Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

(provided by Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc.)

Names: Dumsday, Travis, author.

Title: The Marian apparitions at Zeitoun: an evidential inquiry/ Travis Dumsday.

Description: Yonkers. NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2024. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-0-88141-761-6 (paperback) 978-0-88141-762-3 (electronic)

This Summary was written by the author of the book.

The largest mass religious experiences in recorded history occurred in a suburb of Cairo called Zeitoun between April 1968 and May 1971.

Over the course of this three-year period, vast numbers of people witnessed the remarkable phenomena taking place at St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church. The phenomena began on the night of April 2, 1968 (a date now commemorated on the Coptic Orthodox calendar as the Feast of St. Mary of Zeitoun), when a group of Muslim public transit employees working across the street from the church suddenly saw a woman in bright white atop its multi-domed roof.

Initially fearing it was someone about to commit suicide, they shouted at her to wait for help and called authorities. But they and other passers-by on the street then realized that the woman atop the church was in fact glowing, emanating radiant light.

Word quickly spread throughout the neighbourhood and a crowd assembled. Eventually the figure disappeared, though it reappeared above the church several nights later. It continued to appear at frequent (though irregular) intervals on dozens of nights thereafter. The apparition attracted increasingly massive nightly crowds to the church, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes more; Egyptian newspapers estimated crowds of over two hundred thousand on some evenings.

Those present on nights in which the phenomena took place were witnesses to an assortment of startling events:

the glowing, floating female figure (almost universally identified as the Virgin Mary by onlookers, both Muslim and Christian), who would sometimes appear for minutes at a time and sometimes stay for hours; other anomalous lights; glowing dove-like birds that glided through the air without ever flapping their wings, sometimes flying in a cross-formation; and there were widespread reports of miraculous healings. On some nights only one type of phenomenon would be manifested, while on others there would be multiple.

In the book The Marian Apparitions at Zeitoun:

An Evidential Inquiry (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2024), the history of these amazing occurrences is explored in detail. This exploration includes the examination of a wide assortment of direct eyewitness testimonies, plus the results of official investigations undertaken by the Egyptian government and the Coptic Orthodox patriarchate (both of whom judged the events to be of supernatural origin).

The book also provides an overview of all of the scientific explanations put forward that attempt to account for these events in naturalistic terms, and argues that they are unsatisfactory. Thus, at present the events at Zeitoun constitute powerful evidence for the reality of the supernatural.

Acknowledgements ix

PART ONE: THE APPARITIONS

1 Introduction 3

2 History 15

3 Witness Accounts 87

PART TWO: NATURALISTIC EXPLANATIONS

4 Tectonic Strain Theory 149

5 Mass Hallucination 187

6 Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory 201

7 Jungian Analytical Psychology 225

8 Technological Hoax 253

PART THREE: CONCLUSION

9 Conclusion 273

Works Citied 281

Index 297

The Marian Apparitions At Zeitoun