Sometimes there are random encounters with people you never will forget. I remember an elder man I saw a couple of times in a pedestrian zone wearing transparent plastic gloves and a transparent raincoat all the time. He was always talking of “Fatima”.
I never learned anything about the background of that old man or what might had happened to him. But something must have made a life-changing impact on him.
“Fatima” was one of the most mysterious events in the 20th century and was accepted as a miracle by the Roman Catholic Church. The Miracle of the Sun was an event which occurred on Sunday 13 October 1917, attended by some 30,000 to 100,000 people who were gathered near Fatima, Portugal. Many people claimed to have witnessed extraordinary solar activity (Wikipedia, Miracle Of the Sun).
The whole story of Fatima includes much more than the “miracle of the sun” event. It is a complex case consisting of a chain of events. It began with three children, Ludica dos Santos, Jacinta Marto and Francisco Marot who claimed to have seen “Our Lady Of Fatima” and other visions.
They became famous not only because of the miracle of the sun and the apparitions but also because of the “three Secrets Of Fatima”, which included prophecies.
“The most widely cited descriptions of the events reported at Fatima are taken from the writings of John De Marchi, an Italian Catholic priest and researcher. De Marchi spent seven years in Fátima, from 1943 to 1950, conducting research and interviewing the principals at length.[14] In The Immaculate Heart, published in 1952, De Marchi reports that, “[t]heir ranks (those present on 13 October) included believers and non-believers, pious old ladies and scoffing young men” (Wikipedia, Miracle Of The Sun).
There are variations in the reports but a typical report sounds like this:
“The sun’s disc did not remain immobile. This was not the sparkling of a heavenly body, for it spun round on itself in a mad whirl, when suddenly a clamor was heard from all the people. The sun, whirling, seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge fiery weight. The sensation during those moments was terrible.”—Dr. Almeida Garrett, Professor of Natural Sciences at Coimbra University.[17]
There is a lot more material and also reports including further phenomena for example strange weather events.
However there is one unique experience at the bottom of these reports: they sound more like some completely strange psychedelic sensation rather than the sighting of a “flying saucer” or the simple appearance of a fantastic object.
The problem with “Fatima” is that it’s impossible today to distinct what people really saw and what was brought up later as an interpretation. “It’s like a crime site trampled over leaving few usable traces for forensics”.
However there are a many things here we do know for certain:
The events had a tremendous impact on many people’s lives. There must have happened something which left a very deep impression. Ludica dos Santos became a nun.
Furthermore also the potential of such events to become a legend deeply affect people. The old man ( I’don’t think he was an actual witness) I watched wearing that transparent raincoat even the sun was shining looked a bit like somebody who is afraid of some sort of contamination or radiation – he made his own makeshift biohazmat.
What’s really interesting is that this happened not the first time. In my previous post “Watch The Fire In The Sky” I described similar events hundred of years before Fatima for example in Tuebingen, 1577. Thus there is a tradition for that kind of events.
From a more sceptical point of view we could ask if these “miracles of the sun” are kind of a cultural phenomena or is it simple a strange weather phenomena as some researchers thought.
It’s hard to say but what we can say is that “the dance of the sun” sounds like a typical visionary experience, something which looks like taken from a shaman’s journey but what happened on a collective level.
There is a strong apocalyptic element here and a very strong ambiguity: it’s wonderful and frightening at the same time, it could be benign but also threatening and it’s really weird. It is more like a collapse of the eternal boundary between matter and mind not like a real physical phenomena. It’s both psychological and its very real in a way.
If we look for real signs of the otherworld it might be exactly these type of events in human history – which perhaps changed or even manipulated the course of our history – we should look for. The “dance of the sun” is the kind of event which sets up the idea in our mind that our most cherished beliefs (about what’s real) could be wrong. Since we don’t know much about the nature of these events there is also a danger for misinterpretation and also abuse in a political sense here.
Phenomena like the dance of the sun work like reality changers, something I am dealing with in my movie project.
Further reading (excellent case study of Fatima included):
