accounts of mystical experiences—visions, ecstasies, divine encounters, transcendent revelations—all seemed to describe, with uncanny specificity and accuracy, the experience of an epileptic seizure, including Ezekiel, St. Paul, Joan of Arc, and St. Birgitta. Raphael Sanzio’s famed The Transfiguration depicted an epileptic boy in the throes of a seizure, which he and others commonly used as a visual metaphor for Christ’s ascent to heaven.
