In 1425, in a small village in eastern France, a peasant girl started seeing visions and hearing voices.

Otherwise, the girl was unremarkable.

She was five foot two.

She had dark brown hair.

She always said her prayers and did her chores.

Hearing voices is actually in and of itself not all that remarkable either.

Over the course of a lifetime, around 1% of people will be affected by schizophrenia,

and of those, 60 to 80% report hearing voices. This is obviously not common, but it's not all

that rare either. As a point of reference, there are probably about 2 million schizophrenics who hear

voices in the United States. The official medical diagnosis is called auditory hallucinations.

And this is a good comparison.

Joan of Arc's symptoms match up basically perfectly with those of auditory hallucinations.

They start with the onset of puberty.

There are multiple voices.

The voices have a hierarchy.

They come from an actual perceived location outside of the body, usually from behind the person who hears them.

The voices become angry when disobeyed. All these things are true of most people who suffer from auditory hallucinations,

and were true of Joan as well. What is less common is for those voices to tell you a brilliant

military strategy that will turn the tide of a war. Based solely on following the advice of these

voices, these angels, or this mental illness,

depending on your perspective, Joan of Arc went from a peasant in a small rural town in the

middle of nowhere to one of the most consequential people in the world. And this is at a time,

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