Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (491 page)

Yes, I am.

The thousands who heard an explosion, saw lightning or observed the solar miracle were not out of their senses. When the visionaries were followed to the scene of their visions by other people, they were not exclusively a flock of dyed-in-the-wool religious bigots. They often included sceptical scientists, generally critical journalists and always a number of unbelievers who had not been inoculated with the religious virus.

But it is always the devout, the undisputed faithful, who insinuate themselves into the mass suggestion of 'holy events' - in a way described by Jacques Hochmann [22], psychiatrist and psychologist at the University Clinic in Lyons, France, in connection with the psychodrama performance: There is the theoretical model of a 'sociometry' at the centre of which is the social atom. This atom is to be understood as the nucleus which is formed by the attracting and repelling relations in an individual environment. These relations consist of a network of interrelational (*) chains, which are aroused by affective currents.

But a homogeneous society of 'social atoms' is only formed at places of pilgrimage such as Lourdes, where the pilgrims are definitely bound to each other by 'affective currents'.

----

[*] From relationalism. The doctrine that relations have an objective existence.