Zhone Dark

My test post is dated 4 January 2026. I grabbed the URL because it was available. I had no idea what I would do with the site.

Zhone Dark is a phonetic approximation of the French pronunciation of the French name for the French woman the English-speaking world calls Joan of Arc: Jeanne d'Arc.

At the time that she was alive, it was probably still the norm to localize foreign names of famous people. They just used the closest approximation for the name in the local language.

Joan of Arc is an interesting historical figure because not only are there no surviving portraits of her, I've not really run across commentary characterizing her as beautiful or ugly or particularly describing how she looks.

She's remembered entirely for what she accomplished in her short life and she is surprisingly not really dragged as a nutcase for OPENLY talking about hearing voices. And not because hearing voices was normal or common at that time and in that place in history.

For many years, I've said that if Joan of Arc were alive today, she would be in a psych ward getting her meds adjusted, not ending the Hundred Years War and playing handmaid to the birth of modern France.

She used innovative full-frontal assault tactics which the French military still use today hundreds of years later. She mostly kicked the English out of an occupied France until the man she made King by retaking the city where France traditionally held coronations felt she had done enough for his purposes and cooler heads and diplomatic approaches should take over.

She cared about the people and felt there are STILL French people living in occupied lands and she wanted a zero tolerance policy for this situation. She didn't want to stop until all French people were safe and secure.

The people loved her and she arrived at the palace with little more than the clothes on her back and people donated a war horse, military armor and all the gear she needed to go into battle.

I don't think she was really an official military leader and everyone in authority was afraid of this teenaged girl and they kept trying to hold meetings and such without her and she kept showing up at them having not been told the time or place of the meeting.

Like in the movie The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, she really did write to people or otherwise tell them more or less "I'm coming. I don't really want to fight you. Please just go home to England and don't make me kill you." and a surprisingly high percentage of people packed their bags and left and handed the town in question over to the French without bothering to engage her in battle.

They left because her track record in battle was frightening and her claim that it will be your blood, not ours had teeth. It wasn't mere boasting, bragging, smack talk, intimidation tactics or similar.

That movie actually kind of downplays her story, most likely because the truth about her life was so over the top, it sounds like you are making up nonsense. I looked up the battles depicted in the movie and when she was shot with an arrow and slept it off, she was shot in the neck, not the shoulder.

And she wasn't really a feminist. She threw several women out of the military upon discovering women pretending to be men in order to serve in the military.

She was a woman with concrete goals and the wherewithal to accomplish them. She is remembered primarily for accomplishing most of her stated goals in a shockingly short time and only secondarily remembered for details like how unjustly her life ended and for being a person hearing voices which I've never seen anyone characterize as mental illness.

She was accepted as a religious icon within her lifetime without really trying to claim to be such because she did things like identified the real dauphin, picking him out of a crowd, when they tried to fool her and routinely showed up at meetings to which she wasn't invited and wasn't supposed to know the time and place for.

There may be explanations for those events which aren't "God told me." I don't know if she ever said God told her or if she was just socially savvy enough to pick a noble out of a crowd of commoners and either didn't think to explain or didn't bother to argue it.

But I do understand why people of her era accepted her as a voice for God instead of locking her up in an asylum. She did incredible things -- that word means unbelievable -- and to this day, when something incredible and very positive happens, people typically chalk it up to "God," whatever god they happen to believe in.

To my knowledge, she never tried to tell people something like "You need to do as I say because I speak for God." She instead said basically "God doesn't like this and it will not be tolerated. It's wrong and will not stand."

Once, her underfed troops who were out of rations came upon a field of beans -- a crop with an earlier harvest time than other crops typical for the area -- and were saved from starvation.  The beans had been planted because some months earlier some religious nutcase came through the area talking about the apocalypse or something and told them to plant such.

This is written up as an example of the typical "luck of Joan." 

Unlike the unknown origins of Christianity that weren't written down until about seventy years after the events that inspired its birth, this is a relatively recent historical figure and there are written records of the events of her life. 

I can see why she was accepted as speaking for God within her lifetime and at the same time I can look at her story through modern eyes as the story of a kick ass competent genius.

I'm not Christian and I don't believe in the Christian God. I'm also not interested in trying to invent explanations for her life that fundamentally dismiss what recorded history suggests actually happened.

My older sister whom I respected at one time as more educated than I spent some time attending church twice a year at Christmas and Easter and she saw herself as Christian but scientific and educated. So she was telling me all these scientific explanations for biblical events.

She believed he didn't turn water into wine. They just poured water into old wine barrels and it kind of flavored the water.

She didn't believe Jesus died on the cross. He died too rapidly and he had gone missing for two or three years in the East and must have learned meditation and was just meditating and it fooled people.

I was repeating her sciency theories to my husband who grew up in an extremely religious family and read the Bible cover to cover three times before quitting Christianity and he cocked an eyebrow at me.

I said "What?" He said "That works right up until they put a spear in him to make sure he was dead because he died too fast."

The old guy with the gash in his side in the video for the song Losing My Religion is most likely intended to be Jesus in a presentation most people won't immediately interpret as Jesus. Kind of a stealth reference.

I'm not here to dismiss anything about her life or invent ridiculous explanations that don't really fit what we know about her life. 

I'm aware that to actually be Christian, you need to believe Jesus died and rose from the dead, so people attending church twice a year and trying to invent "scientific" explanations that don't account for the fact that he was speared to make sure he was dead are neither Christian nor actually being scientific.

I still don't know what I want to do with this space and I'm reluctant to try to characterize my half baked ideas. But the name of the site is a reference to Joan of Arc and that's most of what little I know about her.

Footnote

I am reluctant to do a separate post about Christianity. That's not really what I want this site to be about.

Years ago, I made a post on Metafilter called A Third Way: Non-violent Protest. The article is a 404 and some of the "good Christians" on Metafilter who habitually openly pissed on me because I was homeless dismissed it out of hand as a ridiculous interpretation of the Bible while others said this is not remotely anything new, no. 

Do you see what I see? is a piece on an astrology site of mine. It gives some history of Christianity and outlines the degree to which most Christians, up to and including the Pope, are woefully ignorant of their own history.

Understanding History on yet another site of mine is mostly not about Christianity but does talk a bit about it. It's mostly about how challenging it is to properly understand history even from primary sources you have reason to believe are accurate simply because our lived experience of day-to-day life is vastly different than that of historical figures, so we tend to typically miss things and WILDLY misinterpret things even if there was absolutely no intent to obfuscate anything.

And frequently touchy subjects are intentionally obfuscated and spoken of in ways that intentionally make it possible for children to not really get all the ugly details spelled out. Sexual subjects routinely use polite euphemisms that are unlikely to be properly understood by any "outsider," even if merely because they are from a different era.