The ten-member team from the Atheist Centre consisted of medical doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, social scientists, hypnotists, magicians, ventriloquists, and scientists. They extensively toured the ten most affected villages in the sprawling district and medically examined the so-called victims, held discussions with the villagers, and conducted public meetings. The team was accompanied by media from national and international networks and the correspondents of many newspapers. In every village public meetings were also conducted, and the victims as well as the accused were interviewed.

The fear of witchcraft and sorcery (known as banamati in the local language) is deeply rooted in psyche of the common people in the Telangana area of the erstwhile native state of Hyderabad. The surrounding districts of Karnataka and Maharastra have the same problem, fear of witchcraft and sorcery.

The Atheist Centre sent similar teams to Medak district in 1983 and 1984, and to Nalgonda district a couple of times and also to Warangal district last year at the invitation of the inspector general of police. All these teams were headed by Dr. Samaram and were helpful in dispelling superstitions and blind beliefs in the remote villages of those districts. The state government took special note of the work of the Atheist Centre and appreciated its contribution in dispelling the fear of witchcraft and sorcery.

The Atheist Centre team found that people’s ignorance, illiteracy, ill health and a strong socio-cultural belief in the existence of witchcraft are causing untold misery to the people. Many times the belief in witchcraft led to violent incidents resulting in the plucking of teeth, breaking of hands and legs, cutting off the tongues, and in some cases burning to death of the so-called sorcerers. Gruesome murders take place and sometimes they are banished from the village after subjecting them to severe torture.

As the fear of witchcraft and its existence is culturally rooted, sometimes even the lower rung of the police and others fail to take note of the violence. At times the criminals escape punishment for their misdeeds.

Recently, in Rangareddi district, a man and woman were tortured and their tongues were cut off; in another village a score of teenage girls and women ran naked in the streets of the village due to mass hysteria. In other villages, the so-called sorcerers were tortured and disfigured. The team from the Atheist Centre investigated and examined the victims and the accused. The team also gave demonstrations on sleight-of-hand magic and how suggestion and self- hypnotism can lead them to believe in many things which are not true.

As the medical help is not available in the villages, the people fall prey to the quacks who exploit the ignorance and ill health of people and attribute their body ailments to sorcery and witchcraft. The team suggested the organization of awareness programs, public demonstrations exposing the superstitions, and extending medical facilities in the villages, in particular to the so-called victims of witchcraft. It suggested long-range as well as immediate steps to rescue people from the scourge of this superstition. It also suggested strong punishment to the perpetrators of crimes in the name of sorcery. The Atheist Centre will continue to send teams to conduct awareness campaigns in affected villages.

The district superintendent of police, who accompanied the team to all the villages, echoed the suggestions of the team and announced measures to curb the incidents in the name of witchcraft and sorcery. It is heartening to note that Mr. Babu Mohan, a legislator and also a popular movie actor, also joined the team. People from print and electronic media also extended valuable cooperation to make the visit of the Atheist Centre team a meaningful one. The team’s visit received wide attention in the state.

The members of the team included Dr. Samaram; Dr. Vijayam; Dr. I. Ramasubba Reddy, a psychiatrist; T.S. Rao, a psychologist and hypnotist; Gautam, a magician; Niyanta, a scientist, Silvister, a ventriloquist; Sadiq, a bio-chemist; Ravi Prakash, TV commentator of Teja T.V.; and Babu Mohan, popular movie actor. A press conference was also held at the Atheist Centre, Vijayawada after the return of the team from Rangareddi district. Dispelling superstitions is part of the comprehensive activities of the Atheist Centre for social change.

The story of Juan Diego is related in the Nican Mopohua ("an account”) written in the native Aztec language and sometimes called the “gospel of Guadalupe.” According to this account, in early December of 1531 (some ten years after Cortez’s defeat of the Aztec Empire) Juan Diego was a recent convert who supposedly left his village to attend Mass in another. As he passed the foot of a hill named Tepeyac he encountered a young girl, radiant in golden mist, who identified herself as “the ever-virgin Holy Mary, mother of the true God” and asked that a temple be built on the site. Later, as a sign to a skeptical bishop, she caused her self- portrait to appear miraculously on Juan’s cactus-fiber cloak.

The legend obviously contains a number of motifs from the Old and New Testament as well as statements of specific Catholic dogma. Indeed, the tale itself appears to have been borrowed from an earlier Spanish legend in which the Virgin appeared to a shepherd and led him to discover a statue of her along a river known as Guadalupe ("hidden channel”). Moreover, the resulting shrine at Tepeyac was in front of the site where the Aztecs had had a temple for their own virgin goddess Tonantzin (Smith 1983). Thus the Catholic tradition was grafted onto the Indian one, a process folklorists call syncretism.

The image itself also yields evidence of considerable borrowing. It is a traditional portrait of Mary, replete with standard artistic motifs and in fact clearly derived from earlier Spanish paintings. Yet some proponents of the image have suggested that the obvious artistic elements were later additions and that the “original” portions-the face, hands, robe, and mantle-are therefore “inexplicable” and even “miraculous” (Callahan 1981).

Actually, infrared photographs show that the hands have been modified, and close-up photography shows that pigment has been applied to the highlight areas of the face sufficiently heavily so as to obscure the texture of the cloth. There is also obvious cracking and flaking of paint all along a vertical seam, and the infrared photos reveal in the robe’s fold what appear to be sketch lines, suggesting that an artist roughed out the figure before painting it. Portrait artist Glenn Taylor has pointed out that the part in the Virgin’s hair is off-center; that her eyes, including the irises, have outlines, as they often do in paintings, but not in nature, and that these outlines appear to have been done with a brush; and that much other evidence suggests the picture was probably copied by an inexpert artist from an expertly done original.

In fact, during a formal investigation of the cloth in 1556, it was stated that the image was “painted yesteryear by an Indian,” specifically “the Indian painter Marcos.” This was probably the Aztec painter Marcos Cipac de Aquino who was active in Mexico at the time the Image of Guadalupe appeared.

In 1985, forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I reported all of this evidence and more in “a folkloristic and iconographic investigation” of the Image of Guadalupe in Skeptical Inquirer. We also addressed some of the pseudoscience that the image has attracted. (For example, some claim to have discovered faces, including that of “Juan Diego” in the magnified weave of the Virgin’s eyes-evidence of nothing more than the pious imagination’s ability to perceive images, inkblot-like, in random shapes) (Nickell and Fischer 1985).

Recently our findings were confirmed when the Spanish-language magazine Proceso reported the results of a secret study of the Image of Guadalupe. It had been conducted - secretly - in 1982 by art restoration expert José Sol Rosales. Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and observed that the canvas appeared to be a mixture of linen and hemp or cactus fiber. It had been prepared with a brush coat of white primer (calcium sulfate), and the image was then rendered in distemper (i.e., paint consisting of pigment, water, and a binding medium). The artist used a “very limited palette,” the expert stated, consisting of black (from pine soot), white, blue, green, various earth colors ("tierras”), reds (including carmine), and gold. Rosales concluded that the image did not originate supernaturally but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century (El Vaticano 2002).

In addition, new scholarship (e.g. Brading 2001) suggests that, while the image was painted not long after the Spanish conquest and was alleged to have miraculous powers, the pious legend of Mary’s appearance to Juan Diego may date from the following century. Some Catholic scholars, including the former curator of the basilica Monsignor Guillermo Schulemburg, even doubt the historical existence of Juan Diego. Schulemburg said the canonization of Juan Diego would be the “recognition of a cult” (Nickell 1997).

However, the skeptics are apparently having little if any effect, and Pope John Paul II seems bent on canonizing “Juan Diego” who is as demonstrably popular among Mexican Catholics as he is, apparently, fictitious.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the assistance of John Moffit and César Tort who helped update me on this topic, as well as CFI staff members who helped in various ways, including Tim Binga, Kevin Christopher, Ben Radford, and Ranjit Sandhu.

References

• Brading, D.A. 2001. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Callahan, Philip Serna. 1981. The Tilma under Infra-red Radiation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
• El Vaticano. 2002. Proceso, May 19, 29-30.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Image of Guadalupe: myth- perception. Skeptical Inquirer 21:1 (January/ February), 9.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1985. The Image of Guadalupe: A folkloristic and iconographic investigation. Skeptical Inquirer 9:3 (spring), 243-255.
• Smith, Jody Brant. 1983. The Image of Guadalupe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

According to an April 3, 2002, commentary in the Guardian (U.K.), the French daily Liberation cited weekly sales of L'Effroyable Imposture at 100,000 copies. Although sales have been brisk, it is uncertain how many French readers actually buy into Meyssan’s claims. He jump-started the book’s popularity in an appearance on the French TV infotainment talk show Tout le Monde en Parle (Everybody’s Talking About It). However, the more respectable French media have been unforgiving in their criticism. According to the weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur, “The theory suits everyone - there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality.” Liberation renamed the book “A Frightening Confidence Trick” and called it “a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation.”

I have not read the book myself (at the time of this writing I am waiting for an English translation of the book). My French-challenged fellows can find an English- language synopsis of Meyssan’s arguments on a Web page titled “Pentagon: Hunt the Boeing and Test Your Perceptions!” at www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm.

The Web page suggests that an early, misinformed report by the Associated Press was the true explanation and that subsequent corrections are actually part of a coverup: “As everyone knows, on 11 September, less than an hour after the attack on the World Trade Centre [sic], an airplane collided with the Pentagon. The Associated Press first reported that a booby-trapped truck had caused the explosion. The Pentagon quickly denied this. The official U.S. government version of events still holds.

Meyssan’s actual arguments are nothing more than cheap and blatant mystery mongering. They are astonishingly sophomoric attempts to take readily explicable facts and twist them into suspicious mysteries.

Meyssan assumes that the impact of a Boeing 757, weighing 100 tons and laden with fuel, would have caused far more damage to the Pentagon. The “hole” from the impact seems too small to him, and the most dramatic devastation didn’t penetrate far enough into the “rings” of the building for his satisfaction. Where Meyssan has acquired the expertise to determine how much damage an aircraft can do to large buildings is an open question. Given the enormous death toll, the collapse of the roof and structure on the outermost ring and the incineration and damage to the outer three rings, a critic can only wonder what degree of damage would seem plausible to Meyssan.

Meyssan also muses about a lack of wreckage from the airliner, ignoring the experts’ explanation that such a high-speed impact and the subsequent explosion and inferno amply explain how the Boeing jet was pulverized and incinerated.

One photo on Meyssan’s Web page shows a truck pouring sand over gravel that has been spread out by a bulldozer on the lawn at the Pentagon crash site. Incredibly, Meyssan questions why this would be done, stating that the lawn was otherwise undamaged after the attack. He takes great pains to ignore the obvious fact that this is a common practice on every construction site to prevent heavy vehicles from churning sod and soil into a morass of mud.

Meyssan shows no inclination to offer an alternative that explains key questions, such as what happened to Flight 77 and high-profile passengers like Barbara Olson, TV commentator and wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, if they didn’t crash into the Pentagon.

Pentagon spokesman Glen Flood, quoted in an April 1, 2002, story in the Guardian called the book “a slap in the face and a real offence to the American people, particularly to the memory of the victims of the attacks.” Most Americans, I’m sure, will readily agree. It will be interesting to see the reaction here when the English-language edition of L'Effroyable Imposture makes Meyssan’s ideas fully accessible to the American public. Certainly, Meyssan offers much for skeptics around the world to ponder: he should remind us that irrational thinking continues to be, as it has so often been, a tool for dehumanizing victims and deflecting blame from the guilty.

Further Reading:

• The Urban Legends Reference Pages: www.snopes2.com/rumors/pentagon.htm.
• The National Review: www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins040902.asp.