How Light Gets In: Hildegard's Soulful Sense of Colour

This 12th-century Christian mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen was largely ignored, and even ridiculed, for hundreds of years,?Pope Benedict XVI?extended the liturgical cult of Hildegard to the entire Catholic Church in a process known as "equivalent canonization".

Officially recorded on 9 Oct 2012, he named her a?Doctor of the Church, in recognition of "her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching. Today she is broadly recognized for her contributions across many disciplines including philosophy, art, and science.

Heretical? Certainly! She rebelled against the patriarchy of church and society, asserting Divinity as female and male — and that Source Divine existed in all of the cosmos and everything within it.

She knew the secrets of herbs, of bodies, of music as well as being equipped with her venerable gift of the art of Vision to Divinely discern the patterns of life. Soon after her death, all her works left the Convent for Rome in order to be preserved for initiating the process of Sanctification, However, a treasure trove of her works for which she is reputed and respected – that are more connected to her fame as herbalist and doctor, Physica and Causae et curae – bespeak of her reveling in the expressions of the curious and mysterious.

For instance, in the last pages of Causae et Curae, Hildegard inscribed a detailed horoscope for all the 30 lunar days of conception with an apparently quixotic method of calculation.

Yet, in Hindu, Vedic timekeeping a Tithi is calculation of “a lunar day, or the time it takes for the longitudinal angle between the moon and the sun to increase by 12°“: obviously every Moon day has its Moon Goddess who implies a particular aspect of activity.??

Is it not curious, then, how a book written by the Medieval philosopher, theologian, herbalist, composer, visionary Hildegard of Bingen has exactly the same method of calculating lunar days, a Tithi coming from this Medieval astrological tradition?

1. Ripening is important — for fruit and people. Though she’d had mystical visions since childhood, Hildegard didn’t share her revelations with the world until she was 42. It then took her 10 years to write her first book about them. The takeaway: When you’ve got something truly important to share, there’s value in waiting for the perfect moment, when you have the wisdom and maturity to present it well.

2. Your greatest weakness can become your greatest strength. Hildegard suffered poor health her entire life, but it didn’t deter her from passionately pursuing her goals. In fact, her own frailties arguably sparked her interest in healing. She also knew how to use her illness for leverage, as when she took to her bed until her superiors granted her request to found her own abbey.

3. Inner harmony provides the wellspring for outer strength. Hildegard was deeply spiritual and intensely practical, a rare combination in any era. Nourished by prayer and ritual, she found expression in a steady outpouring of creative works.

4. Speak the truth as you know it. While she had a deep respect for authority and the traditions of her church, she wasn’t afraid to bend the rules when necessary or speak up for what she thought was right. In fact, reading the sharply worded letters she sent to princes and bishops can almost make one feel sorry for the recipients.

5. Joy should be the foundation of your life. A key concept in Hildegard’s writings is viriditas, the word she used to describe the mysterious divine vitality that fills the world. She nurtured it wherever she found it, giving what I think is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard: “Be not lax in celebrating.”

“In these images I was reminded of how Hildegard’s cure for complex illnesses often called for herbs and practices with apparently opposite attributes, such as hot and cold or moist and dry and silence and stimulation.?These were often ensconced in a precept of viriditas, translated as “greenness” or “greening power” and interpreted as meaning growth or life. Hildegard wrote the Divine transmits life into plants, animals, and gems and as we eat plants and animals and acquire gems -- obtaining viriditas -- we, in turn, give that life out by practicing virtue, becoming an important link in the chain of being.” ~ R. Eady

"O form of woman, sister of Wisdom, how great is your glory!" -- Hildegard von Bingen, Epilogue, Life of St. Rupert

Pondering viriditas guided my understanding to how much Hildegard's spirituality is embedded in her philosophy of human nature and its fundamental connectedness to “mother earth:” “The earth is at the same time mother...She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all.” Hence Hildegard was an early herald exploring the feminine Divine and also the relation between ecology and spirituality. Her teaching reminds us of our deep connection with the life force which sustains the cosmos and also every living being: Viriditas is the natural driving force toward healing and wholeness, the vital power that sustains all life's greenness.”

As Yoga is essentially about mind and its control. And, if one starts with material bits, only the universe knows whether one will gravitate towards the nonphysical facets.

Hildegard's Biofields of Awareness

Hildegard was a seeing listener and a listening seeress. Her visions were at once auditions.

"Liver listens inside the body; kidney outside the body. Matthew knows the 22 reasons why." ~ HHH Background photo Jim Welsh

Painting: by Bombay-born, Barcelona-based artist Rithika Merchant. A weaver of visual myths, and the moon's feminine mystique's her prime inspiration. Merchant drawn to the moon's "luna-cy"... "The Moon teaches us to balance different aspects of our personality," she said in an interview with Decadence Darling. "It teaches us to be whole we have to accept the darker side of our selves -- be it the destructive aspects or the more taboo (as judged by society) aspects of ourselves."