Still Feeling the Resonance - Hildegard von Bingen
By Sigrid E. Agocsi
Singing Teacher, Voice & Drama Coach, Poet, Author, Scholar, Mystic, Reiki Master and Teacher
Hildegard von Bingen was extremely gifted in many areas. She was the first published Western herbologist, healer, mystic, visionary, prophet, composer and writer with her very own signature, daring to speak out aloud and challenge the rulers and authorities of her time, including Popes Eugenius III and Anastasius IV, and German Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. She has left us many extraordinary creative works that are still deeply touching our hearts and minds, and full of relevance to our times.
In the poetry and melody of her songs, she reveals the full authority, intelligence and striking originality of her genius. She wrote profusely and with authority as no woman before her. Her training came with her lifelong beautiful Benedictine rule of chanting eight times a day that inspired her to write 77 chants and the first musical drama in history which she entitled ‘The Ritual of the Virtues’.
She writes in her autobiographical passages: ‘I composed and chanted plainsong in praise of God and the saints even though I had never studied either musical notation of singing.’ Unlike the more lulling mainstream music of her day only which was only moving within five tones, her fiery and exhilarating melodies soar up to two and a half octaves, dancing into flourishing swirls, which were certainly a challenge to most contemporary singers and her lyrical speech breaks into deepest heartfelt emotion. All her work is rooted in her faith and poetical vision.
Hildegard’s music is interwoven with her holistic spiritual work that grows from the beauty and depth of her theology, philosophy, mysticism and wholesome medicine. Her music is reflecting all of the Divine Light and essence as in the precious sparkling jewels which she also used for healing.
For Hildegard, as for all medieval visionaries, music was an all-embracing concept. To her it expressed the symphony and choirs of angels praising God, the balanced proportions of the celestial spheres, the oneness of body and soul, the hidden design of nature’s creations. In all of her works she is elevating us to the highest spheres but at the same time she is ensuring we come back and ground ourselves on this earthly plane. Hildegard is manifesting the eternal process of life moving, expanding and growing towards the joy of its own deepest realizations and a profound unity of voices singing the praises of God here on earth. Over 300 times in her writings Hildegard uses music to illuminate spiritual truths.
Hildegard von Bingen was born in Bermersheim 16 September 1098 as the tenth child to noble parents. With eight years she was entrusted to the Church in the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, being cared for by Countess Jutta von Sponheim, herself only aged fifteen. Jutta became her friend and spiritual mentor. It is only to Jutta and a monk called Volmar, who was to become her lifelong secretary, that Hildegard confided in her many visions.
In 1141, five years after her election as Mother Superior, Hildegard had a vision that changed her life completely and that rose her beyond her quiet withdrawn life in the monastery. She had a vision giving her instant understanding of the meaning of religious texts, and commanding her to write down everything she would observe in her visions:
‘And it came to pass...when I was 42 years and 7 months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming...and suddenly I understood of the meaning of expositions of the books...’But her confidence was still very low, and therefore, she hesitated to act on her visions. She had been told to ‘write what you see’. For a while she remained hesitant:
‘But although I heard and saw these things, because of doubt and low opinion of myself and because of diverse sayings of men, I refused for a long time a call to write, not out of stubbornness but out of humility, until weighed down by a scourge of God, I fell onto a bed of sickness.’Only after she had fallen ill from this martyring inner conflict did she finally listen to members of her order, and started to write. Although she never doubted the Divine origin of her visions, she wanted to avoid to be regarded as one of those new schismatics who were so fashionable in her days, and who attracted large followings. She always remained critical of them and was keen to be approved by the Catholic Church. She sought the blessing of the Pope by writing to St Bernard of Clairvaux. He brought her visions to the attention of Pope Eugenius III, and a commission to determine whether Hildegard’s visions were divinely inspired was established. The commission came to visit Hildegard and declared her to be a genuine mystic.
Through her many letters she became a powerful woman in medieval times. She communicated with Popes, statesmen, heads of monasteries and German emperors. Frederick I Barbarossa granted her and her convent protection after she gave him advice for important matters and prayed for him many times with a successful outcome.
In 1150 Hildegard finally moved her growing convent from Disibodenber, the monastery they had shared with the Benedictine monks, to Bingen, on the banks of the Rhine. From this time on, her life and work were extremely prolific. The poet and composer Hildegard wrote poetry and music, which were mostly liturgical plainchants in a single vocal melodic line about saints and the Virgin Mary. Every poem and song is a memory of divine harmony. Her 77 chants are a very powerful physical and spiritual healing tool, helping the singer to reconnect to the divine realm and manifesting holiness in daily life.
As a healer and therapist Hildegard is deeply connected to the universe and Mother Earth. She wrote several profound treatises like Liber Simplicis Medicinae (Book of Simple Medicines), Liber Compositae Medicinae (Book of the Composition of Medicine) , and Physica, where she names 513 plants, animals, elements, stones and metals. She describes 293 plants and their effects, including vegetables, grains, herbs and roots. Causae Et Curae (1150) reflects her deep conviction that all is one, and that the process of healing is at the same time the way of becoming whole again. The latter two books became also known as Liber Subtilatum. Her knowledge was based on the ancient cosmology of the four elements - fire, water, air and earth - with their correspondences of heat, moisture, dryness and cold and the humours in the body - yellow bile, blood, phlegm, and melancholy (black bile). If one or two of these humours were out of balance, then one had to consume the equivalent plant or animal that had the quality of what the body was lacking.
Her main literary works are the triology of Scivias (Know the Way), 1151, Liber Vitae Meritorum (Book of Life’s Merits), 1150-63, and Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works), 1150-79. In these books she describes all her visions and interprets them. They are also beautifully decorated, probably by the nuns of her convent under her instruction and partly transcribed by the monk Volmar. The interpretations of her visions are drawing on Catholic spirituality. The trilogy was very well-known throughout the Middle Ages, and much later it was printed for the first time in Paris in 1513.
Hildegard was extremely powerful, with a natural grace and deep humility, not only by the standards of the Middle Ages. Although she often had to battle illness she still traveled and bravely gave numerous public sermons and speeches. Many nobles, abbots and abbesses as well as local people asked for her prayers, healing and her opinion on a variety of subjects. This is even unusual for a woman of our time.
She died in her monastery on the Rupertsberg at Bingen on the Rhine on 17 September 1179. September 17th is also her memorial or feast day.
Although Hildegard was one of the first saints for which the canonization process of the Catholic Church was initiated, it took so long that all four attempts remained unresolved (the last was under Pope Innocent IV in 1244). However, people had been devoted to her and called her a saint already long before the canonization procedure even began. The ever-increasing devotion to her resulted in her name being listed as a saint in the Roman martyrology at the end of the 16th century without ever finalising the canonization process. There is a shrine with Hildegard’s relics in her second monastery that she had founded in Eibingen near Ruedesheim on the Rhine in 1165.
©Sigrid (Ziggy) Agocsi, London, 2006
Sigrid (Ziggy) Agocsi is a passionate singing teacher, voice & drama coach, speech, breathing & movement therapist, classical & contemporary singer, poet, author, scholar, mystic, Reiki-Seichem and Melchisedec-Reiki Master-Teacher, and mother. She is a member of the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine, the London Therapists Forum, the European Voice Teachers Association, the Musicians Union, the Equity, the Reiki Federation; she is also President of the World Association of Interdisciplinary Voice Teachers; founder of the First London Vocal Society and the Artistic Women Entrepreneurs, and is co-founder of the Jermyn Street Poets, German Storytellers and the First London Outsider Movement for the promotion of originality and high quality in the performing arts, music, film and word. Visit her online universe at http://www.freewebs.com/ziggysgalaxy
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