I was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father’s garden . . . I heard this Voice to my right, towards the Church; rarely do I hear it without its being accompanied also by a light. This light comes from the same side as the Voice. Generally it is a great light. . . . When I heard it for the third time, I recognized that it was the Voice of an Angel. This voice has always guarded me well, and I have always understood it; it instructed me to be good and to go often to Church; it told me it was necessary for me to come into France . . . it said to me two or three times a week: “You must go into France.” . . . It said to me: “Go, raise the siege which is being made before the City of Orleans. Go!” . . . and I replied that I was but a poor girl, who knew nothing of riding or fighting. . . . There is never a day when I do not hear this Voice; and I have much need of it.
Many other aspects of Joan’s putative seizures, as well as evidence of her clarity, her reasonableness, and her modesty, were explored in a 1991 article by the neurologists Elizabeth Foote-Smith and Lydia Bayne. While they present a very plausible case, other neurologists disagree, and one cannot hope to see the matter definitively resolved. The evidence is soft, as it must be for all historical cases.
Ecstatic or religious or mystical seizures occur in only a small number of those who have temporal lobe epilepsy. Is this because there is something special—a preexisting disposition to religion or metaphysical belief—in these particular people? Or is it because the seizure stimulates particular parts of the brain that serve to mediate religious feeling?50 Both, of course, could be the case. And yet quite skeptical people, indifferent to religion, not given to religious belief, may—to their own astonishment—have a religious experience during a seizure.
Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, in a 1970 paper, provided several examples of this. One related to a bus conductor who had an ecstatic seizure while collecting fares:
He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. He felt he was literally in Heaven. He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in Heaven. . . . He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divine and angelic voices, for two days. Afterwards he was able to recall these experiences and he continued to believe in their validity. . . . During the next two years, there was no change in his personality; he did not express any peculiar notions but remained religious. . . . Three years later, following three seizures on three successive days, he became elated again. He stated that his mind had “cleared.” . . . During this episode he lost his faith.
He now no longer believed in heaven and hell, in an afterlife, or in the divinity of Christ. This second conversion—to atheism—carried the same excitement and revelatory quality as the original religious conversion. (Geschwind, in a 1974 lecture subsequently published in 2009, noted that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy might have multiple religious conversions and described one of his own patients as “a girl in her twenties who is now on her fifth religion.”)
Ecstatic seizures shake one’s foundations of belief, one’s world picture, even if one has previously been wholly indifferent to any thought of the transcendent or supernatural. And the universality of fervent mystical and religious feelings—a sense of the holy—in every culture suggests that there may indeed be a biological basis for them; they may, like aesthetic feelings, be part of our human heritage. To speak of a biological basis and biological precursors of religious emotion—and even, as ecstatic seizures suggest, a very specific neural basis, in the temporal lobes and their connections—is only to speak of natural causes. It says nothing of the value, the meaning, the “function” of such emotions, or of the narratives and beliefs we may construct on their basis.
9
Bisected: Hallucinations in the Half-Field
