1234, we meet again. I promise I’m not stalking you.
I have indeed heard of mass hysteria. But I have never heard of 70,000 people having a simultaneous hallucination. I’ve heard of a few hundred people having psychosomatic disease symptoms. I’ve heard of widespread panic. I’ve heard of people being fooled by illusionists (not sure of the largest scale here). But I’ve never heard a proposal for how a “dancing sun” illusion could be performed.
Have you ever heard of a case of mass hysteria that would fit this description?
Yes, we meet again, Obi-Wan-Kenobe.
No, I haven’t. But I haven’t studied the phenomenon of mass hysteria.
…my understanding of Fatima is that, like other apparitions of Mary, it took place in a distant, isolated, ‘backward’ area like Lourdes, and involved a series of apparitions to children ( a girl at Lourdes), which month by month began to attract large and then huge crowds. Both Lourdes and Fatima also took place in an atmosphere of severe tension between the RCC and the state government.
…but at Fatima there was a prediction of some spectacular event that would take place at the time of the last apparition. There were also Secrets told, an a lot of talk about the ‘conversion of Russia’, which also heightened the suspense.
…I don’t know what led up to the apparition of the ‘dancing sun’. I don’t know if it was something the children saw, pointed to, started screaming, or what. But the circumstances are such to justify a supposition of mass hysteria. I don’t know of how many similar events have taken place in the West or possibly have happened in the East, at huge gatherings of religious festivals.
Medjujorge also involved a number of Secrets, but I don’t know anything about them.
John XXIII, of whom I am a fan, ignored the apparitions. At some point he read the Third Secret, and put it away without comment.