Let’s blur for a moment the distinction of what exactly is a witch, let’s say that any heterodoxy which the natives of the fifteenth century may have found sinister is enough to be a witch. Let’s also ignore any unrelated crime she may have commited, such as treason against her rightful English king, which itself might be enough for the death penalty but doesn’t have much bearing on accusations of witchery.
The following information is presented in the appendix “JOAN OF ARC AND GILLES DE RAIS” to M A Murray’s now infamous The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.
Joan first encountered her Voices near a tree associated with fairies, which Murray takes to mean it was a site used for folk-religion and her hypothetical pagan survival.
Murray quotes Joan as saying that she saw the “Voices” with her own two “bodily” eyes, and that they were also seen by others including the pretended King of France.
She had known the “Voice” who went by “St Michael” before knowing him to be an angel, when she merely thought he was a man.
She continued to talk to “St Katherine” while incarcerated. A secret entrance from an adjoining chamber was found in her quarters, which would have allowed a fleshly “Voice” entrance.
From 2, 3 and 4 above, Murray extrapolates that the Voices were actually normal human beings, possibly cultists.
She first encountered the Voices when 13, “the usual time for the Devil and the witch to make ‘paction’”
She also cites a certain argument of guilt by association, in that Joan’s assistant, Pieronne, was also a convicted witch. Moreso, though, was the issue of…
Gilles du Retz, de Rais, de Laval, aka Bluebeard, one of the middle ages’ most notorious child murdering cannibals. He was hand-picked by Joan as her guardian and protector. Whereas Joan has been made a saint since her incineration, du Retz merely received a pardon a few years after his execution. There is no doubt, however, of his guilt, specifically of murdering at least dozens of children, mainly taken from peasants who lived around his castle. His servants, responsible for recruiting some of his victims, testified against him and bodies were found on his property. The only question is whether he was just a deviant psychopath or part of some sort of cult which practiced human sacrifice. Murray believes the latter, for which she offers a certain amount of evidence, and believes that Joan and eventually also du Retz were both part of it, and were both sacrificed.
So, on the grounds that her religion seems to have been absorbed from an entirely mortal band of folk-religionist heresiarchs and that her closest personal associate was a serial-killing practitioner of human sacrifice, I denounce Joan of Arc as having been an actual witch, for a definition of “witch” which doesn’t involve magical powers or broomsticks, but does involve some sort of pagan attachments, specifically adherence to a religion which was not Christianity and probably favoured human sacrifice.
“Really” is a difficult word. However, her conviction and execution seem to have been completely in line with contempory judicial theory. The post mortem determination that she was experiencing miracles instead of practicing magic does not invalidate the court’s ruling.
(and she turned me into a newt!)
However, your souces seems to believe that she was the equivalent of a Wiccan (or at least was used by a deceitful “pagan” group) and that I do not accept. Murray seems to be painting the past with too much reference to modern ideas.
ANd the charges against ole’ Gilles may not have been entirely true, either. It wasn’t unheard of to fabricate such claims wholesale, along with the nuttery you describe about Joan.
Forgive my relative ignorance of the subject, but I thought the crime that ultimately led to her execution was wearing men’s clothes, because try as they might the Church’s inquisitors couldn’t get an actual verdict of heresy/witchery out of her ? Then she asked forgiveness and promised to dress as a woman, was sent back to her cell, and her jailers found her again in men’s clothes (which she presumably magicked into being… That or English jailers had their fun, whatever Occam says ;)).
Since the second pair of trousers technically made her a relapse, off to the pyre she went.
Least that’s what I understood to have been the case. Was it not ?
George Bataille, translator of THE TRIALS OF GILLES DE RAIS, makes a good point for the validity of Gilles’ guilt- that his confessions don’t match the usual pattern of “witchcraft confessions” but they are quite similar to the confessions of serial killers.
You’re sure about this? Always thought Charles VII ordered him to assist Joan. I mean I don’t think she really got to chose her military backers. She probably liked him and they were friends but arent you reversing how things happened?
BTW, when will there be a fucking movie about Gilles? Fiction cant beat his own personal story…
If ever there is, they should call it Bluebeard. (A tale inspired by de Rais, who was, among other things, quite the dandy, and dyed his beard blue; though he never married even once.)
It’s actually the other way round. The reason why some of Murray’s interpretations seem so Wiccan is that those interpretations - which most historians now firmly reject - played a central role in the subsequent invention of Wicca.
Murray was certainly imposing her own ideas on the evidence, but, in fairness to her, those ideas were largely her own.
(OK, it’s a bit more complicated than that, as the whole idea of pagan survivals was very much a trendy one of the time, but there is no doubt that it was her own particular spin on it that then gets picked up by the first generation of Wiccans.)
It seems I have rarely been been so thoroughly incorrect on so many individual points as I have in this thread. I’m going to go and sit quietly in the corner now.
I don’t know that there’s any evidence that Joan believed anything particularly heterodox. Even her assertion that saints and angels spoke to her, while odd, was within the Catholic mystical tradition. Some of Murray’s assertions seem to me to be silly. Joan’s trial was a big deal not because it was the “first great trial of strength between the old [paganism] and the new [Christianity] religions”. As pretty much everybody but Murray recognized, paganism was pretty much dead in 15th century France, the only thing left of it some folk religion and customs. Joan’s trial was a big deal because Joan was a big deal. She had pretty much singlehandedly resurrected the French cause, and even more than that, she had given it divine sanction. The English had discredit her visions or else admit that God wanted the Dauphin to win the war. That also explains why the French didn’t do anything to help her after she was caught. They couldn’t afford to be seen as supporting a witch.
And the idea that wearing men’s clothing was some sort of outward sign of Paganism, I have no idea where Murray is getting that from. She had worn men’s clothing on her trip to Chinon to disguise herself as a boy, because she had been afraid of being raped by Burgundian soldiers, and she wore men’s clothing in the prison (one of the things that got her burnt) because they had taken away all her other clothing and she had nothing to wear.
Leslie Feinberg in Transgender Warriors put forth the theory that JdA was condemned for dressing male, i.e. being trans. This is in the context of Feinberg’s Marxist-inspired historical analysis that witchcraft as well as gender transgression were tied to peasant resistance against the political-economic establishment in the Middle Ages, and as late as the 19th century with the Luddite movement and the Molly Maguires. (Luddite has become a synonym for mere anti-technology, but in fact it was the first rebellion of the working class in the industrial revolution that produced the working class.) In the case of JdA, who seems to have been trans and who led armies of peasants against the powers that be, here was obviously a danger to the established order that had to be put down.