Makmahod in France?

Sometimes while I am praying my daily Rosary -- my discursive mind preoccupied with rattling off the Latin formulae, my imaginative mind centered on Christ -- I will receive flashes of extremely vivid mental imagery. These are typically very brief but of such intense clarity that they seem somehow clearer than ordinary physical vision. I received such an image today.

It was essentially the image seen on the Ace of Swords in the Tarot: a luminous hand holding aloft a sword with a gold crown hovering like a halo around the blade. This is a very familiar image to me, and I was not surprised to see it today, as it closely resembles the coat of arms of Joan of Arc, my patron saint, who was executed 593 years ago today. A novel feature had been added, though: Something was written on the blade, in capital letters separated by centered dots. I have reconstructed the inscription as follows:

· L · R · D · M · E · R · A · N · S · E · A · S · C ·

The image was only visible for a fraction of a second, so it was impossible to take in and remember the exact sequence of letters. However, I am 100% confident that I have reconstructed it correctly, triangulating from three different impressions about what it means.

My first impression was that it essentially said, in somewhat garbled spelling, "Lord, me answer. Ask." I understood this to mean that if you want to receive knowledge from God, it is necessary to formulate and ask a specific question -- though that point is somewhat undercut by the fact that I received what is in this post without asking anything in particular!

My second impression was that it was an anagram of "Arc's realm ends." Given the context, I of course thought first of Joan of Arc and the Kingdom of France. That kingdom did indeed end, and Joan's banner was burned in the Revolution. Joan was never known as Arc in her lifetime, though, and arc also means the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel. As I mentioned in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," for me a rainbow represents the word world:

In my very early childhood my thinking was mostly visual, and abstract words generally each had a specific mental picture associated with them. I remember that I often used to pray "Thank you for the world," and that the image that always accompanied the word world was a rainbow.

"Arc's realm," then, refers not only to France but to all the kingdoms of the world.

My third impression was that each of the letters stood for a word -- and no sooner had I formulated that thought than I knew, conceptually if not literally, what words they stood for. As soon as I'd finished my Rosary, I went straight to a French Bible to confirm my hunch. The inscription stands for this:

Le royaume du monde est remis à notre Seigneur et à son Christ.

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15).

I'm sure many of my Mormon readers will immediately have recognized the significance of this being written on a sword. According to a discourse by Brigham Young, this very phrase was written on the blade of the Sword of Laban:

When Joseph got the plates, the angel instructed him to carry them back to the hill Cumorah, which he did. Oliver says that when Joseph and Oliver went there, the hill opened, and they walked into a cave, in which there was a large and spacious room. He says he did not think, at the time, whether they had the light of the sun or artificial light; but that it was just as light as day. They laid the plates on a table; it  was a large table that stood in the room. Under this table there was a pile of plates as much as two feet high, and there were altogether in this room more plates than probably many wagon loads; they were piled up in the corners and along the walls. The first time they went there the sword of Laban hung upon the wall; but when they went again it had been taken down and laid upon the table across the gold plates; it was unsheathed, and on it was written these words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ."

We call it the Sword of Laban, but it may well be of nobler origin than that. According to several secondhand reports, collected by Don Bradley in his indispensable book The Lost 116 Pages, it was also the sword of Joshua, wielded in the conquest of Canaan, and was very likely originally made for (or even by) Joseph in Egypt and carried out of that country in the Exodus with his bones.

Can we add Joan of Arc to the list of possible bearers of this storied blade? Perhaps. The origins of her sword are mysterious. She found it behind a church altar, having been led to it by her voices, and it appeared to be of great antiquity. Who knows who put it there or where it originally came from? At any rate, whether or not Joan's sword was literally and historically the Sword of Laban, it seems undeniable that today's vision is identifying the two, at least symbolically.