As the person who has actually interacted with these two women, I'm still not quite sold on the idea, though I haven't ruled it out.
Basically, Joan and Claire just feel like very different presences. My first two encounters with Joan, on January 1, 2021 (see "Can you just choose a patron saint?") were absolutely overwhelming. The sense of goodness and purity was so intense that it left me trembling and in tears. I felt very much as if I'd literally been in the presence of a goddess. A year later ("Softly now"), she manifested again in a way that I wrote was "a good deal subtler" but "still unmistakably her." If William's theory is right, then I suppose that 2022 manifestation is the missing link between Joan in her glory and the much more approachable Claire.
Unlike Joan, Claire first appeared in a dream and only later in waking life. In her first appearance, on January 5, 2024 ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she didn't actually appear in visual form, but my impression was "of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment." In that dream, although I understood that she wanted to be called Claire Delune, I knew that was not her real name, and she spoke English. Then on January 21 ("The Green Door finally closes"), I "heard" a mental voice that sounded like Claire's saying in French that the Rosary was "one of the keys." I guess this is a potential link to Joan, as she was speaking French and delivering a "Catholic" message. (I'm not sure whether the historical Joan would have known a form of the Rosary or not; the history there is a bit murky.) I didn't assume the voice was Joan, though; I assumed it was Claire. If the 2022 manifestation was "unmistakably her," the 2024 one was not. Of course, the 2022 manifestation came on the anniversary of the original two, and I was actively anticipating a repeat visit; the lack of that context in 2024 may have led to my misidentifying the voice. I don't think so, though. They're just different. With Claire, the dominant impression is exuberant playfulness, which is quite distinct from Joan's affect, and they're also just different in a directly experienced way, the way two different people have different faces and voices.
After I read William Wright's May 30 post, Claire reappeared (for the first time since January) and has done so almost every day since then. Usually this is just an intense feeling of presence with her particular "flavor" to it, but there have been a couple of verbal messages. As soon as I had read the sentence proposing that Claire was Joan, she chimed in with a French pun: "C'est clair : c'est Claire!" -- "This much is clear: It's Claire!" Then, on June 2, she said in English, "Consider the lilies." That's a line from the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but also a link to Joan, who bore a banner "whose field was sown with lilies" -- and also, more surprisingly, to Tim. Tim didn't appear under that name until November 2023 ("Well, that didn't take long"), but I quickly reached the conclusion that the anonymous man who visited Whitley Strieber in Toronto on June 6, 1998, was this same Tim ("'Tim' and The Key"). And what do you know, here I am posting this on June 6! In my 2022 post about Joan, I actually quoted this person I would later identify as Tim: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium."
This, together with the recent sync in which Claire is Tim's assistant ("Tim, Claire, Diego"), makes me wonder if we need to reconsider William Wright's conclusion that Tim is basically the devil.
On May 30, as recounted in "Yeats, Joan, and Claire," I ended up, through a combination of hunch and serendipity, buying a secondhand Rider-Waite Tarot deck, something I would ordinarily never dream of doing. (I spent a couple of hours reconsecrating the whole deck, one card at a time, which seems to have worked. So far, no discernible influence from whoever the previous owner may have been.) In that post, the question of Yeats's possible influence on that deck came up, and I said he may have had a hand in the inclusion of roses and lilies on two of the cards: the Magician and the Ace of Pentacles. I posted a photo showing those two cards, plus the Ace of Swords, which resembles Joan's coat of arms:
As should be clear in that post, I was under the impression that those were the only two Rider-Waite cards to feature roses and lilies. That turns out to be incorrect.
This morning, since Claire seems to have had a hand in my acquiring this deck of cards, I decided to see what it had to say about her. Asking "What is Claire's role?" I drew the Hierophant. This is Waite's version of the Pope card, which he for some reason renamed while keeping the image essentially unchanged and even adding more papal symbolism!
At first this threw me for a loop. The Hierophant typically represents established authorities, formal education, codified religious doctrine, and so on -- quite out of keeping with the spirit of Claire. Then I noticed the crossed keys. This is a papal symbol, obviously, but one that does not appear on traditional Pope cards; Waite added it. It has also come up repeatedly here and on William's blog in various contexts. It definitely relates to Claire: In my first waking encounter with her, she said of the Rosary, "Yes, this is one of the keys" -- implying that there is a second key. In my May 30 post, I tentatively concluded that this very deck of cards was the second key.
Then I noticed the roses and lilies, on the vestments of the two monks in the foreground. Somehow I had never noticed that detail before. This, then, would be another card that potentially has Yeats's fingerprints on it.
Remarkably, in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" my thoughts on the two keys led me to the symbolism of roses and lilies:
I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.
So I first thought the two keys might have something to do with roses and lilies, and then that one of the keys might be the Rider-Waite deck. Not until today did I discover that the Rider-Waite deck actually shows crossed keys juxtaposed with roses and lilies!
I still haven't worked all this out to my satisfaction, but for now my tentative conclusions are that Joan is literally Joan of Arc, that Claire is a different but allied being, and that Tim may end up being one of the good guys after all.
