THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT JOAN OF ARC!
One of the perks of having the ability to communicate with higher dimensional light beings is that I can also speak with famous people from the past and get the inside scoop on their lives. We all know Joan of Arc, and I think a lot of us wonder what her life was like from her perspective. After spending some time hanging out with her on the energetic plane, I decided to give everyone some information about her life that for one reason or another was never passed down.
I think one thing I learned is that a lot of the information we know about Joan is actually pretty accurate, some of it is completely made up, like the stories or paintings about her chasing off prostitutes with swords. It's almost laughable, if it wasn't so insulting. Keep in mind Joan grew up in extreme poverty and most likely saw people starve to death or come very close to it. She knew what it meant to survive, and what people had to do to survive. She would never look down upon or chastise a woman for prostituting herself in order to be able to feed herself or her children. If anything, the only people Joan judged in that situation were the men who took advantage of those women. However, like a lot of things with Joan's life the church decided at some point to make her into this virgin sent down from God. She never meant to be a symbol of virginity or promiscuity for that matter, this idea of her sexuality being such a central part of her story was something that was placed on her, not something she chose for herself.
With that being said, it's important to keep in mind that when the french referred to her as la pucelle or the maid which indicated she was a virgin, it wasn't so much referring to her sexuality as much as it was a reference to her being very young and naive. I don't mean naive to be insulting, but rather that she was a child who convinced the King of France to give her an army, something an adult who was overly ambitious wouldn't even conceive of. Her virginity being in tack is also more a reference, like to that of the Goddess Athena, who was a virgin in the sense that she was whole unto herself. Meaning she didn't need a man to complete her. This whole idea of her actual virginity being a part of the discussion is more just modern day people placing that on her, and had nothing to do with the meaning of it at the time.
So what info do we not know about Joan that we should know. Well for one there was always talk about how she dressed in men's clothing. Was she just trying to be ahead of her time in fashion? It would only be a few hundred years later that women started wearing jeans and pants. Or was it more practical. I guess I would say have you ever tried to ride a horse while wearing a corset dress? Now have you ever tried to ride a horse while wearing a dress like that while riding into battle? She wore pants for practical reasons. It wasn't even to try to get respect from the men or to try to pass as a man herself, it really was because she was leading an army and it would've been impossible to do so in anything other than men's clothing.
Did the men in her army respect her? It was a mixture. The men who tended to be from very poor areas, like Joan was, did. They were the men who mostly ended up fighting the wealthy people's battles, and gender roles were very different amongst the poor versus the wealthy. The royalty at that time as well as the upperclass, were very specific in the ways men were allowed to behave and women were allowed to behave. Despite the fact that the women in the highest levels of society were educated they were actually more oppressed than women like Joan. Why is that? Well because poverty in some ways can be a really strong equalizer between men and women. When you live in poverty everyone in the family regardless of sex is required to work in the fields and put in a hard days labor in order to make sure that you don't starve to death. Joan didn't grow up with the great divide between women and men like her royal counterparts. Because of this girls were much more along the lines of tomboys and so boys saw them in a lot of ways more as equals. The men and women in poverty saw Joan as a giant symbol of hope, because she was able to get out of it. It was like wow if she can do it, as someone who isn't just poor, but is also a girl, then I as a man have hope. They respected her. However, this didn't apply to the men in her army who were formally trained and were from the higher levels of society. They looked down upon her for being poor and for being a girl, and didn't in anyway want to be seen as taking orders from someone who was so beneath them.
So how did she deal with those men, and get the men in her army to respect her? Well this is something the history books don't know. She liked to take all the men who disrespected her or sexually harassed her and put them right up in the front. She put the men she liked the most way in the back. As you can imagine if you're right up in front riding into war your chances of survival are going to be much less than if you are in the back. Seeing that the front row takes the brunt of the battle. I guess she figured if they were so tough then they shouldn't have any problems being in the bravest position.
Did she have a mental illness? This is probably the most insulting thing that has ever been said about her. That she suffered from some sort of mental illness and thats why she had visions and heard voices. Just because men aren't powerful, and have no concept of women's intuition and aren't able to do anything powerful, doesn't mean they should go around projecting that onto women! Just because she was able to accomplish more than any man in her country could, and became even more powerful and influential than the king, despite being poor, illiterate, and a child, doesn't mean she was crazy. Stop discrediting her and insulting women everywhere.
Did Joan of Arc have a boyfriend? This is something I'm really surprised no one has ever seem to brought up. I mean she did have an army of hundreds or possibly thousands of men. While she was a young woman, very much a child, she was also a teenage girl, and aren't all teenage girls even ones who lead armies at least a little boy crazy? I guess everyone figures that she was too busy taking back France to have time for boys, or maybe they like the idea of this powerful independent young woman free from men. Well what I gathered from our time together is that yes she in fact did have a boyfriend, someone around her age who was part of her army and was of a much higher social class than she was. She was very much in love with him. How the history books missed this one, I guess only lends to the power of a woman to keep what means the most to her so incredibly close to her heart. With that being said, she did make it clear that everyone in her army and the people in general at that time were aware she had a boyfriend.
What was it like in jail? This part was awful. She spent the first part of her time full of hope waiting for someone to come rescue her. You can imagine how she felt when they never showed up. She really believed her army would find a way to get her out. I did some research to see if there were any rescue attempts, and it seems that there was one, that completely failed. She also tried to escape on her own when she jumped out the window. This was not a suicide attempt as some people have said, but rather her attempt at running away, it failed. She was tortured beyond anything that anyone can imagine. While the history books mention a little bit of it, they really don't get the full scope of how bad that torture was. Probably, because she did such an amazing job putting on a really strong front when she was being put on trial. The truth is the torture was so horrendous that I didn't even feel comfortable writing about a lot of what she was put through.
Why did she agree to sign a confession, and then why did she take it back? She agreed to sign a confession in exchange for her freedom, because she quite frankly was tired. She wanted to go home, and she most importantly wanted to go back to her boyfriend whom she was incredibly in love with. After she signed that confession, she was brutually raped and beaten by one of the guards, along with two other men who were both part of the royal court. After that she started wearing pants again. She then took back her confession and decided she would rather die, than live with the pain of being raped. Rape is worse than death, and anyone who has experienced it knows that. Somewhere in that pain, and the fact that nothing could be worse than that, even being burned alive, she took back her confession and told them to go fuck themselves. She wasn't going to let anyone have any power over her. So she died. She remembers seeing this crowd of people all of whom came to watch her die. No one helped her.
Given the way she died, alone, abandoned, betrayed, she is very surprised and quite honestly shocked that anyone even remembered her, let alone that she has become such an integral part of history. She likes that she's inspired so many young girls, and hopes that if there is one thing that they can take from her life; it is to always fight for what you believe in, and that you as a girl are more powerful than you can imagine. Her power came from being a woman.
