Orrin Devinsky, a former student of Geschwind’s, has been a pioneer himself in the investigation of temporal lobe epilepsy and the great range of neuropsychiatric experiences which may be associated with it — autoscopy, out-of-body experiences, déjà vu and jamais vu, hyperfamiliarity, and ecstatic states during seizures, as well as personality changes between seizures. He and his colleagues have been able to perform clinical and video EEG monitoring in patients as they are having ecstatic-religious seizures, and thus to observe the precise coinciding of their “theophanies” with seizure activity in temporal lobe seizure foci (nearly always these are right-sided).9
Such revelations may take different forms; Devinsky has told me of one woman who, following a head injury, started to have brief episodes of déjà vu and a strange, indescribable smell. After a cluster of these complex partial seizures, she entered an exalted state in which God, with the form and voice of an angel, told her to run for Congress. Though she had never been religious or political before, she acted on God’s words at once.10
On occasion, ecstatic hallucinations can be dangerous, although this is very rare. Devinsky and his colleague George Lai described how one of their patients had a seizure-related vision in which “he saw Christ and heard a voice that commanded him to kill his wife and then himself. He proceeded to act upon the hallucinations,” killing his wife and then stabbing himself. This patient ceased to have seizures after the seizure focus in his right temporal lobe was removed.
Such epileptic hallucinations bear a considerable resemblance to the command hallucinations of psychosis, even though the epileptic patient may have no psychiatric history. It takes a strong (and skeptical) person to resist such hallucinations and to refuse them either credence or obedience, especially if they have a revelatory or epiphanic quality and seem to point to a special — and perhaps exalted — destiny.
As William James observed, an acute and passionate religious conviction in a single person can sway thousands of people. The life of Joan of Arc exemplified this. People have puzzled for nearly six hundred years as to how a farmer’s daughter with no formal education could have found such a sense of mission and succeeded in getting thousands of others to aid her in an attempt to drive the English out of France. The early hypotheses of divine (or diabolic) inspiration have given way to medical ones, with psychiatric diagnoses vying with neurological ones. Much evidence is available from the transcripts of her trial (and her “rehabilitation” twenty-five years later) and from the recollections of contemporaries. None of these is conclusive, but they do suggest, at least, that Joan of Arc may have had temporal lobe epilepsy with ecstatic auras.
Joan experienced visions and voices from the age of thirteen. These came in discrete episodes lasting seconds or minutes at most. She was very frightened by the first visitation, but later she derived great joy and an explicit sense of mission from her visions. The episodes were sometimes precipitated by the sounds of church bells. Joan described her first “visitations”:
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.
