Dreams. Animals have them. Humankind’s oldest stories talk about them. In your dreams! we say, or, beyond my wildest dreams, validating with our speech habits Freud’s intuition that dreams are at bottom wish fulfillments. Yet they come to us as alien, uncanny, often frightening. We awake from a scary dream sweating, heart pounding, grateful that after all it was only a dream. We can’t help wondering, though: why did I have it? What does it mean? What might it portend?
If anyone knows dreams, it’s Kelly Bulkeley. Author or co-author of more than a dozen books on dreams and dreaming, director of the extraordinary online resource called the “Sleep and Dream Database,” he’s deeply interested in dreams as a religious phenomenon, including the ways in which they’ve manifested themselves in the history of the world’s religions. This is a subject dear to my own heart; and Bulkeley and I have something else in common. His most recent book, Lucrecia the Dreamer, was published in the “Spiritual Phenomena” series of Stanford University Press, soon–well, in perhaps two years–to be the home for my own book, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
It’s hard to read the story of Lucrecia de León without thinking: this ought to be a movie.
She was born in 1568 in Madrid, the sprawling, sewage-reeking city that King Philip II had a few years earlier made into his capital. She was a dreamy child (in more than one sense of the word) who grew up to be a beautiful young woman, all but illiterate yet with a keen native intelligence, a pious and obedient daughter of the Catholic Church. Courted by an old soldier, she married the young clerk who’d won her heart.
She was 19 years old when Philip’s empire, at the height of what seemed to be its power and splendor, suffered the staggering blow that revealed how hollow and rotten it truly was. Its “Invincible Armada,” sent out in the spring of 1588 to punish heretic England and bring it back into the Faith, was shattered. The next year the English struck back, raiding the coastal town of A Coruña with a two-week orgy of murder and torture. The king was helpless to protect his people. Spain was in a state of shock; Lucrecia was unsurprised. She’d seen it all already, in her dreams.
It was those dreams that made her notorious, those dreams that at last devastated her life.
They’d begun at age 12, when she dreamed of a royal funeral and shortly afterward the queen died of influenza. They enraged her father, whose persistent hostility is one of the more baffling and sinister features of her story. He told her to stop her dreaming; she couldn’t, any more than you or I can stop ours. “The Lord God hath spoken,” as one of her distant forerunners had said (Amos 3:8). “Who can but prophesy?”
If her father wasn’t interested, others were. The nobleman Don Alonso de Mendoza met her and was fascinated. He introduced her to Fray Lucas de Allende, who became her confessor. The two men began to create a systematic record of Lucrecia’s dreams, each meticulously dated, relevant circumstances noted.
This was at the end of 1587. She’d just turned 19.
“The twelfth of January of this year [1588] the Ordinary Man came to me and I saw that he was bringing a Cross in his hand; he carried the Cross to the Palace and placed it in a tower with a view, and I said to him, ‘Why are you placing the Cross in this part?’ He answered me: ‘Because his death is close.’ And I saw a blood river, coming from the area of the stables; this river was surrounding the Palace, flowing with serpents and snakes–that I have seen in other visions–and with lots of crows, squawking with their beaks in blood. Three men came out of this river and looted the Palace and cut many children’s and old people’s heads off. When I saw this, it hurt me so much that I started to cry aloud. The Ordinary Man said to me: ‘Do not be sad, do not cry because of these things that God does, he does them to teach us a life lesson, so you should not be in sorrow.'”
Twelve days earlier another of Lucrecia’s dream companions, the “Lion Man,” had shown her a vision of a woman surrounded by four well-dressed men who shaved off her hair and stripped her naked. “After this they wanted to molest her and she defended herself, and the four men hurt her many times with their cold swords.” “Who is this woman?” Lucrecia asked; and the Lion Man answered, “I do not want to tell.”
(We might guess: she was Lucrecia herself.)
The “Lion Man” (a.k.a. “the Young Fisherman”) and the “Ordinary Man”–so called because of the regularity with which he put in an appearance–were familiar characters to Lucrecia, her mentors and guides through the terrifying world of her dreams. There was also a third, the “Old Fisherman,” sometimes called simply El Viejo or El Pescador. Who these three men were, out of what stuffs Lucrecia’s unconscious had fashioned them, are impenetrable riddles that Bulkeley doesn’t try to resolve. (Though he notes that the “Ordinary Man” was said to look much as contemporary Spanish artists portrayed John the Baptist; and of course Jesus’s disciples were “fishers of men.”)
Her dreams grew darker, more apocalyptic. She saw a monstrous “dragon walking on the streets of Madrid, crawling, and with his horns he was lifting and throwing back all the corpses that filled the streets and those people that were on the streets.” She ran afoul of the authorities. She was arrested and then, thanks to Don Alonso’s intervention, released.
Her father threatened to have her killed.
The Invincible Armada set sail; Lucrecia had already had a string of dreams hinting at its fate. When Sir Francis Drake sacked A Coruña the following year, she’d visited the town in her dream three nights earlier. “She described a terrible butchery of the townspeople,” Bulkeley writes; “the air was filled with the cries of women and children screaming in pain.” A group of followers formed about her, the “Holy Cross of the Restoration,” which built for itself an underground mini-fortress in a cave near Toledo. Lucrecia seems not to have commanded or encouraged any of this. Obviously, however, she was a high explosive that might go off at any time.
On May 25, 1590, at King Philip’s orders, the Spanish Inquisition stepped in.
They brought her to Toledo for trial but didn’t quite know what to try her for. Heresy? She was obviously a faithful Catholic. Sorcery? She’d never cast a spell. Treason against the king? She’d never raised a hand against him or anyone else, or encouraged anybody to do so. It boiled down to: were her dreams real, or illusions sent by the Devil? Or had she deliberately concocted them for nefarious purposes?
By this time she was married and pregnant, though apparently not in that order. In her imprisonment she gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Margarita; miraculously, both survived. She was subjected to a torture which Bulkeley compares to waterboarding, which left her traumatized and in dread of ever going through it again.
“They all forsook him and fled” (Mark 14:50); and, in the face of the Inquisition’s horrendous machinery, that was more or less what happened to Lucrecia. Fray Lucas (in Bulkeley’s words) “said he had never wanted to have anything to do with the silly girl, but Don Alonso had pressured him to comply.” The middle-aged ex-military man whose wooing she’d spurned, who’d been the moving spirit behind the “Holy Cross of the Restoration,” dismissed her “as a liar and a fool and denied ever taking her seriously.” Her young husband, arrested along with her, publicly distanced himself while secretly sending her love notes.
Meanwhile one of her judges hit on her, trying to get her alone for a private interview. “You are so beautiful,” he told her, “that even a dead man could make you pregnant.”
Meanwhile her most effective advocate, Don Alonso, went quietly insane.
And her father, at the end as from the beginning, remained her enemy.
(To be continued in my next post.)
by David Halperin
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