Maria of Agreda

“Sister Maria of Agreda was a cloistered Spanish nun who lived in the seventeenth century.”

“She was a mystic who wrote books about the Virgin Mary that were very popular in her era and are still widely read.”

“She is best known as the author of the *Mystical City of God*, a biography of the Virgin Mary”

“Sister Maria of Agreda, however, was never canonized, although her cause has been proposed to the church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints many times.”

“In the early 1600s, as Spain was exploring and colonizing western North America, the youthful Maria claimed that with the help of angels she flew through space and over the ocean to New Mexico.”

“Her sister nuns said they witnessed Maria during her alleged bilocations and that she rose a few feet off the floor and was surrounded by brilliant light.”

“Her biographers have said that while her body levitated surrounded by a blinding white light in her small cell in the convent, she experienced herself soaring on the wings of angels across the ocean and in space to what Spain called “the New World.””

“He met with Maria and questioned her closely about what she saw and with whom she spoke.”

“Benavides was impressed by her account, which included details of things of which he thought she could not have been aware, and he made a report to the king of Spain, Philip IV.”

“He and others used them to justify their continued funding and efforts to expand the Spanish empire.”

“Maria allegedly bilocated to New Mexico, and the stories of her experiences helped Spanish missionaries obtain funding to convert indigenous Americans.... Maria’s case is similar to Tyler’s in that she seeded the cultural imagination with supernatural support for the missionaries’ work.”

“Whether or not I really and truly went in my body is something about which I cannot be certain... What I can assure you beyond any doubt is that the case did in fact happen, and that as far as I know, it had nothing to do with the devil or wrong desires.”

“She even criticized Benavides for being too “literal” in his interpretation of her bilocations. At the same time, she insisted that they *really did happen*.”

“Significantly, Maria notes that her travels would not have happened without the assistance of angels, or angelic beings.”

“Her earliest works, later burned by nuns of her convent, were cosmographies.”

“They contained descriptions of her astral journeys through space and over the earth, which she recorded as topographies of other countries, cultures, and space.”

“Sitting in the archive, it was hard not to remember Sister Maria’s early work on cosmography and her recognition of some of the “heretical” scientific discoveries of her own era. Those works, her first, were burned, and only a few copies remain. She wrote that she saw the earth from space, and it was a spinning sphere.”

“As a woman living in the seventeenth century who dared to write, she inspired suspicion and had to answer to the Inquisition.”

“She later claimed that she was pressured to answer to Benavides in ways that he desired. Some of her writings were burned.”

“Later, she recanted her recantations and rewrote many of her former works from memory.”

“Maria’s story became very popular in the seventeenth century and is even mentioned in textbooks as part of the history of the western United States, where I first encountered it as a student in high school.”

“Witnesses reported that Theresa of Avila, Joseph of Cupertino, and Maria of Agreda, who was also a noteworthy bilocator, all seemed to be dead when they were levitating.”

“Maria of Agreda, who was also a noteworthy bilocator”

“Maria of Agreda’s body became so light that her sister nuns could blow it around with a puff of breath.”

“She also was tortured while in this state, to no effect.”

“floods of visitors came to her convent, and her sisters took to floating her out into public where people could move her about by blowing on her as if she was, as Professor Eire puts it, "a wispy plaything."”

“When she found out that she was being used in this way, as an amusement, and a paid one at that, she was furious.”

“While in Rome I became reacquainted with a historical figure whom I came to view as a meta-experiencer.”

“The organization that funded my research trip to Rome had asked me to analyze the canonization trial records of St. Joseph of Cupertino and Sister Maria of Agreda.”

“I was struck by the thought that Sister Maria of Agreda, whose records I had seen, had claimed to have bilocated to New Mexico, the part of the world where Tyler had taken James and me to visit the supposed UFO crash site.”

“That night, Tyler admitted that his understanding of the “beings” was being transformed by his experiences. His encounter with Sister Maria and her alleged bilocations... coupled with what he had felt while making hospital rounds with Father McDonnell, and then the insights he gathered from the other scientists at the Vatican and the Vatican Observatory, shifted his interpretive structure with respect to what he thought might be extraterrestrials.”

“He now felt a kinship to Sister Maria of Agreda, and he vowed to devote his life to a new ministry.”

“He believed that these beings were, or were similar to, the beings spoken of by Sister Maria, the angels that had transported her to what is now the southwestern United States.”

“As Jeff Kripal suggests, instead of positing an either/or scenario that negates the inexplicable and anomalous and reduces Maria’s claims to purely imaginings and nothing more, why not consider the story within a framework of both/and?”