A Teacher
Hildegard of Bingen
Viriditas & living-light vision
The transmission
Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th-century German Benedictine abbess, composer, naturalist, and visionary—one of the most extraordinary polymaths of the medieval period.
From childhood she experienced what she called visions of a “living light” (lux vivens), which in midlife she was commanded to record, producing the illuminated visionary work Scivias (“Know the Ways”) along with treatises on medicine, natural science, and a large body of liturgical music.
Crucially, she insisted her visions occurred not in ecstatic trance but with her ordinary senses fully awake, a claim that shaped how later readers understood the relation between altered perception and normal consciousness.
Hildegard’s signature concept, viriditas—“greenness” or the divine life-force animating all creation—gives her an outsized role in any lineage tracing “energy” and “vital force” ideas. Her vision of a cosmos suffused with a living, animating divine power anticipates the vitalist and “life-energy” currents (qi, prana, animal magnetism, biofield) that run through both esoteric and modern frequency-healing traditions.
As a woman who claimed direct visionary authority and integrated mysticism with medicine and the natural world, she has also become a touchstone for contemporary creation-spirituality and holistic/energy approaches that fuse the spiritual with the physical-vital.
What they gave
Viriditas (the living green / life-force): Articulated a divine animating energy pervading creation—an ancestor of “life-force” and biofield concepts.
- Living-light visions: Reported visionary perception experienced in waking consciousness, bridging altered and ordinary states.
- Integration of spirit and body/nature: Fused mysticism with medicine and natural science, prefiguring holistic mind-body spirituality.
- Direct visionary authority: Modeled first-person spiritual knowing, a precedent for experiential, non-institutional spirituality.
In their words
I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight and breathes forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are.
But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars.
I am also rationality, possessing the breath of the resounding Word through which every created thing was made; and into all these things I blew, so that none of them is mortal in its nature, because I am life.
For rationality is the root, and the resounding Word flourishes within it.
The soul provides the body with life like fire flooding the darkness with light; it has two major powers like two arms: the understanding and the will.
Therefore human being, you are not a bundle of veins; pay attention to the knowledge of the scriptures.
For over all the other powers of the soul it is understanding which distinguishes what is good from what is bad in human actions.
The will warms an action, the mind receives it, and thought bodies it forth.
The soul reveals her capabilities according to the capabilities of the body, so that in childhood she brings forth simplicity, in youth strength, and in the fullness of age, when all the veins of the human being are full, she brings forth her greatest strength in wisdom.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Benedictine monasticism; patristic and biblical theology; the medieval visionary and apocalyptic tradition.
- Taught / Influenced: medieval women’s visionary mysticism; Christian creation- and eco-spirituality; modern “life-energy” and biofield spirituality; feminist and holistic recoveries of the mystical tradition.
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 3
Essential Works
- Scivias (Know the Ways)1151
- Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works)1174
- Physicac.1150