I find myself in front of a pair of massive carved oak
doors with lion knockers and fleurs de lys. Inside I meet Charles d’Orléans, the poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. I have dreamed into his life over many years, but this is the first time I have seen him face to face. I observe him closely, recalling that no contemporary portraits of him survive.
Charles has sharp, angular features, a beak of a nose, a strong pointed chin, dark straight
hair cut above the shoulders. He is in what, for him, is informal garb: a particolored doublet
(dark green and pale green or cream) and hose.
He declares in French, Il faut connaitre le
coeur de haine pour obtenir le salut d’amour. "We must know the heart of hatred to gain the salvation of love."
The words strike deep. I ask the 15th century Duke of Orleans why I have been dreaming into his life, and his death. He tells me: Je porte le sceau des
ages, inclus de l’age mussulmane que vous importe si lourde dans vos temps. "I carry the seal of the ages, including that of the Muslim age that weighs so heavy on you in your times." This is exciting, and altogether mysterious.
This encounter unfolded during a group shamanic journey I led in which I gave participants the assignment of finding a personality in another time whose life issues are relevant to their present situations. The follow-up assignment that I gave the group was to write a page from the “autobiography” of the personality they had encountered. When I took up pen and paper to write my own page, I began by reproducing Charles' extraordinary opening statement:
Il faut connaitre le
coeur de haine pour obtenir le salut d’amour.
Then the words streamed from me, or through me:
We must know the heart of hatred to gain the salvation of
love.
"My mother schooled
me in hatred. Chief among her keepsakes, in the black-shrouded box near my
right hand on the table, is the silken square on which she first embroidered
the emblem of our family’s grief, and hate. It is the image of a rounded
watering-can, a chantepleure,
dripping fat drops of blood. My mother told me it was her heart that was
bleeding, and would go on bleeding until we avenged ourselves on John of
Burgundy, who had my father chopped to pieces on a Paris street like a side of
beef on a butcher’s block.
"John is long dead,
and I cannot hate him now. His son became my friend. On the game-board of this
world, the pieces are forever in motion.
"My beautiful young
wife Marie is waiting for me. Perhaps she is my reward for the bloody years of
war and revenge, and the longer years I spent in a gilded cage, as a hostage in
England. I am writing a new poem for her, or rather for the Lady of
the Forest of Long Awaiting I worship in the pleasing
slopes of her body.
"Through the
landscapes of women, and of the gentle Loire
country around my chateau of Blois,
I give myself reason to stay in this body, which has survived longer than any
of my boyhood friends, but is beginning to fail. The Lord knows – and the
Adversary even better – that I have had no difficulty leaving this body. I am a
prince of France,
but I am also my mother’s son.
"There is a rustle
of wings at my window, and a huge black crow tapping at the glass. The sheen on
its plumage is purple in the morning light. Is it my mother’s familiar, calling
me to yet one more act of family duty – or vendetta?
"I will never leave you, she promised. She
knows the ways to keep such a promise. She was a Visconti, of that great
Italian house that pursued its battles by night as well as day. She was accuse
of sorcery, to keep her and her accusations out of Paris after my father’s murder. In our time,
it was customary to charge an unmanageable or inconvenient woman – even a woman
of the highest degree – with sorcery. This was done to a Queen of England as
well as to the peasant girl from Lorraine
who raised an army in my name. My mother’s policy was this: If they are going
to charge you with sorcery, you may as well become a sorcerer....
"I am writing in my library, here at Blois, the city I love best. Through the
leaded glass, I see the lazy bend of the Loire,
lemon-green in the sunshot mist. At my left hand, I have my copy of the Picatrix, lettered by a renegade monk
from Germany.
I never tire of reading its account of a city of magicians in North
Africa. Next to the Picatrix
is the jeweled box that contains the rarest of all my manuscripts. I have had
five letters of Greek embossed on the lid. Θαύμα. Thauma. The contents of this box have made a long journey. By a
great irony, the script was in Constantinople
at the same time my family’s enemy, John of Burgundy, was there as a prisoner
of the Great Turk…"
Graphic: Dutch artist's version of Charles d'Orleans, circa 1471. There are no surviving contemporary portraits.
