The musical scale begins with Domrémy and ends -- until the 19th century, and still in most non-Anglophone countries -- with an acronym for Sancte Iohannes, "Saint John." It did not escape my notice that it could just as easily be an acronym for Sancta Iohanna, "Saint Joan."
Last night, having started Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival and found that the first chapter was just a republished magazine interview, I wondered if the whole book was like that, so I flipped forward to check, opening to a random page. As the synchronicity fairies would have it, that page was p. 27, from which a familiar name stared up at me:
There are certain parallels that are quite obvious, and one of them that comes to mind is Saint Joan hearing voices and gaining direction. Granted, she was a farm girl, and perhaps she was growing mushrooms in the backyard. . . .
I consider this a fairly specific sync. My having been thinking about my patron saint is nothing new, of course, but I typically call her "Joan of Arc" or "the Maid." In this case I was specifically thinking of the title Sancta Iohanna, "Saint Joan," the same title used by McKenna's interlocutor (yes, this was another interview). It is really a rather unusual way of referring -- especially in passing, in a secular context -- to the personage for whom the most common name by a very large margin is Joan of Arc.
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| Google Ngram Viewer |
I'm sure if we could somehow filter out references to Shaw's play, and instances where Saint Joan is followed by of Arc, the difference in frequency would be even starker.
As for the suggestion that Joan may have been "growing mushrooms in the backyard," my first reaction is of course to roll my eyes, but I suppose I should be less dismissive. In the context of McKenna's belief that "entheogens" allow us to make contact with the divine, this proposal does not amount to calling Joan's visions pathological, and it is well established that God sometimes uses altered states (e.g. dreaming, fasting, meditation, the prophetic trances of the Old Testament) as vehicles for revelation. Nor does the mushroom hypothesis "explain away" what made Joan exceptional. After all, most people who take mushrooms become New Age doofuses, not saints.
3 comments:
Unless these mushrooms had a long-term effect, the theory doesn't really work as the communications persisted. My explanation for the decline in experiences like this would be that the veil thickened as history progressed, making all kinds of interactions like this more difficult.
By the way, I suppose there could be an entheogen equivalent, endiabologens(?), that soften a person up for demonic influence eg caffeine with its anxiety effects.
There's that word again. The other day, I became more attentive to "vehicle" after reading the later comments on your post about Google disappearing Arnie. It was only afterwards that I read the long article on Hale-Bopp that Debbie linked. Looking at it again, I see it uses the word twice. The first instance is in context of Noah's ark -- "It was the vehicle that God used to deliver them up above the chaos" -- but it was the second, regarding the Titanic, that stuck with me: "Some may find it incredible to imagine that God would speak to the world through a shipwreck, not to mention a secular film. But God can use whatever vehicle he chooses."
I've previously said I consider syncs to be a work of God, but even before I started noticing them, I'd come to recognise he can reach us in ways no-one would expect. The syncs have really solidified that for me. Maybe something to keep in mind in these strange times.
@WG
Noah's ark, you say?
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