Joan of Arc’s Voices

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Part 1

Beginning when she was about 13, Joan of Arc began hearing voices, which she identified as angels and saints through whom God was addressing her. These saints included the important French Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret, all of whom she would have known well from her religious instruction. It’s not probable that Joan simply made this up for attention, so clearly she was “hearing” something. So what we need to do is ask whether she was actually hearing the voices of saints from heaven, telling her things God wanted her to do, or if she was delusional or hallucinating.

The first case would be very hard to prove, but among the things one might offer up include the very obvious fact that the voices eventually deluded Joan into a very agonizing death. This might well be what God wants to happen, but that would have to be the subject of another topic.

In the second interpretation, Joan’s messages would then of necessity be ones she had come up with herself. We often think it’s not possible for anyone to know so much about things that they are not immersed in (Joan was not a member of the court, nor was she a member of the military), but the truth is we glean an enormous amount of information from the conversations, various sources of news, gossip, the pulpit, and so forth. We all actually know far more about what’s “going on” than we usually suppose. There is no reason to suppose that Joan wasn’t subconsciously communicating this knowledge to her conscious mind via visions and voices.

And the fact is, hallucinations are fairly common, often intense and very frequently religious in nature. And young adults, especially girls, are especially susceptible.

Joan’s messages started off quite brief and simple, and got longer and more detailed as time went on. Again, this is hardly surprising, given that she was now immersed in policy, the running of the military, and so forth. With more intimate knowledge, more detail becomes “available.” And this is also something that seems true of hallucination development that psychologists see today.

Why would Joan start having hallucinations in 1425? Well, these things are often the result of some sort of trauma, often emotional. Joan’s hometown was burned in 1425 (during the Hundred Years War), and the ongoing fracas of that long conflict may well have suggested to Joan’s unconscious mind a mission to end the war – if only for the sake of her own town, family and emotional peace. Oh, and by the way, her father was also trying to marry her off at the same time – usually another good emotional prod.

The point of all this is very simple. Joan heard voices. Did she really hear voices? I think the answer to that is yes, in the sense her brain registered the sound of voices speaking familiar words (in the French of the day, of course). But did Joan hear voices that were anything other than her own manufacture? And how would it ever be possible for her to even know?

I myself have “heard” things that clearly were not there. I think everyone does. (As it happens, at 71 I now suffer from tinnitus, a constant, never-ending ringing in my right ear. That “sound” is not actually emanating from anywhere. It is a complete manufacture of the nerve impulses between my ear and my brain. The ear drum, hammer, anvil and stirrup bones, all have nothing whatever to do with it. There is no sound, and yet I hear sound. I “know” the cause, and even still I cannot distinguish it from the actual business of hearing an external sound at high frequency.

So in that sense, did Joan actually hear a voice not of her own (or her brain’s own) manufacture? I do not think so. Most physicians today would not think so – and do not think so when new patients report similar experiences.

We "experience" things all the time that have no external cause. Often enough, these are brief and quite inexplicable:

• the sudden impression of being what was often called (in my day) "spaced out"
• hearing our name called
• the feeling of being watched
• recognizing with absolute certainty a friend on the street who's been long dead or gone, causing our body hair to stand on end
• in fact a virtually endless list of impressions, feelings, made more or less tangible depending on the circumstances and our state of mind/being

Much of this is really just the result of the brain unconsciously processing the ever-present and absolutely daunting stream of data that is pouring in through our senses, and trying to find patterns and meaning in case some reaction is necessary. Strong patterns are "raised" to the conscious level for more processing or decisioning -- although some decisions may already have been made and acted on at the pre-conscious level. Thus the hair standing on end...

Here is a key notion to consider: everything that we experience is filtered through our own expectations. Joan did not hear St. Peter. She heard the important saints in her church in her home town of Domrémy, in eastern France. Like Joan, we all interpret what we can't understand, and that interpretation will more often than not match our expectations.

Someone reminded me the other day that I play music (piano), and I do "lose myself" in the best of it from time to time. There are things that transport me "right out of myself," so-to-speak, in which I lose my sense of a world around me or time passing. But the music stops, the moment passes, and I do not interpret my experience, however strong, as having truly "stepped out of" time and self. I accept that there has been a state of altered conscious appreciation, but this does not seem or feel mysterious to me, and I think that's because I don't expect it to.

But what of the peyote-laced shaman, or the deep-in-meditation adept? What are/were they expecting, and how, based on those expectations, might they interpret their experiences?

Joan may have suffered from any number of physical or psychological conditions about which from this distance we can only guess. And she may not. But everything that she experienced, every word that her voices said to her, every idea that came into her head -- however it got there -- was subject matter present in her world and well known to her. Remember, Joan lived in an isolated area that remained loyal to the French crown despite being surrounded by Burgundian lands. Several local raids occurred during her childhood and on one occasion her village was burned. She knew, as the whole village knew, what was going on in the world around her. And the saints she heard were the saints that were most represented in the village church just a short walk from her home.

Imagine that you are in the carnival "hall of mirrors." Always an amusing and somewhat unsettling experience because you can't really tell whether the light image entering your eyes is unreflected (i.e. representative of something real in front of you) or reflected on or even more times. Your eye receives only the image, your brain can only deal the electro-chemical information fed to it along the optic nerve, across the optic chiasm, and back through the visual cortex of the brain. From that, it must strive to make sense of what it "sees." What makes the hall of mirrors so much fun sometimes is that very often, the brain can't make perfect sense out of what it thinks it sees.

Surely the same must be true for other experiences which might be the result of internal, rather than external, misdirection. If auditory areas of the brain are stimulated and produce signals that are recognized as "sound" (as in my tinnitus) how would the conscious mind be able to determine whether or not there was in fact an external auditory stimulus? It can't, but because it "hears," that is precisely what it must and does do.

The cognitive part of the brain is simply left with the problem of trying to interpret the signals it is receiving. It will do this through the lens of its own previous experiences. Joan met important saints in her village. Catholics meet Mary, which Protestants almost never do. Where Christians see demons, Muslims see Jinni, and so forth.

But here's a key point to consider -- the higher brain's interpretation of what it's experienced may not (and probably does not) relate to any sort of actual reality.

continued...

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Part 2

Now, it is known that the Orientation Association Area of the brain (see Newberg/D'Aquili, Why God Won't Go Away) helps to distinguish "you" from "non-you." Meditation may well be able to quiet its function (and some drugs certainly can), leaving the higher brain bereft of that input. How would that feel? How would the brain interpret such a thing?

Would that not depend on what its expectations are, just as Joan expected Saints Margaret and Catherine? Mightn't the native shaman see himself somehow connected to the spirit world -- inhabited by the nature spirits he knows and the ancestors he remembers? Mightn't the "non-dual" indoctrinated Buddhist interpret the experience, instead of as the deprivation of input of the OAA, rather as the "merging" of the self with the rest of what is -- exactly as he expects?

A while ago, while I discussing this stuff, someone said the following to me:

“...with the explanation that some voices have been a self-delusion, it is not possible to explain everything with this "explanation". So from my point of view it does not make sense to try to explain everything with some kind of hallucination. Or if you do that, you have to question the reality as well..."

Well, in answer to that, I shall try to show that there is something to the idea of "reality," and that there may be ways to sort out the real from the unreal.

"Reality" seems available to all of us, regardless of belief and regardless of capability. (By "reality" here, I am talking about the physical universe, the universe of mass and energy and all that goes with it.) The blind man and I will both, for example, come to a sudden, possibly painful, stop when we encounter a closed glass door. We might say that "reality kicks back," as Samuel Johnson suggested to Bishop Berkeley.

One way or another, there is no part of the reality in question that is not in principle available to all observers, using some or all of our sensory apparatus. The fact that some have sensory apparatus that doesn't work (as in the blind many above), or that operates differently from others, means the perception of the nature of the reality may well be different, but the essence of the reality will still exist and can be shared.

And what do we find with spiritual or supernatural experience? They cannot be shared. They are private within in each person's own "experience."

That brings us to "experience" itself. Nothing that we experience is actually experienced anywhere or in any sense except in our minds. Walking into a wall would result in a sudden stop for our physical body, that is certain. But without the mind to be aware of that stop, there would be no experience of it.

It is true, as my friend who heard voices points out above, that there are certain kinds of experience that are entirely generated within the mind/brain, and that are perfectly indistinguishable from experiences perceived by the mind/brain through the senses. Some are merely hallucinations, others are much more wonderful. Some, like anosognosia (see The Brain That Misplaced Its Body), are beginning to be understood, but not all that well yet.

Consider, for example, the special smell of someone who you have been wildly and erotically attracted to. There are pheromones contained in that smell that you are not aware of, and those pheromones cause a cascade of chemical reactions in your brain and therefore your body that are very real responses to a very real physical stimulus. But the wonderful thing is is that these same, very real responses can easily result from just the memory of that smell! Very real responses to a non-existent physical stimulus.

Unless, of course, you accept that the business of memory is an operation of the very real, physical brain.

But go back to the first point, again. There appear to be two kinds of experiences: those that correspond to an objective reality, and those that do not. The first sort are eminently shareable, the second kind private and unshareable.

Experience of anything -- of reality or of God (real or not) -- then, is only a thing of the mind. But any two beings possessed of any two kinds of mind can be made somehow aware of ("experience") an encounter with a solid object like a wall. Any two minds can in principle (and usually in practice) somehow find a way to share aspects of the experience of any reality as defined above.

Why, then, should this not be the case for any other sort of reality (external to the workings of the brain/mind)? Why should one person hear voices of saints familiar to her, while others remain stubbornly deaf to all such experiences? Why should one woman imagine that her son's arm is attached to her body (in the article linked above), when the doctor observing her is perfectly aware that the arm she's imagining is her own, paralyzed one?

I think that the answer is clear. The mind that "experiences" is spiritual by its very nature -- because it can only experience indirectly, through an enormous manufactory and cobbling together of vast streams of unconnected data through multiple senses and building an internal representation of reality. Because the mind has the ability to do that, when confronted with sensory data, and because memory is an enormous evolutionary advantage (not having to learn which plants are poison every time you're hungry!), the mind is also capable of building internal representations without external, real causes affecting the senses.

But the way to tell the difference, in my view, is to determine what can -- in principle and in practice -- be shared, and what cannot. That which cannot be shared outside of the mind that conceived it, cannot be said to be real in any sense to any mind other than the one that conceived it.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

I'm quite content in my view that spiritual entities spoke to her. She was quite an amazing person.

 

[ChristineM]

My view is a form of psychosis. My brother in law has schizophrenia and hears voices most of the time. His illness has led me to meet many other people with similar symptoms. Without exception their voices are contemporary, relating to current events.

Despite their illness many of them lead normal lives, some are exceptional in their chosen field using their voices to enhance their own creative thinking.

I cannot contemplate the oppressive religious climate of the early 1400s but imagine that Jeanne d'Arc's voices were representative of that period.

 

[metis]

In response to the OP, my response is "Who knows?". If someone says they "hear voices", maybe they do or maybe they don't. Who am I to judge?

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

My view is a form of psychosis. My brother in law has schizophrenia and hears voices most of the time. His illness has led me to meet many other people with similar symptoms. Without exception their voices are contemporary, relating to current events.

Despite their illness many of them lead normal lives, some are exceptional in their chosen field using their voices to enhance their own creative thinking.

I cannot contemplate the oppressive religious climate of the early 1400s but imagine that Jeanne d'Arc's voices were representative of that period.

She wasn't mentally ill, according to experts:

"A number of more recent scholars attempted to explain her visions in psychiatric or neurological terms. Potential diagnoses have included epilepsy, migraine, tuberculosis, and schizophrenia.[112] None of the putative diagnoses have gained consensus support, and many scholars have argued that she didn't display any of the objective symptoms that can accompany the mental illnesses which have been suggested, such as schizophrenia. Dr. Philip Mackowiak dismissed the possibility of schizophrenia and several other disorders (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and ergot poisoning) in a chapter on Joan of Arc in his book Post-Mortem in 2007.[113]

Dr. John Hughes rejected the idea that Joan of Arc suffered from epilepsy in an article in the academic journal Epilepsy & Behavior.[114]

Two experts who analysed the hypothesis of temporal lobe tuberculoma in the medical journal Neuropsychobiology expressed their misgivings about this claim in the following statement:

It is difficult to draw final conclusions, but it would seem unlikely that widespread tuberculosis, a serious disease, was present in this "patient" whose life-style and activities would surely have been impossible had such a serious disease been present.[115]

In response to another such theory alleging that her visions were caused by bovine tuberculosis as a result of drinking unpasteurized milk, historian Régine Pernoud wrote that if drinking unpasteurized milk could produce such potential benefits for the nation, then the French government should stop mandating the pasteurization of milk.[116]

Joan of Arc gained favor in the court of King Charles VII, who accepted her as sane. He would have been familiar with the signs of madness because his own father, Charles VI, had suffered from it. Charles VI was popularly known as "Charles the Mad", and much of France's political and military decline during his reign could be attributed to the power vacuum that his episodes of insanity had produced. The previous king had believed he was made of glass, a delusion no courtier had mistaken for a religious awakening. Fears that King Charles VII would manifest the same insanity may have factored into the attempt to disinherit him at Troyes. This stigma was so persistent that contemporaries of the next generation would attribute to inherited madness the breakdown that England's King Henry VI was to suffer in 1453: Henry VI was nephew to Charles VII and grandson to Charles VI. The court of Charles VII was shrewd and skeptical on the subject of mental health.[117][118] Upon Joan's arrival at Chinon the royal counselor Jacques Gélu cautioned,

One should not lightly alter any policy because of conversation with a girl, a peasant ... so susceptible to illusions; one should not make oneself ridiculous in the sight of foreign nations.

She remained astute to the end of her life and the rehabilitation trial testimony frequently marvels at her astuteness:

Often they [the judges] turned from one question to another, changing about, but, notwithstanding this, she answered prudently, and evinced a wonderful memory.[119]

Her subtle replies under interrogation even forced the court to stop holding public sessions.[79]"
Joan of Arc - Wikipedia

 

[ChristineM]

She wasn't mentally ill, according to experts:

"A number of more recent scholars attempted to explain her visions in psychiatric or neurological terms. Potential diagnoses have included epilepsy, migraine, tuberculosis, and schizophrenia.[112] None of the putative diagnoses have gained consensus support, and many scholars have argued that she didn't display any of the objective symptoms that can accompany the mental illnesses which have been suggested, such as schizophrenia. Dr. Philip Mackowiak dismissed the possibility of schizophrenia and several other disorders (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and ergot poisoning) in a chapter on Joan of Arc in his book Post-Mortem in 2007.[113]

Dr. John Hughes rejected the idea that Joan of Arc suffered from epilepsy in an article in the academic journal Epilepsy & Behavior.[114]

Two experts who analysed the hypothesis of temporal lobe tuberculoma in the medical journal Neuropsychobiology expressed their misgivings about this claim in the following statement:

It is difficult to draw final conclusions, but it would seem unlikely that widespread tuberculosis, a serious disease, was present in this "patient" whose life-style and activities would surely have been impossible had such a serious disease been present.[115]

In response to another such theory alleging that her visions were caused by bovine tuberculosis as a result of drinking unpasteurized milk, historian Régine Pernoud wrote that if drinking unpasteurized milk could produce such potential benefits for the nation, then the French government should stop mandating the pasteurization of milk.[116]

Joan of Arc gained favor in the court of King Charles VII, who accepted her as sane. He would have been familiar with the signs of madness because his own father, Charles VI, had suffered from it. Charles VI was popularly known as "Charles the Mad", and much of France's political and military decline during his reign could be attributed to the power vacuum that his episodes of insanity had produced. The previous king had believed he was made of glass, a delusion no courtier had mistaken for a religious awakening. Fears that King Charles VII would manifest the same insanity may have factored into the attempt to disinherit him at Troyes. This stigma was so persistent that contemporaries of the next generation would attribute to inherited madness the breakdown that England's King Henry VI was to suffer in 1453: Henry VI was nephew to Charles VII and grandson to Charles VI. The court of Charles VII was shrewd and skeptical on the subject of mental health.[117][118] Upon Joan's arrival at Chinon the royal counselor Jacques Gélu cautioned,

One should not lightly alter any policy because of conversation with a girl, a peasant ... so susceptible to illusions; one should not make oneself ridiculous in the sight of foreign nations.

She remained astute to the end of her life and the rehabilitation trial testimony frequently marvels at her astuteness:

Often they [the judges] turned from one question to another, changing about, but, notwithstanding this, she answered prudently, and evinced a wonderful memory.[119]

Her subtle replies under interrogation even forced the court to stop holding public sessions.[79]"
Joan of Arc - Wikipedia

My guess (and just like anyone else) it is a guess is that she suffered a form of schizophrenia. I have had experience of seeings similar "manifestations" for the last 17 years. People with serious mental health issues appearing completely sane, even functioning above what would be considered normal.