. First, the metaphor facilitates the analy-
sis of change and innovation “from within” a culture, emphasising the
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 207

“pre-constrained” nature of the resources in use and the nature of the

creative individual as a collector of pre-made messages. In the words of
Levi-Strauss, “The elements which the bricoleur collects and uses are
‘pre-constrained’ like the constitutive units of myth, the possible combi-
nations of which are restricted by the fact that they are drawn from the
language where they already possess a sense which sets a limit on their
freedom of maneuver” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19). Second, despite other
forms of innovation or creativity in culture (arts, science), the bricoleur
is a conservative cultural force of change, who remains within the lim-
its of his own beliefs and values, blending each piece and its particular
history to his understanding of what is needed (Levi-Strauss 1966: 20).
Furthermore, the metaphor also provides a good balance between the
individual and the collective dimensions of the creative process. If reli-
gious innovation can be led by a singular visionary, the ingredients of the
recipe are taken from a collective repertoire and usually offered to a col-
lective audience, a devoted or a critical audience (or even an indifferent
public), who will judge the result by contributing to the creative process
and participating in the destiny of the innovation. In this sense, Lévi-
Strauss offered a complementary metaphor to illuminate this process:
the myth as an orchestral score (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 213). For our topic,
ritual reform emerges as a new religious score that society must interpret.
The visionary arranges different melodic lines, which his followers have
gathered together, like an orchestra, and the audience judges whether or
not the resulting harmony is satisfying.
Considering this ritual score as a syncretistic practice, religious brico-
leurs take and arrange pre-made elements of the ritual repertoire of the
culture in a way that is reminiscent of what Robert Cantwell has called
ethnomimesis. This concept reinforces the idea of “syncretism from
within” and is defined as “that unconscious mimicry through which we
take the deposits of a particular influence, tradition, or culture to our-
selves and by which others recognize them in us” (Cantwell 1993: 5).
This recognition is particularly relevant for those religious reform-
ers interested in legitimating their creativity as an expression of a larger
tradition, which used to be the case in Catholicism. The concept also
supports the idea of syncretism as a conservative cultural force, which
reproduces folklore and ethnic issues:

Imitation, then, is that power by which, in different times and places, we

take on and, consciously or unconsciously, perpetuate not only the habits,
208 M. CORNEJO

behavior, speech, ideas, and feelings of people close to us, but also the
character of what is perceptibly around us: smokestacks and locomotives in
one period; automobiles and airplanes in another; fantasies and spectres in
another. (Cantwell 1993: 5)

Moreover, Cantwell had in mind the acting of this culture in the form
of rituals and festivals as the main tool by which societies express their
ethos as folklore: “As ethnomimesis belongs to our corporal and spiritual
endowment, I tend to identify it not only with folk culture … but also
with festivity” (Cantwell 1993: 7).
Whether or not these two perspectives are essentially political, both
are helpful in illuminating the sociopolitical dimension of syncre-
tism because of their balance between the individual and the collective
dimensions in the creative process. However, the political perspective
on Spanish “syncretism from within” also requires a supplementary
consideration about what type of syncretism is legitimate and accepted,
and what is not. In this regard, syncretism and innovations constitute
an occasion to appreciate the constant and underlying fight for defin-
ing religion, in the same line that Pierre Bourdieu highlighted his popu-
lar concept “religious field” (Bourdieu 1971). According to Bourdieu,
the religious field is the space in which the agents (priests, prophets,
sorcerers or visionaries) fight to impose a legitimate definition of “the
religious” (Bourdieu 2000: 102) and a legitimate way of worship as a
consequence. Thus, the religious field can be a concrete space like a
city or an abstract space like Catholicism; it may or may not be plural
(with several denominations or confessions). The point is that, inside this
religious field, each singular episode of Marian visions (and innovation
in general) starts the machinery of legitimation and the defence of the
hegemony, struggling for what society believes or does not believe reli-
gious beliefs and practices to be.
This agonistic point of view enriches the metaphor of the bricoleur
and the orchestra, as well as the concept of ethnomimesis, by develop-
ing the social dimension of syncretism and emphasising the role of the
political conflict that underlies the cases. Nevertheless, the possibility of
religious failure (as a result of bad harmony in the composition or as a
result of defeat in the fight for definitions) has only been pointed out,
rather than properly developed. As we said in the beginning, our con-
ception of failure here comes from John Austin’s theory of infelicities in
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 209

speech acts, but how could the linguistic approach be compatible with
our political emphasis on ritual syncretism?
Austin remarked several times that the variety of “acts” on which the
notion of infelicity applies is as wide as human culture can be, although
any kind of act that has to do with infelicities is ritual by nature:
“Infelicity is an ill of which all acts are heir which have the general char-
acter of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts” (Austin et al. 1978:
18). Indeed, “I claimed that I applied to all ceremonial acts, nor merely
verbal ones” (Austin et al. 1978: 25). By introducing the relevance of
conventionalism in communicative acts, Austin also allows us to think
of infelicities as social behaviour, and not merely verbal behaviour. From
here, we only have to read his rules in a sociopolitical way.
As is well known, Austin’s theory proposed three pairs of rules by
which utterances must strike to perform happily (Austin et al. 1978:
14–15). The first pair refers to the need for the legitimation of all the
elements involved in the utterance, including those participating, who
must be the right people in the right circumstances, or the procedure
will fail. Of course, the definition of what or whom is proper, or oth-
erwise, does not come from a linguistic dimension, but from the social
structure that a cultural tradition considers to be correct, or even true.
In this sense, failure would consist of the lack of a legitimate social role
in the performance of a conventional act. A second pair of rules refers to
the formal aspects of the performance: it must be executed completely
and correctly by each participant. Accordingly, failure could consist of a
formal default regarding the precise and overall protocol of the execu-
tion. Finally, the third pair of rules is of particular interest to religious
matters, since these rules claim coherence between consciousness and
external behaviour, which both mean to “believe” in a religious sense.
Considering this, failure would be overcome when there is an inconsist-
ent relationship between the feelings or beliefs of the participants and the
values and procedures performed. Hence, the first and the third pairs of
rules are certainly social rules focused on the authority of the visionaries
and their followers as religious agents on the one hand, and the reliability
of the visionaries regarding their true feelings and their real experiences
on the other hand. Surprisingly, the linguistic rules of utterance have
become a matter of legitimation and honesty, which are two frequent
topics that are discussed when new revelations happen.
210 M. CORNEJO

THE RISE AND FALL OF JOSÉ’S REFORMATION OF MARIAN CULT

In order to explore the mechanism of failure in syncretistic strategies of
innovation, the focus should now be on how these frameworks function
in a real episode. To appreciate the syncretism inside our specific case,
we will start by describing the local repertoire of religious actors and tra-
ditional practices, which is not so different from other Catholic towns
in Spain or in other countries. After that, we will explore our case by
following the chronological sequence of events and considering how the
visionary creates his composition, as well as the elements of why it failed.
The structure of religious actors in Noblejas includes: a local priest,
who is in charge of the parish; a community of the Daughters of Charity
of Saint Vincent de Paul, who run a primary school; a young group
of Vicentian Marian Youth (guided by the Daughters of Charity); sev-
eral religious brotherhoods devoted to saints and a local advocation of
Jesus Christ (Santisimo Cristo de las Injurias); and, as an informal activ-
ity, prayer groups that are devoted to private figures. The practices of
the parish are the most important ritual expression in the town, which
include masses, catechesis at different levels, delivering sacraments and
other common practices. The most important activity of the brother-
hoods is the worship of the holy figures and, especially, processions. The
processions always take to the streets in Easter and on the respective days
of saints (the saints to which the brotherhood is devoted to), as well as
May 3, when the town celebrates the festivity of the Santisimo Cristo de
las Injurias. Prior to José’s visions, there was no brotherhood devoted
to the Virgin Mary (and there was none afterwards). The only festivities
in honour of the Virgin in the town were two minor celebrations, which
were guided by the Daughters of Charity: the Immaculate Conception
and Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. Noblejans usually go to the
neighbouring towns of Ocaña, Villarrubia de Santiago and Oreja to cel-
ebrate the festivities for the Virgin, rather than organise a very important
cult of their own. On the contrary, and beyond these public activities,
the private cult is most clearly devoted to Virgin Mary through the
activities of domestic prayer groups. These prayer groups are composed
of and guided mostly by women, who celebrate the cult by reciting the
rosary in front of little domestic shrines, which are usually portable in
order to facilitate a change to the place of worship (the groups usu-
ally meet in the houses of group members). These little shrines usually
include a figure of La Milagrosa (Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal)
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 211

or the Immaculate Conception, but there are also shrines devoted to

miraculous revelations, which have no formal cult in the town, such as
Lourdes or Fatima, or even revelations never recognised by the Church,
such as El Escorial.
Furthermore, beyond this principal form of private cults, the local
repertoire of the sacred also includes myriad domestic phenomenology
and narrations about little private miracles based on petitions, offerings
and all kinds of “instrumental praying” (Christian 1989: 134), which
mainly consist of the exchange of personal efforts for miracles (efforts
such as going on pilgrimages, ordering and paying for liturgical services,
buying special dresses or presents like liturgical and ornamental objects,
votives and flowers). Even if it is not the most comfortable topic to talk
about with foreigners, as I was warned during my fieldwork, I also dis-
covered that the domestic repertoire of the sacred includes numerous
apparitions of dead relatives, mostly while dreaming and usually in the
night. Exceptionally, I was told of a relevant episode of a poltergeist in
the town. Besides that, Noblejans know popular elements of esotericism
like mediumship, psychophonies, tarot cards, astrology, as well as Ouija
tables are very popular among young children and teenagers. Some of
these elements featured in the episode of José’s visions.
The first apparition happened in November 1994. José was resting in
his bedroom when a blurry and bright female silhouette appeared before
him along with a soothing smell of roses. He identified the form imme-
diately as Our Lady and then he collapsed. His relatives, scared, checked
his pulse and brought him to the doctor. The doctor said that he had
been “clinically dead”, although he recovered in the ensuing hours.
At this point, his mother and other relatives mentioned that they had
also been perceiving strange movements of objects in the house before
he fainted. The events were considered to be an isolated bizarre inci-
dent and forgotten until the next episode, which occurred in the fol-
lowing year. Of course, the vision itself is the first element of innovation
that José introduces, since it is not a typical occurrence in the town.
Although we can admit that it is common in the repertoire of popular
Catholicism, it is usually reserved for the most faithful and special peo-
ple. The association of the first vision with the moving objects is also an
innovation, which brought the Catholic repertoire together with the
phenomenology of esotericism and parapsychology.
In April 1995, the events gained complexity. José fell into a trance
at home and heard the very sweet voice of a woman saying that she
212 M. CORNEJO

wanted him to transmit an important message to the people of the town.

Returning from the trance, he felt his body to be in terrible pain and
discovered five stigmata: two on his hands, two on his feet and one on
his forehead. The five little wounds bled but did not stain. José told
the local priest what happened to him and asked him for permission to
announce the Marian message in public. On Holy Thursday of that week
in 1995, the town hall square was crowded as usual. The priest gave a
microphone to José and he fell into a trance again and started to chan-
nel. With the tone of his voice deepening, he spoke about upcoming
wars and misfortunes, which would be caused by the liberal behaviour
of humankind, as well as the lack of prayer and good deeds. In order
to avoid these misfortunes, Our Lady demanded Noblejans to pray the
rosary and follow Christ. The public message had some significant simi-
larities with the messages of El Escorial (1981, Madrid, Spain), where
Amparo Cuevas was spoken to for the first time by Our Lady of Sorrows,
who said that the Passion of Jesus had been forgotten and that it was
necessary to pray, especially the Holy Rosary. On that occasion, stigmata
for many of the faithful were also claimed.2
In the following years, especially between 1995 and 1997, ritual crea-
tivity exploded and lasted until 2001. The revelations and the stigmata
continued month after month, and year after year, especially around
Easter. The phenomenon developed with regard to three dimensions: (1)
the phenomenology of the sacred itself, (2) the ritual innovation and (3)
the social process behind the episode.

1. Regarding the phenomenology of the sacred, the first episodes

established the basic pattern of the case: visual apparitions, trances,
heard messages and stigmata. These miracles continued through-
out the years that followed, although they increased with new
manifestations, such as: miraculous discoveries of little statues
of the Virgin Mary (whose locations were revealed to the vision-
ary by some kind of impersonal force, which pushed him to go
there—namely, the meadow—and dig); teleplastic materialisations
of the faces of the Virgin Mary and Christ at José’s home (which
I observed in my visit to the place in 2001); numerous petitions
for the laying on of hands in pursuit of miraculous healing; and
the basic repertoire of esoteric events, such as electronic voice phe-
nomena (recorded psychophonies and cacophonies) or spirit pho-
tography, which was carried out by a professional photographer
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 213

who is also a personal friend of José. Again, the traditional reper-

toire of Catholic apparitions and parapsychological manifestations
combined to form a particular ethnomimetic proposal.
2. Regarding ritual innovations, they were mainly three in this case:
(a) José’s home became a new site of semi-public worship; (b) he
and his followers started a new kind of processional style for the
local figure of La Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows); and (c) they
sought to create a new cult devoted to a different figure, the
Recumbent Christ. Whether or not the image of La Dolorosa was
a personification revealed in the beginning, other secondary visions
that were revealed to José emphasised the importance of the cult
to this figure, thereby following the same pattern as happened in
El Escorial. Both La Dolorosa and the Recumbent Christ previously
existed as figures in the local parish, but they both lacked any col-
lective devotion in the town (a brotherhood, a celebration, a holy
day in their honour), although they were (and are) both carried
in procession during special moments in Holy Week. With these
materials, José operated his proposal as a bricoleur, working with
what he had at hand (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 17)(Fig. 9.1).
a. After the public revelation, the little room where the apparitions
and messages were received for the first time became a shrine to
which people went in order to pray together as an embryonic
pilgrimage. Many images of saints, the Virgin Mary, Christ, the
Sacred Heart and crosses filled up the walls alongside two tel-
eplastic materialisations. A little sideboard exhibited a 50-cm
tall figure of La Milagrosa (very popular in the town because of
the devotion of the Daughters of Charity), surrounded by many
other secondary figures (I was shown three of them, miracu-
lously found), holy pictures of saints from different origins and
a red candle that was always brightly flickering. A wardrobe with
a face materialised on the inside was put in there too, while the
rest of the space was dedicated to the people who stayed to pray
the rosary. Around 1997, José’s place was visited by an estab-
lished group of 20 people (mostly women in their over-50s) on a
weekly basis. However, the rumours and the spread of the news
about the revelation attracted many people (from the town and
the surroundings) to the place, especially in the first two years.
When people visited, they were invited to join José in praying
the rosary.
214 M. CORNEJO

Fig. 9.1 La Dolorosa Procession (Our Lady of Sorrows)

b. In the 1996 Holy Week, two years after the first apparition, José
and his followers asked to carry and accompany the heavy statue
of La Dolorosa in a procession as Nazarenes. On this occasion,
the ethnomimetic strategy meant a double advance. The first,
as mentioned before, focused the cult on the same advocation
of the Virgin Mary as occurred in El Escorial. The second was
intended as a style innovation inspired by the liturgical fashion
of Seville, which was mimicked by many religious brotherhoods
in Spain (the brotherhoods of the neighbouring town of Ocaña,
for example), but not by Noblejans. It implies carrying the paso
(the statue) on their shoulders, as well as the use of penitential
purple robes with conic caps and drawstrings at the waist, large
cirial canes and bare feet. The group of men and women accom-
panied La Dolorosa throughout the whole time that She was
paraded (several days), even during the procession of Las Caidas
(The Falls), when men and women used to march separately
through the streets following Christ or Mary (José’s followers
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 215

joined the women-only parade, which followed Mary as La

Dolorosa).
c. The next step shows especially well how José had to impro-
vise with pre-made materials and pre-constrained circum-
stances, which limited their freedom of manoeuvre (Lévi-Strauss
1966: 19). In 1998, some of José’s supporters contacted the
Archbishopric of Toledo in order to receive some recognition of
the visions or, at least, of the group. The formalities were not
fruitful, as they encountered ambiguous discourses and a lack
of interest, according to the testimonies. The group considered
the recommendation of the local priest and the Archbishopric to
move the focus of the cult from Mary to Jesus. The first devo-
tion in Noblejas is already a local advocation of Jesus (Santisimo
Cristo de las Injurias) and the figure already had a communal
brotherhood and several days in recognition of cult in the litur-
gical calendar. In order to foster the cult of Jesus, as the revela-
tions and the Church commanded, José and their followers made
some arrangements and took care of another figure, that of the
Recumbent Christ in a glass sarcophagus, which does not have
any specific cult or brotherhood (even though it is the oldest and
finest figure in the town). José brought the statue to his home
to clean it up and the prayer group visited the figure there for
months afterwards (until José brought it back to the temple).
3. Around the same period, the rumours of the visions reached sev-
eral journalists who contacted José and his followers. As Christian
has pointed out, journalism is one of the most important sources
of legitimation (and delegitimation) with regard to contemporary
apparitions (Christian 2009). In this case, José talked with some
journalists, including the famous collector of Marian apparitions
Pitita Ridruejo (Las Apariciones de la Virgen, EDAF), but he was
afraid of turning it all into a freak show and finally refused to talk
with journalists, in turn relinquishing the possible legitimation that
he might have received from them.

Although the new ritual for Holy Week and the prayer group has been
active since 1998, decline started to set in. Somehow, the orchestra score
that José offered to his local audience was not appreciated by the public,
who found the harmony to be off-key, strident, disgusting. In 2003, the
216 M. CORNEJO

revelations had ceased and the activity of this group was finished. The
never-formalised brotherhood paraded until 2002 as companions follow-
ing La Dolorosa. They wore the Nazarene robes for the last time in the
same year, but they did not carry the figure on their shoulders (it was
carried using a small motor vehicle), while the men and women sepa-
rated during Las Caidas procession, like the rest of the Noblejans used
to do. Subsequently, the prayer group only met in the days leading up to
Holy Week; for the rest of the year, some of the former members of the
group returned to praying the rosary in church, while others did it alone
at home and some did not pray the rosary at all in the end.
In the meanwhile, the story of José’s miracles and his brotherhood
became a ridiculous tale with crazy anecdotes that amplified some of
the original chronicles by distortion and emphasis on the more strident
effects. Indeed, the first time I was told about the story in 2000, the
storytellers were significantly cruel about the visionary and his family.
Gossips speculated about what José could do with the Recumbent Christ
at home. I was told that the figure was found on the sofa, standing in the
kitchen, laying on the marital bed and shut away in a wardrobe. Other
mocking stories involved José’s deceased father. People said that José’s
father went “in spirit” to José’s wedding and that the spirit occupied an
empty seat next to the groom, where he was served dish after dish, as
some people said the family used to do regularly at home. The tales used
to cite the testimony of imprecise witnesses and the people I spoke to
never narrated the story in the first person. Although the stories were
invented (and people seemed to be more keen to laugh than be con-
cerned about realism), their dissemination reflects a general failure in the
syncretistic proposal.
According to Austin’s rules of failure and their sociological reading,
legitimation, formality and honesty were brought into play, all of which
we can say were derailed. The amplification of the stridency, the last of
the failures described, seems to be a matter of the mis-execution of the
proposal. In the context of Levi-Strauss’s metaphor, a formal default
occurred, which was related to the appropriate harmony of the composi-
tion as it was judged according to the musical taste of the audience. Too
many elements were not acceptable by the public at large, such as having
the Recumbent Christ at home, an adult man (eventually married) being
visited by the Virgin Mary at his bedside, falling into a deep trance and
channelling in the same way as a medium, taking the private cult out of
privacy (by making home a public shrine), diverting the focus of a cult
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 217

from Mary to Jesus in the middle of the process, dressing up as strangers

in the processions or men parading in the women-only procession. Many
felt uncomfortable with these proposals and did not understand their
relation with the original message. I was told that the group did many
bizarre things because they craved attention, while some said that the
worship of the Passion of Jesus could have been improved by revising the
way they behaved and prayed the rosary previously, rather than inventing
creepy rituals. In this sense, there was a flaw in the construction of the
proposal’s meaning, a default in choosing the symbolic means, a cultural
and semantic failure.
A part of this cultural failure also lies in the reputation of the vision-
ary, a topic that readdresses our argument to the first and third pairs of
Austin’s rules. José was not a very different young man from the others
in the same town at the same time. He went out, got drunk, smoked
whatever, drove madly and had fun. In time, he met his wife, got mar-
ried and had a beautiful baby girl. He and his family were humble.
Gossips said that his father was violent and had alcohol issues, but his
family remembers him as a good person. However, none of these charac-
teristics seemed to be good enough for José to become a keynote speaker
on behalf of the sacred, neither for the Church, nor for the locals. José
was not a saint and he knew that. In fact, the apparitions were a shock-
ing episode and a big moral challenge for him, having experienced a kind
of conversion in the same way that Christian (1996) and Roma (1995)
described other apparitions experienced by men in Spain. The rules of
happy performances, however, say that “the particular person and cir-
cumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the
particular procedure invoked” (Austin 1978: 15), which was not the
case here. The invocation of the rosary against liberal customs by José
was astonishing, even to himself. In fact, many in the town thought
that some kind of drug must have confused José’s mind. Subsequently,
his reliability was in doubt. The last rule of the happy utterance says
that, where the procedure invoked is designed for persons with certain
thoughts or feelings, “the procedure must in fact have those thoughts
or feelings” (Austin 1978: 15). In José’s case, too many people thought
that he could lie to himself and to others. The priest thought that,
although he was tolerant of the new rituals.
As a final point, the cold attitude of the Church played a negative role
in the whole process since the local priest and the regional Archbishopric
never showed any interest in the apparitions. In hegemonic Catholic
218 M. CORNEJO

contexts, the Church is the institution that gives or otherwise the legiti-
mation for innovations, as Stefania Palmisano has explored in depth
(Palmisiano 2010, 2015). In the words of Bourdieusian theories, the
Church represents the experts who define what the religion is about.
José’s proposal was risky since he opted to follow some of the key ele-
ments from the model of El Escorial, which is controversial and lacks
any formal recognition from the Church. Certainly, the direct commu-
nication between the sacred and the visionaries means (or is intended to
mean) the rise of a new authorised voice, which contests the old authori-
ties and introduces a risk of destabilising the hegemonies in the religious
field. Then, the historic attitude of the Catholic Church about visionaries
is based on scepticism (Maunder 1991: 84) and the religious field was
previously undermined for novelties in the form of visionaries.

CONCLUSIONS
The study of failed cases suggests, at least, three major conclusions. First
of all, despite numerous scholars admitting that all religions are syncre-
tistic compounds, the process of syncretistic innovation is very complex
and difficult, such that it does not seem to be welcomed by the large
audience of the faithful in every case. Certainly, there are societies in
which innovation and mixtures are particularly welcomed, but the lack of
attention to failed cases does not properly allow for comparison between
those in which it is welcome and those in which it is not. Inside our
own framework, we can simply state that even “syncretism from within”
does not assure success for different reasons. This moves our argument
towards the two next conclusions: social power relationships are prob-
ably the most important engine of syncretistic change, and symbolic
coherence takes a part in the process.
Cultural and symbolic coherence is a fuzzy matter, which depends
on a proper consideration of the local repertoires of beliefs and prac-
tices and their meaning for locals, including what they think is meant by
“the religious” or whom they think the religious actors must be or how
they think they must behave. In our case, the visionary took care of his
choices by trying to respond to the sacred call through a balanced har-
mony of old and new melodies. The strategy of ethnomimesis led him
to take elements from within the Spanish Catholic repertoire at the same
time that the bricolage were enriched with the repertoire of esotericism.
Perhaps the most relevant support that he hoped to have found was from
 9 RITUAL CREATIVITY AND RITUAL FAILURE IN POPULAR SPANISH … 219

the Church and other elements of social approval, but the incoherencies
perceived by the public did not support José’s proposal in a positive way.
The jokes and the laughs, a demonstration of misunderstanding, played a
role alongside the cold attitude of the Church.
Finally, José did not gain the social approval he needed in order to
put himself among the forces in the local religious field. Paraphrasing
Monika Reuters, there is no syncretism “unless a group of influential
people agrees that it is” (Reuters 2015: 14). While the visionary caught
the attention of everybody, he only received the explicit support of a
small group of women and friends, none of whom had the means, the
manners or the contacts to support a major project. The press never
publicised the episode, which meant that the social capital of the reform-
ers never increased. The priest was tolerant of the rituals, but he never
seemed to be truly convinced of the sanctity of the events. The reliability
of a humble rustic man in his twenties was questioned. Perhaps creativ-
ity is bubbling away in the margins of society as Victor Turner always
thought (Rosaldo et al. 1993: 2), but marginality is still marginality.

NOTES
1. For a European comparative perspective on anticlerical responses, see also
Badone (1990).
2. The first message heard in El Escorial said: “I am Our Lady of Sorrows.
I want a chapel to be built in this place in my honour. I want people to
come here from all over the world to meditate on the Passion my Son
endured, because it is forgotten. If they do people will be cured. This
water will cure. Those who come here to pray the Holy Rosary will be
blessed. Many will be marked by the cross on their forehead. Do peni-
tence. Do pray” (quoted from http://www.virgendolorosa.net/histo-
riaprincipal.html, accessed on September 15, 2016).

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