Mimesis, Memory, and the Magic Lantern: What Did the Knock Witnesses See?

On the night of August 21, 1879, during the early months of the Land War and amidst a looming agricultural crisis that was being compared with the Great Famine, an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary was reported to have appeared outside the south gable wall of the remote village church at Knock, County Mayo. Floating in mid-air with her eyes and hands raised toward heaven, Mary’s appearance, as described by witness accounts, resembled devotional images attributed to Bernadette Soubirous’s vision at Lourdes (1858)—an event that “had evidently been much talked about” at the time.¹ However, at Knock—unlike Lourdes and other nineteenth-century French Marian visions—Mary was not alone. On her right, bowed with his hands clasped in prayer, was her husband, St. Joseph. On her left, dressed in the robes of a bishop and holding a book as if preaching, stood St. John the Evangelist. Some witnesses, but not all, also claimed to have seen an altar upon which rested a lamb and a cross. For more than two hours, twenty or more people witnessed what they later described as “appearances,” “likenesses,” or “statue-like” figures that despite remaining motionless appeared to be “alive.” One witness, Patrick Walsh, who was working in his field more than half a mile away, described seeing not representations but rather “a large globe of golden light.” Situated “above and around the chapel gable,” such was the luminance of this body that Walsh “thought” he had never seen “so brilliant a light before.”²

From the outset, the Knock event was beset by rumors that the vision was not miraculous in origin. Given that all those in sight of the gable wall reported seeing something, and that there was no message—the vision was silent—it seemed that a natural explanation was at hand. Further inflaming suspicion among those unconvinced by published accounts of the apparition were the witnesses’ convoluted descriptions of the event. Skeptics were quick to suggest that the witnesses’ apparent disbelief for what they had seen, but poise in describing their experience with references to saints, indicated that a clerical intercession had occurred.³

The circumstances that instigated this interpretative anomaly and their connections with the events that played out at the time of the apparition have been examined by Eugene Hynes.⁴ In his 2008 study (the first book-length critical analysis of the apparition), Hynes suggests that a crisis of clerical authority at Knock, coupled with the widening divisions between priests, tenant farmers, and landlords during the Land War, provided the occasion by which clergy named the presences alleged to have been seen by the witnesses. But this was not a linear, top-down process where, following the Devotional Revolution model, priests simply attributed ecclesiastically sanctioned identities to the vision.⁵ As Hynes contends, those who gathered at the gable wall—particularly the group that would establish themselves as the leading witnesses—had, by means of their interpretative dispositions, clerical allegiances. Belief in local folkloric traditions, also contributed to how the apparition came to be imagined.

One conjecture, which arose shortly after the vision, that claimed to explain the peculiar physical characteristics described by the witnesses, was that the apparition had been created by a projection device. Commonly referred to as the “Magic Lantern theory,” this premise—which is more a recurring explanation for the Knock event than a concisely ordered thesis—contends that the apparition as the witnesses interpreted it—was an image disseminated by lantern projection. Championed by skeptics, the Lantern Theory has re-emerged with every twist and turn in the shrine’s fortunes. Though the theory has several variants, and most of its proponents claim that the lantern’s presence at Knock was part of an elaborately constructed hoax.⁶ Surprisingly, outside the objections raised by devotional writers, the Lantern Theory has attracted little other critical attention.⁷

I argue in this paper that rarely cited descriptions of the apparition’s optical attributes, together with the phantasmagoric like sensory experiences noted by the witnesses, confirm that long standing...