Rorschach icons

People arrive in droves to view them: holy images that appear--many believe miraculously--in the most unlikely places. They include the figure of the Virgin Mary formed by a stain on a store's bathroom floor, the face of Jesus in a giant forkful of spaghetti illustrated oil a billboard, and the likeness of Mother Theresa on a cinnamon bun served in a coffee shop (Nickell 1997, 1998).

Simulacra

Such images are frequently reported. If the depictions are of religious figures, they are sometimes popularly termed "apparitions" or "religious visions" (e.g., Virgin Mary 2003). However, they are quite different front the internalized viewings by "visionaries" which typically are unseen by ordinary folk. Rather, they are more or less visible to everyone, representing simply the ink-blot or picture-in-the-clouds effect: the mind's tendency to "recognize" pictures in random patterns.

This tendency is known as pareidolia, a neurological/psychological phenomenon by which the brain interprets vague images as specific ones. These are known as simulacra (DeAngelis 1999; Novella 2001). Often the discerned image is a face because--as Carl Sagan (1995, 47) explained, "As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired to our brains." As Sagan observed (1995, 46):

   The most common image is the Man
   in the Moon. Of course, it doesn't
   really look like a man. Its features are
   lopsided, warped, drooping. There's a
   beefsteak or something over the left
   eye. And what expression does the
   mouth convey? An "O" of surprise? A
   hint of sadness, even lamentation?
   Doleful recognition of the traits of life
   on Earth? Certainly the face is too
   round. The ears are missing. I guess
   he's bald on top. Nevertheless, every
   time I look at it, I see a human face.

Other secular simulacra include the "Face on Mars" (see Morrison 1988), as well as various shapes--a camel, butterfly, and a portrait of comedian Bob Hope--in a woman's potato chip collection (Nickell 1998, 137). One famous granite formation, New Hampshire's the Old Man of the Mountains profile, was a 700-ton, 1,200-foot-high simulacrum until it collapsed into rubble (Laughlin 2003).

Of course, simulacra can be faked. For example, suspect, crudely artistic images appeared repeatedly on the floor of a peasant woman's home in Belmez de la Moraleda, Spain, in 1972 (Nickell 1998, 39). A large Christ portrait--looking amateurishly airbrushed, complete with a neat, oval-ringed halo--supposedly formed "miraculously" in 2000 on the wall of Palma Sola Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, Florida (Christ 2000). It appeared after workers used pressurized jets of water to clean the bricks. Deliberate simulacra hoaxing, however, seems rare.

Pious Imagination

Not surprisingly, a great number of reported simulacra are religious. For example, a Moslem girl in England reportedly found an Arabic message, "There is only one God" in the seed pattern of a sliced tomato (Message 1997).

Religious simulacra are perhaps most often associated with Catholic or Orthodox tradition, wherein there is a special emphasis on icons and other holy images. (Historically, what were perceived as excesses of image veneration were felt to represent idolatry, a violation of the commandment against graven images. Such objections led to the iconoclastic crisis in the Byzantine empire, 724-843 A.D., and were among the issues of the Protestant Reformation.) (Eliade 1995; Nickell 1997)

Today, theologians and clerics are usually quick to dismiss such images, one priest wisely attributing them to "pious imagination" (Nickell 1998, 34). However, they remain intensely popular among the superstitious faithful, and another priest, while warning against image worship, says more hopefully that simulacra created by nature "can provide us with a mirror into the transcendence of something larger than ourselves" (Cox 2001).

Images of Mary are especially prevalent, appearing in a splotch of tree fungus in Los Angeles, a fence post in Sydney, Australia, a tree stump and a refrigerator door in New Jersey, a mottled rust stain on a water heater in Arizona, a bedroom wall in Nova Scotia, the bark of an elm tree in Texas, and so on--as shown by clippings in my bulging "simulacra" file (e.g., Virgin Mary 2003). One of my favorites is the form of the Virgin of Guadalupe in spilled ice cream (Stack 2000).

Images of Jesus are also frequently perceived--for example, in the foliage of a vine-covered tree in West Virginia, in rust stains on a 40-foot-high soybean oil tank in Ohio, a grimy window in an Italian village, and in the discoloration of a San Antonio living-room ceiling, among numerous such examples. In 1995, television viewers saw the face of Jesus in a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing stars being born in a gas cloud some six trillion miles long (Nickell 1997, 5). A Sacred-Heart figure of Jesus (as well as an Easter bunny) is outlined in the wood-grain pattern of my orifice door.