Abstract. – The initial failure to identify the Virgin Mary in an apparition, a widespread feature of Marian vision narratives in Europe, may well have psychodynamic implications of the sort advanced by Michael Carroll in his classic study, “The Cult of the Virgin Mary” (1986). However, in this article we argue that it also serves an important rhetorical role in Catholic knowledge structures that circulate both regionally and locally. Drawing principally upon our analysis of vision narratives from southern Spain, as well as other sources, we argue that the misidentification element is a central component of a general schema of human-supernatural interaction in the culture of European Catholicism. [Spain, popular Catholicism, Virgin Mary, miracles, apparitions]