"Joan of Arc and the Wound at the Porte Saint-Honoré" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Complete Book of Psychic Empowerment: Tools & Techniques for Growth & Empowerment"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 8
Joan of Arc and the Wound at the Porte Saint-Honoré
.jpg)
(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
On
the morning of Thursday, September 8th, 1429, Joan of Arc led the
French assault on the Porte Saint-Honoré,
one of Paris's fortified gates, in an attempt to retake the city from its
English and Burgundian defenders. She was struck down by a crossbow bolt
through the thigh while probing the water-filled moat, and had to be forcibly
carried from the field, still urging her soldiers onward even as she bled. It
was a real, thoroughly documented military defeat, one of the first serious
setbacks in a campaign that had, until that point, moved from triumph to
triumph. It also marks a useful pivot point for examining the claim underneath
her entire career: the voices and visions that put a teenage farm girl at the
head of a royal army in the first place.
Six
centuries of scholars, physicians, and clergy have tried to explain those
voices, and none of their explanations has managed to settle the question…
The siege itself is well documented across multiple contemporary and near-contemporary sources. Charles VII arrived at the outskirts of Paris on September 7th; the assault launched the next morning, directed at the wall between the gates of Saint-Honoré and Saint-Denis, with Joan positioned visibly on the earthworks calling for the city's surrender. The defense proved fierce enough that the French suffered heavy casualties without breaching any section of the gatehouse. Joan, wounded and eventually removed from the field against her will, wanted to renew the attack the following day; Charles's council overruled her and ordered a retreat instead, the first time her judgment had been so directly countermanded. It was, in hindsight, an early sign that the extraordinary run of military success following her emergence a year earlier had limits.
That
emergence itself rested entirely on Joan's own testimony about hearing voices,
beginning around age thirteen, which she identified as Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, guiding
her toward the mission of restoring Charles to his throne. Modern medicine has
spent the better part of a century trying to diagnose those voices
retrospectively, and the resulting literature reads less like a settled case
and more like an ongoing argument. Proposed explanations include several
distinct forms of epilepsy, most recently a specific hypothesis published by
neurologists Giuseppe d'Orsi and Paola Tinuper describing “idiopathic partial
epilepsy with auditory features,” pointing to Joan's own testimony that the
sound of church bells could trigger her experiences. Others have proposed
bovine tuberculosis, a genuinely common affliction of the era that can affect
the temporal lobe, or various forms of schizophrenia and psychosis.
Physician
Philip Mackowiak dismissed several of the leading hypotheses outright in his
own detailed analysis, and multiple researchers examining her trial testimony
have specifically noted that she displays none of the disorganized thought,
cognitive impairment, or other hallmark symptoms typically accompanying the
conditions proposed. There's also a more fundamental methodological objection
worth taking seriously: the primary source for nearly all of this retrospective
diagnosis is the transcript of her 1431 trial of condemnation,
a proceeding explicitly designed by hostile political and religious authorities
to convict her of heresy, making the underlying testimony, however detailed, a
document shaped by coercive and adversarial pressures rather than a neutral
clinical record. Diagnosing a fifteenth-century woman from an interrogation
transcript engineered to destroy her is a genuinely fraught exercise, whatever
conclusion it reaches.
Whatever
produced her experiences, the trial record shows a coherent, consistent witness
who never wavered in her account under sustained hostile questioning, and who
went to her execution in 1431 still affirming the reality of what she'd heard.
The voices may never be diagnosable at this remove. Her conviction that she'd
heard them was never seriously in doubt, even among the men who burned her for
it.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of a visionary
history still being argued over six centuries later, we're recommending a
practical guide to developing and discerning one's own intuitive and visionary
experience.
The
Complete Book of Psychic Empowerment: Tools & Techniques for Growth &
Empowerment
By Carl Llewllyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate, PhD | Llewellyn Worldwide
Joe H. Slate, a psychologist with decades of research into psychic phenomena, built this book specifically around the practical cultivation of intuitive and visionary ability, treating psychic experience as a genuine human capacity worth developing with structure and discernment rather than either uncritical acceptance or reflexive dismissal. The book moves through concrete exercises for strengthening psychic awareness, dream work, and precognitive ability, aimed at readers who want a grounded, systematic approach to experiences that, historically, have too often been left entirely to chance, or judged solely by hostile outside observers. That framework offers a useful, modern counterpoint to Joan's own story: a fifteenth-century visionary with no framework beyond her own faith and no one but hostile interrogators to evaluate her experience, against a contemporary approach that treats visionary and intuitive states as something to be understood, tested, and integrated safely. Slate's own clinical background lends real methodological seriousness to material that could otherwise drift into unfalsifiable claims.
This
is a practical development guide rather than a historical or medical text, and
readers wanting the deeper clinical debate over Joan's own experiences
specifically should pair it with the medical literature cited above. But for
readers of this magazine who finished today's post wondering how one might
actually learn to responsibly evaluate their own unusual experiences, rather
than facing them alone the way Joan ultimately did, Slate's book offers a
genuinely constructive starting point.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
Modern Occultist
2026. Modern Occultist Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.