What Is a Voice?
Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orléans, symbol of France, immortal saint, a teenager in armor confronting the world, is perhaps the most famous voice-hearer in history. I saw Carl Dreyer’s black-and-white The Passion of Joan of Arc on a great screen hanging before the choir in the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, the aching harmonies of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light playing as Joan turned her eyes this way and that, terrified by her inquisitors, searching for her angels. She had what we all want: utter confidence in her conviction, an absolute and guileless moral vision. That conviction delivered her nation but brought her to the stake. Which of us would stick to our truth in the face of the flames?
She didn’t seem to feel that she had a choice. Born at a time when the English controlled much of what we now call France and were greedy for the rest, she started hearing the voices at around age 13 that urged her to liberate her country. Against all odds—she was young, a girl, a peasant—she walked into a king’s court and told him to give her an army to free Orléans from its siege, and he did, and they won the battle. Eventually she was captured. She refused to turn against her voices. That is, she recanted for a while—she was terrified of the fire—but she could not bear to deny what felt so real to her, even to get herself out of the courtroom alive. “I am more afraid of failing the voices by saying what is displeasing to them than of answering you.” So they burnt her. She was nineteen.
She was in the garden the first time a voice reached out to her. The voice came from the right, from the direction of the church. Then and thereafter, the voice came surrounded by light. At first, she was frightened. Then she knew that the voice came from God. She heard it daily, and it brought her joy. Here is the transcript from her trial:
It seemed to her a worthy voice, and she believed it was sent from God; when she heard the voice a third time she knew that it was the voice of an angel. She said also that this voice always protected her well and that she understood it well.
Meticulous clerics, who wrote down the questions Joan was asked and the answers she gave, record passage after passage about her voices as the judges probed, looking for heresy. Sometimes she speaks about a voice, sometimes about voices. She says that the voice comforted her. She trusted it absolutely and heard it every day. The voice woke her up in the morning. It was not, however, always present. “Asked if the voice was actually in the room, she said she did not know, but it was in the castle.” The voices did not instruct her in everything. “She said the voices left it to her to tell her father and mother [that she was leaving Domrémy] or be silent.” Her voices never said anything mean.
Because of this talk about voices, over the years many people have thought of her as mad, sometimes with a tone of startling condescension. One scholar, who thought that Joan was driven insane by her repressed homosexuality (his evidence, was that while riding into battle she chose to wear trousers) wrote this: “It is difficult to appreciate the fact that at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when Joan of Arc lived, nobody had any understanding of insanity.” The more recent fashion has been to attribute her voices to epilepsy, an illness called “the sacred disease” because the seizures can bring an intense sense of holiness. Oliver Sacks cautiously offered a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy with ecstatic auras because her experiences came in short discrete episodes and seemed like seizures. He also offered respect: “An acute and passionate religious conviction in a single person can sway thousands of people.”
There have been other fashions. Vita Sackville-West, writer, gardener, and the friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, wrote about Joan in the years after nearly three quarters of a million young men were slaughtered in the trenches and those left behind turned to Ouija boards and mediums to find their dead. Sackville-West wondered whether Joan was just better at hearing spirits than the rest of us. “More, perhaps, than any other military figure in history, she forces us to think.” Frederic Myers, an early twentieth century psychologist with an elaborate theory of the unconscious and the supernatural, wrote that her voices were “an impulse from the mind’s deep strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself.” More recently, Joan has become an icon for those who want to argue that the problem lies not with the voices, but with our social discomfort with those who hear them. Here she is displayed along with Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as evidence that, if we weren’t frightened by voices, maybe those who heard them would be free to do remarkable things.
And yet Joan may not have heard voices at all, at least not in the way we hear words from the radio, out loud and articulate, as if someone were delivering the traffic report. She certainly felt a sense of commandment that came from outside of her, from a mind, something person-like she called God. She was always clear about what the mind wanted her to do: end the siege at Orléans, crown her king, expel the English from France. But the more time I spend with the trial transcripts, the more I suspect that she did not hear words, but that she put words to the meaning she felt reach out to her.
“Voices are both things in the world and thoughts in the mind—and neither. People who experience them often feel as if the boundary between within and without, self and world, has slipped. People with madness describe silent thoughts that echo, thought sits behind another thought in space—the sense that everything in the world emerges out of themselves so that they become the world.”
I say this because the only good evidence of audition—evidence that she heard these voices with her ears—comes on the first day in court, when she said that she heard her voice from the right, from the church. On day four of the trial, under relentless questioning, she first describes the voices as three angels and names them. Then she is questioned the more intently on how these angels appeared, what they wore, how they dressed their hair. One of her most astute historians, Karen Sullivan, notes that inquisitors press her on this because they want to find a detail—a hoof beneath the robe, perhaps, rather than a foot—that will show that Joan is dealing with the demonic. Joan feels that the experiences are real. Together, they create events that appear to drift away from the original events. Joan gradually seems to see and hear the angels more clearly, experience them more distinctly. As Sullivan remarks, “It is as if once Joan was obligated to identify her voices as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, the voices began to reveal themselves, and she began to perceive them, as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret.”
We can’t know what Joan actually experienced. What shines through these trial records from so many centuries ago is an intense awareness of a being reaching out to her with moral purpose, in a way that tumbles the barrier between mind and world. It matters beyond measure for her, and she dies for it.
• • •
I have been talking with people who hear voices for over four decades. For a couple of years, I spent many afternoons hanging out with homeless psychotic women on the streets of Chicago. I have interviewed hundreds of hospital patients and outpatients in the U.S. and abroad. I have also been initiated into covens of witches and lodges of Druids, Kabbalists, and magical priests in London. I spent years in churches with charismatic evangelical Christians in the U.S. and abroad, and along the way, Black Catholics, Zoroastrians, newly Orthodox Jews, Anglo-Cuban Santería devotees, Tulpamancers (people who create invisible friends), and, briefly, a southern California group following a U.S.-born guru who called herself Kalindi. I have sat with hundreds of people, many psychotic, many not, and become someone to whom people who have odd experiences want to tell their story. They write to me from all over the world. Often, I follow up, and we talk
I use what we call the phenomenological method. I ask about what someone experienced in the moment instead of what they think they experienced, focusing on sensations rather than beliefs. When people tell me that a spirit spoke to them, I want to know where, precisely, they felt that the spirit was located and what, precisely, about the experience led them to feel that the spirit was there. I want to know how audible the voice was, so I ask whether the hearer turned her head to see who was talking, and whether she felt like she heard it with her ears. I ask whether the voice came from far away or right beside her, whether she heard a voice timbre or just knew that someone was speaking, whether there were words, and, if so, what those words were.
For the most part, I have seen two broad patterns in the way people seem to experience these events. The voices heard by those who are clearly, obviously, ill are usually frequent (occurring many times each day, and sometimes continuously), extended (people describe sentences, paragraphs, conversations) and distressing, even though many of these hear at least some positive voices and sometimes those positive voices are quite important for them. When charismatic evangelical Christians, Tulpamancers, witches, Druids, and others like them describe an audible spiritual voice, a voice that they can hear with their ears—for them, those events are typically rare (one specific event, maybe at most a handful), brief (typically four to six words, unless what they hear is on the cusp of sleep), and startling, but not distressing. Here are the kinds of things people have told me that they heard God say: “I love you”; “Sit and listen”; “Yes”; “Start a school”; “I am not distant”; “Get off the bus.”
The voices of madness and the voices of spirit voices are generally different in other ways, too. People who have been hospitalized talk about voices as near-tangible things pushing down on the body. Ordinary Christians don’t talk about God’s voice so physically. The voices of madness often feel alien, unwanted, almost like an assault: “a hostile takeover of my mind,” someone told me. Ordinary Christians don’t usually experience God’s voice as an intrusion. Lastly, people who have been hospitalized often hear multiple voices, and sometimes these voices talk to each other, or comment on the person who is hearing them. (“Look, she’s going into the store now.” “She’s buying bread.”) Occasionally, people who have never been hospitalized describe murmuring or voices talking to each other—but in my experience, at least, that is rare.
Of course, some people don’t fit within these two categories. They hear audible voices every week, maybe even daily, but they’ve never been hospitalized, and they don’t seem sick to me. Sometimes they used to hear kind and gentle voices, but now those voices have been joined by a commanding bully. Or they don’t hear voices, but they are accompanied by a presence which guides without words. Or they’ve been practicing spiritual disciplines determinedly and now hear God every day. There are many Joans.
Whether a reflection of madness or not, whether audible or inner, the experiences we call voices have common qualities. Three stand out to me.
Voices are (in the first instance) thoughts, mental events that feel that they are not your own. The event that someone calls a “voice” has first of all a “not-me” quality. People say: it did not feel like me. It did not have my voice timbre. It just didn’t sound like me. Sometimes people say that that they heard the voice inside their mind, but they knew it came from outside. Sometimes they say that the voice is present and even watches them, like a character in a Hayao Miyazaki film. I remember a woman I met in San Francisco General Hospital who said, “If I’m talking to myself in my head, going over some stuff, reflecting with myself—you know what your voice sounds like. But then a whole total ’nother entity and being, a voice, comes in.”
People tell me that they know that God has spoken in their mind when they have a thought that does not feel theirs. Something about its texture stands out—it is spontaneous, strong, too loud; it feels like a moral trumpet: “It was so intense and so clear.” “Sometimes something comes out of the blue.” “It more or less popped into my head.” “This really strong thought comes to me.” “All of a sudden—boom!” “It was a thought combined with a very strong physical—a very strong compulsion.” Again and again: “I know it is not from me.”
We don’t think about thought as having texture, but of course it does. Some thoughts feel loud. Sometimes thoughts feel insistent. Sometimes thoughts startle us. Sometimes thought are like whispers in the back of our mind. Sometimes thoughts command our entire attention. The internal events people call voices have textures that feel different from their own thoughts the way fur feels different from glass.
Voices are both things in the world and thoughts in the mind—and neither. People who experience them often feel as if the boundary between within and without, self and world, has slipped. People with madness describe silent thoughts that echo, thought sits behind another thought in space—the sense that everything in the world emerges out of themselves so that they become the world. A young man with psychosis that I met in San Mateo found that when he stood on the pavement and a car drove by him, noise sloughed off the car’s trunk like water and resolved into voices, like a bubbling stream of jeering, laughing words that came out of the car and into him and then swept away. He felt that as he moved his hands, a turbulent stream of words fell from his fingers, as if he thrummed air into voices, as if the air was liquid and became sound.
People without evident madness also can and cannot draw a boundary between what is within and what is without. They tell me that a god, or maybe the dead, spoke in a way that sounded as if the voice came from the outside, but when I say, “Did you hear it with your ears?” they struggle to answer. Sometimes people say: “I hear it out loud in my mind,” or, “It is audible, but only in my mind.” William James writes in The Varieties of Religious Experience that contradictory phrases like “dazzling obscurity” and “whispering silence” are common in mystical literature.
What people call a “voice” doesn’t even need sound. Deaf people with psychosis hear voices, too. In 1999 two researchers carefully interviewed ten people born profoundly deaf who had also developed schizophrenia. They described their experiences with signs best glossed in English as “heard,” “shout,” “voices,” and “talk.” One described dueling voices she heard inside her head, and another, angels who spoke about her to each other. Many seemed to both feel sound and see hallucinated lips. One said, “Hands and lips move and glow in my mind. It’s blurry but I understand it like daydreaming or watching a film. Like a ghost with a camera in my head.” Other deaf participants did not see. They knew. They felt the voice in their body, speaking from their legs, or vibrating in the air. Sometimes the voice touched them. Sometimes it came with light or smell. The voice was within and without, imagined and perceived, thought and sensed.
Finally, a voice is a mind, a social presence, emerging with an intention. To those who experience them, it feels as though a being is reaching out with moral purpose, to instruct, to direct, to guide.
That is why hearing voices is so different from, say, musical hallucinations, music no one else can hear. You can think, more or less, in the presence of music. The same is true of tinnitus, the static people hear when they lose the upper registers of their hearing. I found my own tinnitus incredibly annoying when it started, as if the universe crackled and the noise never stopped. Then, like most people, I found that the static faded into the background, as if I overheard the humming of the stars.
But you cannot gently tune out someone who is talking directly to you, telling you what to do. The voices of madness almost always command. Clean your plate. Put on the shirt. Jump. Die. The command feels like a force, pushing, insisting, demanding, always there. When I began to teach about psychosis, I would use an old video cassette designed to teach undergraduates about so-called abnormal psychology. I wanted students to hear people talk about what it felt like to live in relationship with voices. It showed a young black man, an excellent musician, who broke both his ankles when he jumped out of a second story window because the voices told him to jump. They had commanded and commanded, and he kept saying no. Eventually he jumped because they just wouldn’t stop.
“I don’t know why it happened,” I remember him commenting wearily, shaking his head. “In the end I guess you could say that I jumped just because the voices and me, we had a misunderstanding.” In psychosis the world can feel as if it is dense with signals that insist and demand, and it can be hard for those who hear to wrench their attention away.
The voices of spirit, of course, also command. “Now the Lord said to Abram: Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great.” When most people say that God has spoken, they feel directed and instructed. I ran a large international study in which we asked over three hundred people across five countries whether they’d heard a god or a spirit speak out loud and if so, what that god or spirit had said. Five times out of six that person said that they heard a command. The truck barrels down the freeway and, before the driver sees it, he hears an audible voice that tells him to change lanes. Someone is travelling and lost and alone and scared, and when she peers down a side street, she hears God say, “Not that one.”
Early in the morning on December 25, 2020, in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, people heard rapid gunfire that seemed to come from an RV parked on the city streets. An announcement came from the truck that everyone should evacuate. The police gathered. One of them felt watched by someone inside the van and turned back to get more gear. As he did so, he felt God speak to him. “I literally heard God tell me to go turn around and go check on Topping [another officer].” At that moment, Topping was walking to the van, but when the officer called out, he turned back. It saved his life. The truck exploded in what the first officer described as the biggest explosion he’d ever seen, flames shooting up hot and orange.
This then is a voice: a presence, a being, a mind, that reaches out with purpose. Surprisingly often, the human says that no words were present, but always there is a command, an insistence, a message. It is somehow in the mind and in the world at once, but it does not feel as though it comes from the mind of the person experiencing it. However we understand the ultimate source of the voice—and there are many, even from a purely secular perspective—something happens so that a thought feels like it isn’t yours, isn’t entirely inside of you, and above all can think for itself and about you, as if your own mind slipped outside, turned around and focused itself on you.
T.M. Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches anthropology and psychology. Her books include When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. She has written for the New York Times, and her work has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines.
