Visions – Georges Marasco – page 1

Belgium, 1921-24: The bizarre case of Georges Marasco

Today, few recall the name of stigmatist, healer and visionary Georges Marasco. In the

1920s, she attracted a cult-like following in Belgium and elsewhere, and her trial for fraud made

headlines around Europe. Although supporters considered her a saint, her case made many

within the Church feel uneasy – not least because she was a female who preferred both male

dress and nomenclature. Trans-gender issues no longer carry the taboo they once did, and the

Marasco case demands modern re-appraisal. Hence her inclusions in a volume about visionaries,

even though her visions were probably the least extraordinary of her claims.

The Marasco story offers an interesting challenge: How should believers react when

confronted by a sincere individual who lays claim to the miraculous, yet whose biography

contains passages many will find disconcerting?

In his chapter on the Marasco affair, the famed Jesuit scholar Herbert Thurston1 notes that

clerics offer three traditional classifications for claims of the paranormal: fraudulent, divine or

diabolical. Thurston felt the need for a new category:

...I submit that we ought to recognize the existence of a small class of

abnormally constituted persons who seem to have lived in an atmosphere
of extravagance and miracle, but who are not necessarily to be accounted
either imposters or saints. There may be exceptional people in whom the
relations between body and mind do not seem to follow the laws
observable in other healthy human beings who form the majority of the
race.

1
Herbert Thurston, Surprising Mystics, Chicago: Regnery, 1955; pp. 204-217.
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This particular “abnormally constituted” person was born in Brussels in 1890. Her birth

name was Bertha Mrazek. Although she is said to have been a gifted painter, I have yet to

discover surviving examples of her work.

During World War I, according to Thurston, Marasco did remarkable service alongside

her friend Edith Cavell, the heroic British nurse whose efforts in occupied Belgium saved the

lives of many soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Cavell helped nearly 200 Allied soldiers

escape from enemy territory; when the Germans discovered this covert activity in 1915, she was

arrested, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to death. Her martyrdom made international

headlines for weeks, and helped push the United Sates toward war.

Mrazek/Marasco – she later claimed that she changed her name at Cavell’s suggestion –

barely avoided execution herself; her propensity for barbed retorts certainly did not make her

captivity easier. Fortunately, she managed to engineer an escape. After the war, she remained

haunted by Edith Cavell’s death, and for the rest of her life she kept mementos of her friend,

including her cross. (Cavell was a devout Anglican.)

I should here note an anomaly: No biography of Cavell known to me mentions Marasco,

and Cavell expert Diana Souhami had never heard of her until I mentioned the name in

correspondence. Even so, I don’t think that Marasco falsely associated herself with a celebrated

figure. Thurston – a careful scholar – reports that the Belgian government verified Marasco’s

wartime service, the exact nature of which remains unspecified. (She seems to have been a spy.)

Thurston also claims to have seen the aforementioned cross. If Marasco had lied about knowing

the famed British martyr, other Cavell associates would have set the record straight.

In 1920, Georges Marasco – then 30 years old and living in Forest (Vorst), Belgium –

was deathly ill. The exact nature of the illness remains unknown. She had been paralyzed for a
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full year, with bones out of joint, dislocated vertebrae and a severe skin condition affecting her

right arm. In March, she went blind.

In July, desperate friends took to her to Our Lady of Hal (Halle), a Marian shrine located

about twelve miles away from Waterloo. The central feature of this shrine is a rather primitive –

but striking – “black virgin” statue which dates back to the Middle Ages, and which had

narrowly escaped Protestant destruction in the 16th century. Rumors of miraculous cures have

surrounded this sculpture since at least 1428, when “Our Lady of Hal” allegedly restored a dead

infant to life.2

Upon arrival inside the church, Marasco’s body was motionless, and those present briefly

feared that she had died. Nevertheless, her stretcher was placed before the shrine. After a brief

period of prayer, Marasco regained both her sight and full use of her body. She sang a hymn,

offered to create a painting for the church, then walked away from the site unaided.

In Thurston’s opinion, the illness was probably of hysterical origin and the cure,

therefore, non-miraculous. Although his skepticism is warranted, his vocabulary now seems

dated. “Female hysteria,” a once-common term, fell out of use many decades ago; even in

Thurston’s day, most medical professionals had ceased to employ it. Modern psychiatric

professionals use the label “conversion disorder.” The symptoms include paralysis, loss of

hearing, vision impairment, fainting, seizures, insensitivity to pain, and dystonia (involuntary

movements and abnormal positioning of the body).

Any diagnosis of this disorder must first rule out fraud, which is not an easy

determination. I believe – but cannot prove – that Marasco was not malingering. I also question

whether doctors would speak of dislocated vertebrae in a case of conversion disorder.

2
“Our Lady of Hal,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 196, London: John Bower Nichols and Sons, 1854; pp. 258-
263.
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Her turnaround shocked her doctors and friends back home in Forest, where she became

an instant religious celebrity. A stream of the curious segued into a procession of disciples as

visitors reported miraculous phenomena:

 Georges Marasco had visions and locutions.

 She developed the stigmata.

 In a trance-like state, she revealed the secrets of both past and future.

 Sick individuals claimed that she could heal by touch or proximity.

 Like Therese Neumann, she had long periods of inedia.

 Disciples saw her levitate above her bed.

 Visitors believed that she had the gift of “mystical substitution” – that is, she

would relieve others by taking on their mental and physical sufferings.

Specialists in aberrant psychology may be able to explain many, though not all, of these

claims. For example, someone with dissociative identity disorder (commonly called multiple

personality disorder) could develop a self-mutilating “alter,” and the resultant scars would

mystify the primary personality. On the other hand, the etiology – and even the existence – of

dissociative identity disorder remains controversial. Extreme psychological states of this sort

remain insufficiently understood, and we ought not to use one mystery to explain another.

Georges Marasco’s stigmata included a deep “spear” wound in her side. A photograph of

her displaying this mark exists, and the image is, I must admit, as impressive as it is disturbing.

The gouge seems every bit as deep as the one in Caravaggio’s famous painting of Thomas

examining the risen Christ. We lack, however, adequate documentation of this wound’s first

appearance. If it was self-inflicted, she committed an extremely dangerous act.

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Her disciples were mostly affluent women. They flocked to her home – where she lived

with a much younger sister named Irène – and donated to her cause. In short: Georges Marasco

found that she could make a living as a mystic and prophetess. She maintained a chapel in her

house, and officiated as “a sort of priestess.”

When not serving in a quasi-clerical capacity, she was often seen around town wearing

male costume.

This would not do. The church hierarchy turned against her, and the French priest who

served as her spiritual director was instructed to break off all relations. Her enemies spread many

wild rumors, the worst of which held that she had spied for Germans during the war.

The possibility of genuine hysterical illusions seems to be left out of the

account, and the fact that Georges was arrested by the Sûreté militaire,
discharged for want of evidence against her, and then taken into the
Belgian Secret Service, is chiefly referred to as a proof of her
extraordinary cleverness in finding influential protectors and in throwing
dust in the eyes of the officials.

This somewhat confusing passage may indicate that Bertha/Georges, having conducted

espionage on behalf of the Belgians during the war, now hoped for high-level protection.

In the winter of 1924, the police arrested her on a charge of obtaining money through

fraudulence. Despite the outcry from her followers and the spiritualist press, prosecutors

investigated every aspect of her history, as did the newspapers. Although they found no evidence

for the charge of treason (the government provided no details of her wartime efforts beyond the

admission that she had served nobly) her inquisitors did uncover a skeletonized closet.

They learned that Bertha Mrazek had been a difficult child. Her disreputable parents had

turned the girl out into the streets when she was still in her teens. She joined the Van Breen
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Brothers’ Circus, and soon did stints as a quick-sketch artist, a contortionist, and – of all things –

a lion tamer. After that, she sang at the famous Chat Noir nightclub, a gathering place for artists,

mystics and avant-garde bon vivants. She was, in short, a classic bohemian hell-raiser.

Irène, born in 1913, was her daughter, not her sister. The father was said to be an artist.

This “backstory” would shock few people in the 21st century. In the 1920s, however,

religious people expected their miraculées to have more family-friendly biographies. Most of the

public turned against Georges Marasco.

Her transgressive sexuality suggests the possibility of a romantic liaison with Edith

Cavell. That notion has never before seen print, although the idea must have seeped into a few

minds during the high point of the Marasco controversy. Cavell (who died shortly before her 50th

birthday) seems never to have taken an interest in any man, although she narrowly escaped a

proposal from her twit of a cousin. Nevertheless, her deep religious convictions and bourgeois

background probably confined her to an asexual existence.

The court declared Georges Marasco schizophrenic and had her committed to an asylum

near Mons. On December 4, 1927, an editorialist in La Libre Belgique protested her harsh

treatment. The writer claimed that Marasco was lucid most of the time, although life at the

asylum would probably soon drive her as mad as the other inmates.

After that, she disappears from history.

I don’t believe that all memory of her case should vanish. If we study only the “good”

claims of religious paranormality, we massage the record to the point of deception. Georges

Marasco claimed to see visions: How does she differ from the universally beloved Bernadette?

Or from Joan of Arc, another transvestite?3 Marasco allegedly bore the stigmata: How does she
3
It has been argued, not least by Joan herself, that she adopted male clothing as a form of self-protection while out
in the field with soldiers. But even when she functioned as a courtier to Charles VII – a role she played more often
than some biographers admit – she dressed in the height of mens’ fashion. For a brief period she was one of the
richest women in France, and the one indulgence she permitted herself was luxuriant male costume.
Visions – Georges Marasco – page 7

differ from Padre Pio? She allegedly healed and prophesied: How does she differ from the early

Christians at Pentecost?

I am not saying that her miracles were genuine; neither am I saying that she was a hoaxer.

My argument is this: Many Christians of her day applied differing standards to her case because

she did not conform to their social preconceptions. Nightclubs, bohemia, gender confusion,

unwed motherhood: This is not a resume designed to appeal to conservatives. Thus, off she went

to the madhouse. Had she fit cultural expectations, she might now be beatified.

Father Thurston hesitantly suggests that her “miracles” stemmed from some factor

classifiable as non-divine and non-infernal, yet paranormal – “paranormal” meaning, in this

instance, inexplicable to current science though not necessarily to future science. Perhaps. I

cannot rule out this idea, just as I cannot rule out fraud. But if a non-theological paranormal

factor operated in this instance, then perhaps we should presume that this same factor operates in

Church-approved miracles.

Amusingly, Montague Summers believed that Marasco’s eccentric behavior indicates that

she had “entered into a formal or tacit compact with the fiend.”4 Many American fundamentalist

preachers would offer a cognate explanation. But Summers himself was one of the most

eccentric people who ever lived – and I’m tempted to say something similar about many

American fundamentalist preachers.

4
Montague Summers, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, London: Rider & Co., 1950; p. 204.