ANT 320 - The Supernatural and the Paranormal
Term Paper #2
Generally, supernatural “events” are things that people witness. Sometimes, however, people themselves – or, more precisely, their bodies – become the actual “event.” Such is the case with the so-called “stigmata” – the Greek word that means “marks,” “spots,” or “signs.” In Catholicism, the term “stigmata” refers to bodily marks, sores, or sensations of pain arising on one’s body that correspond to the wounds of the crucified Jesus Christ. They typically appear on the hands, feet, and side - the sites where Jesus was wounded during the crucifixion. When these marks appear on others, they are often believed by devout Christians to be signs of divine favor or of the “saintliness” of the individual on whom they appear (Britannica, 2024). They are regarded as having spiritual significance, and those who have them are said to have “received” the stigmata. They are seen as having been granted or given the marks by a divine source as a sign of divine approval.
Stigmata occurrences are rare, controversial, and subject to multiple interpretations. They are sometimes attributed to psychosomatic causes or are even suspected to be the product of deliberate hoaxing. In many cases, however, they are seen by some as genuine miracles. To understand the stigmata, and whether or not instances of stigmata demonstrate a rupture in human understanding of nature, we must examine specific cases of stigmata, as well as establish the specific notions of nature that we use as frameworks to understand science and religion.
The most well-known and influential case of the stigmata was that of Saint Francis of Assisi in the 13th century. St. Francis is one of the two patron saints of Italy and is associated with a devotion to poverty and simplicity. Francis founded the Franciscan Order, based on his personal teachings of renunciation of wealth, service, and compassion; the Franciscan Order is now one of the largest orders in the Catholic Church (Leonard, 2023). St. Francis received the stigmata – the wounds of Christ – in 1224, during a period of his life marked by intense prayer and fasting. According to legend, as St Francis prayed one morning, a six-winged, crucified angel appeared to him. After this vision, St. Francis was left with wounds in his hands and feet – located in the same physical sites as the nails in Christs’ crucifixion – and in his side – in the site where a lance pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross, as depicted in the Gospel account. Several witnesses testified to having seen the marks on Francis’ body (Leonard, 2023). After his death in 1226, members of the Franciscan Order went to his deathbed to venerate his body, where they witnessed a new miracle: “they saw his flesh, which had hitherto been dark, gleaming with dazzling whiteness” (Robson, 2002, 262). The stigmata of St. Francis are a particularly sensational case because St. Francis’ body was publicly exposed for devotion after his death, allowing – indeed, encouraging – people to observe the wounds. To deny St. Francis’ stigmata would mean denouncing the words of thousands of witnesses, which has made this first case difficult to ignore.
There have also been modern instances of the stigmata reported in various places around the world. One such case occurred in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in 1927. Marie Rose Ferron, the tenth child of a devout Catholic family, had many profound spiritual experiences throughout her life. These experiences often came with physical manifestations, one of which was the stigmata. Ferron’s stigmata first appeared briefly in 1926; by Lent of 1927, the marks routinely appeared every Friday (Dallaire, 2010). Lent – the forty-day period of fasting and prayerful contemplation that precedes Easter – is the religious “season” leading up to Good Friday and Easter, the days marking the crucifixion and then resurrection of Jesus. As such, it is particularly associated with the suffering of Christ, and with the stigmata.
Therese Neumann’s stigmata provides another, highly controversial, modern example of this phenomenon. This German woman, who died in 1962, claimed over the course of her life to have experienced a number of physical “miracles” – of being cured of blindness and of appendicitis without medical intervention, and, ultimately, of receiving the stigmata (Vogl, 1987).
The common thread through most instances of stigmata is the controversy that marks their public reception.This controversy stems from the place of stigmata – or lack thereof – in the natural order. The sense that the world around us is governed by nature and a natural order is a concept of great importance to humans. Throughout history, across regions and cultures, humans have turned to nature to regulate conduct and to explain human behaviors. As historian Lorraine Daston explains in her book Against Nature, “in various and dispersed traditions, nature has been upheld as the pattern of all values: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” (Daston, 3). Natural order is of particular importance because of our epistemological impulse or desire to classify things or, as Daston puts it, the “human cognitive necessity of lumping things into categories” (Daston, 10). Without notions of nature, we wouldn’t be able to classify events as either natural or supernatural, preventing us from fulfilling our desire to categorize phenomena we encounter – and, significantly, preventing us from being able to understand things as being “miraculous” or outside the norms of the natural order. By definition, within this framework, if something violates the natural order, this can imply only one of two things: that our understanding of the natural order needs to be updated and modified, or that the violation is miraculous. Indeed, the very concept of a “miracle” depends on our having a shared understanding of an order that it violates.
Many different notions of nature are used as frameworks through which humans understand natural order. Universal natural laws are one such notion. These laws define a specific order that exists everywhere and without exception. Under a purely scientific notion of nature, universal natural laws cannot be suspended. Gravity, to give just one example, is considered an immutable fact. Stigmata by definition are a suspension of a scientific notion of nature, and of the laws it implies. Stigmata violate our understanding of pain perception: individuals who experience stigmata often report feeling intense pain associated with the wounds, yet there may be no physiological explanation for this pain. This challenges the conventional understanding of nature, suggesting an unnatural or supernatural intervention – yet scientific frameworks do not accept supernatural interventions, causing a rupture. Stigmata transcend the natural order by manifesting physical wounds on the body without natural cause, violating “rules” of normal physiological processes.
To further refine human notions of nature, we can, again, turn to Daston’s Against Nature. As Daston describes them, “specific natures” are based on the characteristic form of different things in nature. These specific natures determine how these elements look and behave. The appearance and behavior of a certain species can only be altered by “constraining or ‘doing violence to’ specific nature” (Daston, 8). Stigmata defy concepts of specific natures because they demonstrate the alteration of one’s physical appearance without any apparent act of violence or even physical touch. Specific natures guarantee an order, a path of development – in this case, the developmental stages in which wounds heal – and stigmata defy this order.
Thanks to this human preoccupation with nature and classification, it follows that there are certain emotions evoked by ruptures in nature (ie. encounters with the unnatural, or the supernatural): “An extreme state that we suffer rather than merely feel that register[s] a breach of order” (Daston, 31). These emotions range from horror to awe. Stigmata do evoke intense emotions, emotions Daston would call “the passions of the unnatural.” Individuals who have received the stigmata are often overwhelmed with emotions; many stigmatics are left in ecstasy and euphoria. These intense emotions noted in stigmatic people – as they experience the passions of the unnatural – further demonstrate that stigmata represent ruptures in and from nature.
For stigmata to be considered natural in scientific notions of the natural order, they are explained not as divine religious experiences potentially but as psychological conditions that cause stigmatics to experience physical sensations mimicking the wounds of Christ – or cause them to believe that they are experiencing these sensations. Psychosomatic illnesses are physical symptoms that are thought to be caused by psychological factors such as stress or trauma (Freud, 1982). Stigmata could be seen as psychosomatic symptoms arising from intense religious fervor or unresolved psychological issues, for instance. Scientists may argue that St. Francis’ stigmata is a case of mass hysteria, in which individuals convinced each other of having seen the stigmata. Or perhaps St. Francis believed he had received the stigmata due to psychosis brought on by intense fasting. One might say that Therese Neumann was mentally ill, and not touched by God. A scientific notion of nature would never explain the stigmata through religion, thus not accepting stigmata as they are understood by stigmatics themselves – divine miracles.
While stigmata demonstrate a rupture in nature as understood by scientific frameworks, they are certainly possible, and natural, in religious notions of nature. Christian notions of nature position God as not only having the ability to create laws of nature, but also to suspend such laws. Miracles, such as stigmata, are considered natural as divine intervention is a normal part of the religious natural order. It is also accepted in Christianity that these miracles are more likely to happen in moments of intense prayer or spirituality, as is the case for many stigmatics – Ferron’s stigmata were particularly present during Lent, and St. Francis’ during devoted fasting and prayer – their stigmata appear during their periods of asceticism or religiously significant moments.
Many scholars have attempted to untangle the boundaries between different frameworks of nature. The scientific notions I have described are often favored in the “disenchanted” and secularized West, and treated as absolute. Religion is sometimes regarded as fiction, and not to be used as the basis for natural laws. Religious beliefs are often associated with irrationality and intolerance (Asad, 1). While the religious notion of nature is certainly biased and insufficient, the scientific notion is also imperfect. For something to be natural in the scientific sense, it has to be replicable, quantifiable, and be “possible” under proven laws of physics and nature, meaning that there are a restricted set of experiences that are admissible into the scientific paradigm, and stigmata are not among them. Scientific notions of nature can also be biased, as anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah describes: “Science, too, has not escaped this taint of being tarred by interest groups and political power” (Tambiah, 2). Just as religious beliefs can be shaped by social, cultural, and political contexts, scientific research may also be subject to biases or agendas driven by funding sources, institutional pressures, or ideological influences.
As I have argued, stigmata provoke a rupture in scientific notions of nature. Conversely, they are natural under certain religious notions. There exists, however, a third possibility, one that lies between a rupture and a lack of rupture. A possibility that indigenous author Vine Deloria Jr. would describe as misinterpretation – not “misexperience.” The framework that Deloria describes would not position stigmata as anomalies and they would be accepted as natural: “some things are accepted because there is value in the very mystery they present” (Deloria, 46). By some, they could be interpreted as religious phenomena, and by others, through a Freudian analysis, may be treated as a hysteric condition with somatic symptoms. Regardless of the interpretation, however, by Deloria’s notions of the natural, stigmata would be accepted as real experiences, and would not be dismissed or subjected to skepticism.
Interpretations of stigmata are further complicated by the sources available to study them. The contemporary image of stigmata is highly influenced by art history, as well as by written descriptions from religious texts. That is to say, understandings of stigmata are cooperations between belief as well as artistic and literary interpretation. Other factors, ones of cultural biases, religious belief, and personal experience, also impact individual interpretations of the stigmata. Ultimately, stigmata represent significant ruptures in scientific notions of nature, while being considered natural under certain religious frameworks. These different interpretations of stigmata beg the question: is there truly a difference between a hysteric person developing somatic symptoms, and a true religious experience? Is the imagined experience of pain vastly different from the experience of pain invoked by a “real” injury? Perhaps we can take inspiration from Deloria’s frameworks, and learn to simply revel in the mystery put forth by stigmata, without needing to classify them as “real” natural experiences, or as mis-experienced unnatural events. Perhaps ultimately, the real “miracle” is that the range of human experience is such that it allows for multiple frameworks of interpretation for extraordinary events.
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