Missing Witches - MW Hildegarde of Bingen - Dare to Declare Who YOU Are

00:00:00.000 Witches, before we start this episode, I want to invite you. We're hosting a circle, a virtual

00:00:06.420 circle, and if you'll be there with us, then you'll also be part of our Samhain special this

00:00:11.460 year. We're inviting leading art witches, death witches, tech witches, activist witches, science

00:00:17.600 witches, and I suspect that includes you, so come. You'll find info on our website and on Eventbrite.

00:00:23.960 Just look for Missing Witches, Samhain Circle.

00:00:27.080 Look for the door into the unknown country. 0.56

00:00:29.620 It's free. It's open to awe.

00:00:32.340 Come, come, come. 1.00

00:00:34.580 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:41.140 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:44.680 This is the story of a woman, a child, 0.87

00:00:48.340 walled away in a dilapidated monastery in the heart of the medieval Catholic Church.

00:00:53.960 whose life and work triumphs this truth.

00:00:58.360 That there are ways out even when you're trapped.

00:01:01.780 That your body, no matter its condition, is a vessel of the living universe,

00:01:07.220 singing through you and for you to sing with.

00:01:09.820 You are of value all on your own, and you are also of a vast chorus,

00:01:15.120 and there are infinite roots and roots to opening ourselves to the teeming lifeness of this life.

00:01:21.680 Even when the combined curiarchy that grasps at you and us all of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, misogyny has you cornered, there are tools at hand for carving out a margin of peace and emancipation and of power.

00:01:39.080 this episode of missing witches is dedicated to prophet mystic visionary healer organizer

00:01:46.680 artist composer brewer baker writer architect maker hildegard of bingen to our chorus of

00:01:56.980 questions about the unknown or not yet understood electric the dimension of mystery that is part of

00:02:03.300 life in countless cultures and traditions, we add Hildegard, a 12th century nun who saw the visions

00:02:10.060 in her mind's eye all her life, and then, in middle age, when the average woman of the time

00:02:15.100 would have been nearing a death by childbirth, illness, poverty, or violence, she spoke her

00:02:21.280 truth out loud about the things spirit told her, voiced the things that only she could hear,

00:02:27.520 and stood tall and fierce, though wracked with pain,

00:02:33.920 shone even in the dark with what she called the living light,

00:02:37.460 or in other contexts, the greenness.

00:02:42.360 On May 10, 2012, the Pope cast a spell of canonization

00:02:46.520 and Hildegard of Bingen was transformed into a saint of the universal church.

00:02:52.380 Fiona Maddox, whose book Hildegard of Bingen, The Woman of Her Age,

00:02:55.800 was totally my favorite reference

00:02:57.700 in researching this piece. 1.00

00:02:59.580 Her wry feminist vision is a gift.

00:03:02.560 Writes,

00:03:03.640 The Pope had quoted Hildegard

00:03:05.340 in the context of the Roman Catholic Church's

00:03:07.460 recent sex abuse scandal.

00:03:09.940 In the vision of St. Hildegard,

00:03:11.560 the face of the Church is stained with dust.

00:03:14.720 Her garment is torn

00:03:15.760 by the sin of priests.

00:03:18.140 The way she saw and expressed it

00:03:19.780 is the way we have experienced it this year.

00:03:22.660 He also noticed that her keen interest

00:03:24.660 in the sciences was a natural extension of her spirituality, since in her eyes the entire

00:03:29.580 creation is a symphony of the Holy Spirit. It was hardly surprising that Benedict, a German as well

00:03:35.860 as an accomplished musician, would push for her official sanctity. He went a step further. On the

00:03:41.380 7th of October 2012, he made her a doctor of the church, a title given to those whose writings or

00:03:46.500 teachings have had a particular impact. There being only 35 in total, Hildegard is an exclusive

00:03:52.480 of Company. Others include Saints Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and her own

00:03:58.920 great ally, Bernard of Clariveau. This proved one of the last major decisions in Benedict's

00:04:06.260 pontificate. Today she is best known for her music, yet her compositions form only a small

00:04:11.040 part of her story. She was a polymath, a visionary, a theologian, a preacher, an early scientist and

00:04:17.600 physician, a prodigious letter writer who numbered kings, emperors, and popes among

00:04:22.780 her correspondents. She was an artist not only in the musical and literary sense, but

00:04:28.380 in painting and, it would seem, architecture. She even invented her own coded language.

00:04:35.660 Her boldness, courage, and tenacity made her at once enthralling and haughty, intrepid

00:04:41.400 and irksome. By contrast, the ills and terrors caused by, or perhaps even causing, her spectacular

00:04:49.420 and overwhelming visions often rendered her helpless and torpid. So it was official. Hildegard,

00:04:57.780 both the torpid and the bold, was officially a saint, and I don't really care about that,

00:05:04.880 except that I love to see a woman of the 12th century, or any age, weave a magic so profound

00:05:09.920 that she made a safe place, a place of power for herself and other women, and from that magic

00:05:16.860 citadel she expanded the identity and gender of spirit, wrote of the holiness of the green earth

00:05:23.320 itself and our complete dependence on it, developed recipes for potions to deliver cures,

00:05:30.540 even a recipe for happiness baked into a perfect little cookie. Composed music was in fact the

00:05:36.700 first recognized composer, influenced politics, and with her own body in the throes of chronic

00:05:42.220 illness, became a portal between worlds that channeled prophecy and art and music and a

00:05:49.560 brilliant bit of joy and safety for herself and other girls. But look, I don't embrace or feel

00:05:55.960 good about all of Hildegard's work. Fiona Maddox makes clear that Hildegard's ideas are not the

00:06:02.400 progressive ideals we'd love to find in an astonishing woman writing and creating in the

00:06:06.680 12th century. Hildegard says things about keeping the classes of people separate and only takes

00:06:12.420 girls of good family with money into her convent, strategically maybe building up their combined

00:06:18.200 respectability and coffers and safety, and eventually opening a large convent for women 0.95

00:06:23.860 of lower classes too, which she visits regularly but still. She uses the trope of the poor feeble 0.52

00:06:29.280 woman extensively in her letters. And then she lays the voice of God on them with all her

00:06:34.560 undeniable authority and they generally cower before her. Interestingly, she doesn't waste 0.94

00:06:40.300 as much time with the little old me stuff when writing to other women. She also used her voice 0.97

00:06:45.180 and position to whip up passion for crusades. And you have to mourn and rage at the history of the

00:06:50.960 crusades, of religious colonization by violence in any form, by anyone. The crusades demonized

00:06:57.820 and murdered peaceful quote-unquote heretics, Jews and Muslims, and wired into Christian culture a

00:07:05.080 way of weaponizing a peaceful premise, a kind of cult logic that is still used to twist minds

00:07:10.400 toward hate and fear of other people, including queer and trans people today, and also to sell

00:07:16.460 Amway and Mary Kay and countless other religion and capital-entwined Ponzi schemes. Add this to 0.72

00:07:23.720 the list of reasons why I broke from the church of my childhood. Religion is a justification for 1.00

00:07:28.380 extortion, theft, and colonization. My family lived pieces of this. These are the roots and 1.00

00:07:36.460 roots of control and predation that I felt twined invisibly around my mind and heart when Sunday

00:07:41.220 service was my weekly rhythm, even when the message was one of revolutionary love.

00:07:48.000 I had to cut those ties, though I think it's possible to rewire them from the inside for the

00:07:53.300 purposes of healing and community and care. And if that's you, then more power to you.

00:08:00.380 But for me, I think I'm done with religion for this reason. For the way I feel it working in my

00:08:05.780 brain. As Donna Haraway writes, building on a quote from ethnographer of thinking practices,

00:08:11.480 Marilyn Strathairn, it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with.

00:08:17.360 It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.

00:08:22.420 It matters what knots, not knots, what thoughts think thoughts,

00:08:26.460 what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.

00:08:30.840 It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

00:08:37.060 I don't want to build worlds out of stories based on shame or control or violence or othering anymore.

00:08:43.840 I don't want to benefit from extortion, threat, or theft.

00:08:47.780 That's why I'm out here doing this, looking for stories I have been missing,

00:08:52.240 and even for someone so deeply enshrined, entombed even, in the heart of the church.

00:08:57.720 I hear an ancestor to missing witches in Hildegard sometimes,

00:09:01.500 and those are the notes I want to follow and listen to

00:09:04.480 and lift up for us to sing along with even here today.

00:09:09.400 I love the living world.

00:09:12.920 As science delves deeper into the potential in waves of chemistry and electricity all around us,

00:09:19.040 mycelium networks and bacteria working to collaborate with us on environmental remediation

00:09:23.980 and species health and macro and microbiome healing out here at the edge of the end of this world

00:09:29.660 and the perpetual painful birth of the next,

00:09:33.260 I find my way to new roots of love for Hildegard.

00:09:36.700 Love for the work she put into understanding the delicate wisdom in the natural world,

00:09:40.860 in leavening and fermentation and voices raised in song.

00:09:45.440 Love for her authority and strength

00:09:47.280 and for her resilience through chronic illness

00:09:49.500 and love for the greenness that pervades her work.

00:09:54.000 She wrote,

00:09:55.060 Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth

00:09:58.880 is penetrated with connectedness,

00:10:02.320 penetrated with relatedness.

00:10:05.500 With this and other lines reverberating from her

00:10:08.380 with the wisdom of the witch as above,

00:10:10.860 so below. I want to make a case for Hildegard as witch ancestor, with her sisters in their long hair

00:10:17.120 and tiaras, defying decades of rules that nuns should shave their heads and hide away, that they 0.72

00:10:22.540 didn't own their lives in the first place, these girls given by their families along with their

00:10:26.700 dowries as tithes to the church. I want to take their shiny tiaras and their hope and sisterhood

00:10:32.800 and all the bits and pieces that I like, like a magpie, and weave them into my nest of what it

00:10:37.620 means for me to be a witch because I like that word in the worlds it makes

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00:13:05.020 i want us to start first with this image and keep it in our minds as we try to understand her

00:13:15.320 hildegarde was literally walled up in a monastery and had funeral rites read over her at eight

00:13:22.120 or 12 we don't know for sure she doesn't tell us much about this time

00:13:26.660 but she would argue against the practice of child oblates later on in life

00:13:30.880 she was under the tutelage of a 14 year old named juta by the age of eight and when judah decided

00:13:38.300 since she wasn't allowed to go on crusade that she'd like to be an abbess hildegard's parents

00:13:43.820 sent her as well i feel sympathy for judah she recognized something special in hildegard

00:13:49.100 she starved herself and wore a chain against her skin that dug into her flesh all as part of her

00:13:55.240 complicated relationship to a spirituality I don't understand. Hildegard didn't follow in her

00:14:00.620 mentor's path of self-denial or self-harm, and I love that in a time when those attitudes were

00:14:06.580 popularized by the church, especially for women, this isolated young visionary took a different

00:14:12.660 path entirely, one that loved eating and drinking and being in the world. Hildegard was given by

00:14:20.380 her wealthy parents to the church, accustomed for tenth children that came with her dowry and her 0.68

00:14:25.600 complicated quiet pain. And even in this terror, this blatant echo of the brutal sacrifices of

00:14:31.720 virgins and countless other cultures that used a god to justify ways of terrorizing and controlling

00:14:37.560 women, she didn't die and she didn't disappear. Her voice didn't drown. She was a seed. She created.

00:14:47.680 her voice came bursting out of her and she got loud she gathered women and wrote music and books

00:14:55.280 and had a voice within her that spoke with such complete spirit and confidence that the pope

00:15:00.300 recognized her prophecy as divine and granted her safety which though precarious in a time of papal

00:15:06.580 schisms hung on her like a magic cloak her whole life buried in the dark she found a voice within

00:15:12.040 her full of power and she lived and thrived but let's circle back again because as you can tell

00:15:19.620 I attain great emotional heights reading Hildegard and reading about her I feel her magic in me but

00:15:25.660 then I crash she is beloved of contemporary Christians and new age natural healers alike

00:15:32.220 and both of those systems of thought tend to trigger my knee-jerk no thank you I like atheism

00:15:38.440 and science, though I talk to the trees and listen to the wind and write love notes to my house.

00:15:44.500 I was raised in a beautiful version of the church, to be clear and fair. My social justice hippie

00:15:49.960 Christian parents do it right as far as that's possible, I think. And I know many other

00:15:54.220 practitioners who find in the Bible, in that life of that beautiful anarchist socialist Jesus,

00:16:01.860 profound roots to healing and community building and to revolutionary magic.

00:16:06.800 I see that for many, and I send love and feel their great love in return,

00:16:12.160 gifted as they are at forgiveness.

00:16:14.360 But for me today, religion just exhausts me and terrifies me and makes me angry.

00:16:21.320 Even the beautiful, progressive, queer, united church ministers I bumped into in my Hildegard 0.94

00:16:26.240 readings seem to come with a giant warning sign for me, I don't know.

00:16:31.000 To me, religion, as it's been practiced, seems pervasively a history parallel to capitalism,

00:16:36.060 a history of systems defined by emerging brutality

00:16:39.200 of often good community-oriented ideas

00:16:43.100 turning towards the protection and accumulation

00:16:45.400 of the bits of power they manage to scrape together

00:16:48.140 which requires controlling the means of production 0.79

00:16:51.760 and growth of the religion 1.00

00:16:53.180 which means controlling women's bodies and minds for procreation 0.98

00:16:57.900 and controlling men's bodies and minds as tools 1.00

00:17:01.840 sometimes for building

00:17:03.700 too often collapsing towards violence

00:17:06.860 I'm furious at every single storyline

00:17:11.220 of every religion where the end result 0.96

00:17:13.140 is identities and modes of joy

00:17:15.500 erased

00:17:16.140 and walled in shame

00:17:18.580 people in chains again

00:17:21.080 children walled up

00:17:23.240 and married off to Jesus in a crypt

00:17:24.980 and honestly no wonder Hildegard says

00:17:26.880 she was anxious every day of her life

00:17:29.160 every single day

00:17:31.780 she had layers of good reasons for anxiety not that you need reasons when it's coursing through

00:17:38.400 your nervous system the vision that came to her over and over again and that she wrote and 0.93

00:17:43.820 published and preached about publicly behaviors that all already defied rules of how women were

00:17:49.320 allowed to behave the vision she saw was about the sickness in the church fiona maddox writes

00:17:57.080 as ever her chief concern was to denounce the evil and felony sweeping through the church

00:18:02.660 Her principal target is not mankind, but in the clergy,

00:18:06.260 who in her eyes neglected their duties and sought temporal power

00:18:10.160 and wealth over and above spiritual humility.

00:18:15.160 Heldegard was angry as hell at the church, at the clergy,

00:18:18.320 but her whole safety relied on those institutions too.

00:18:22.840 And her inspiration came from a voice she understood as God.

00:18:27.100 And the things she'd read and been raised in,

00:18:29.120 especially when she was alone with one other woman, a kid really,

00:18:33.720 who was bent on self-flagellation in the name of God,

00:18:37.560 shaped all her world and thoughts.

00:18:41.120 She described her visions as seeing a reflection of the light most of the time,

00:18:45.220 not the light itself.

00:18:47.540 And I think that's a clue to how she and other visionaries

00:18:50.080 shaped the pure inspiration they received

00:18:52.180 into the language and context of their own life and time.

00:18:55.700 those are the thoughts she used to think other thoughts

00:19:00.440 but when it comes to using the language of the church to think my thoughts

00:19:06.000 let alone the language of war and violence

00:19:09.000 I want to be done

00:19:11.140 I love and am fascinated by the spectacular impulse to awe in the brain

00:19:16.900 and I don't want to see that impulse to awe manipulated

00:19:20.520 bent and tortured into shapes

00:19:22.860 justifying endlessly duplicating misery and inequality here on earth.

00:19:28.260 I don't know exactly where that leaves me.

00:19:30.980 In debates in our house around atheism on one side

00:19:33.660 and agnosticism in a sense that the earth and universe

00:19:36.300 are profoundly alive in a vast way on the other,

00:19:39.920 we land on this.

00:19:41.400 Everything is sacred or nothing is.

00:19:44.080 Everything is sacred and nothing is.

00:19:47.780 It's our way of sitting in the crux of binary,

00:19:50.320 at the spot where the pulls of infinity meet

00:19:53.940 bowing to each other in a dance of double helix

00:19:57.660 we reject the brutality of division

00:20:00.060 in sacred versus profane

00:20:01.820 as the bio-art coven manifesto goes

00:20:05.200 our dances gesture to the play between purity and dirt

00:20:09.160 getting in touch with embodied ways of knowing

00:20:12.440 there's no such thing as dirt

00:20:15.380 only not watching close enough

00:20:16.940 there's no such thing as purity

00:20:19.320 only not looking at the entire picture

00:20:21.540 Hildegard was deep in her context

00:20:25.860 but still I feel like she gets it

00:20:27.760 or at least brings wild new dimensions

00:20:30.040 and complexity to the contemplation

00:20:32.300 of the nature of the divine at the time

00:20:34.120 of the purity in the living dirt

00:20:36.760 and she grounds her vision of the sacred

00:20:39.620 in the loving pulsing light

00:20:41.520 of all that lives and is

00:20:43.520 she wrote love abounds in all things

00:20:47.440 excels from the depths to beyond the stars

00:20:50.120 is lovingly disposed to all things

00:20:54.000 she has given the king on high

00:20:57.280 the kiss of peace

00:20:58.620 I know you heard that she in there

00:21:02.380 and smiled gentle listener

00:21:04.020 not because we need to impose a boring binary

00:21:07.740 to love or God when the nature of the living world

00:21:10.540 is so much more infinitely vast

00:21:12.580 but because we know the context, the dominance of the patriarchy, the way the divinity of woman

00:21:18.660 and of otherness was disappeared in order to be more effectively dominated.

00:21:24.400 And Hildegard, sprouting with the voice of all that is God, etc. from her cell, resisted.

00:21:33.000 In God Our Mother, the Feminine Cosmology of Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen,

00:21:38.180 Jennifer A. Hudson writes,

00:21:39.980 Hildegard's cosmology exists beyond binarisms because her cosmic vision is cyclical and in

00:21:46.180 this way is feminine and reaches beyond structure and chaos in that it constantly

00:21:52.100 negotiates the masculine with the feminine. In Hildegard of Bingen's vital contribution

00:21:58.660 to the concept of woman Abigail Favalli writes Hildegard's theology is intensely

00:22:04.660 incarnational, and yeah, I love this, a theology in and of the body. Abigail continues,

00:22:11.400 The material world is imbued with sacred significance and sacramental meaning. The

00:22:17.560 human body is a microcosm of the cosmos, which Hildegard conceives as an ordered, harmonious

00:22:22.520 whole. Her mystical vision of the universe is not a top-down hierarchy, but a cosmic egg with

00:22:28.780 interconnected nested layers, the earth at its heart. Hildegard's theology, following sacred

00:22:36.440 scripture, emphatically affirms that both woman and man carry the imago dei, which endows each

00:22:43.340 sex with equal dignity before God. My stepdad, Irish Catholic New Yorker, told me a story

00:22:51.100 recently, I think as part of his ongoing gestures of support towards my work with Missing Witches.

00:22:55.840 It was a story of having his mind cracked open by a Jesuit professor doing his undergraduate

00:23:00.720 studies at Notre Dame, a priest who argued passionately, with piles of theological support,

00:23:06.660 the still contentious point that God is neither male nor female, and also is perfectly male and

00:23:11.840 female, and there is no reason to privilege one gender over the other in how we speak of God.

00:23:17.380 Which my stepdad, skinny, tall, fiery as hell when he gets riled up, took as a challenge, 0.56

00:23:22.300 and wrote his papers that year with God-gendered female throughout, 0.79

00:23:26.560 an act of defiance and exploration and of discovery that stayed with him

00:23:30.980 and how he's viewed what we might call spirit or the love in the universe or the living light.

00:23:38.380 Hudson continues,

00:23:40.440 Balance and interconnection are a major crux of Hildegard's cosmology.

00:23:45.100 Balance and interconnection of masculine and feminine forces with humanity

00:23:48.840 mirror the balance and interconnection within divinity and the cosmos.

00:23:52.980 Moreover, Hildegard uses the feminine form in Latin, sapientia dei,

00:23:56.840 whenever she discusses Christ, which is similar to Julian of Norwich's use of God or Mother.

00:24:02.480 It is not so much that God exists as a sexless entity for Hildegard,

00:24:06.540 but rather as a balanced higher power that possesses a blend of masculine and feminine characteristics.

00:24:13.480 These divine qualities are in turn mirrored within both sexes of the human family.

00:24:18.840 And look, she may have seen divinity in the spectrum of the human family, but Hildegard was not a queer ally, and neither, clearly, is the church. 0.53

00:24:27.560 But as angry as I get at the history of the church and the failings of family members, feminists, witches before me, I need to grow myself in love. 0.54

00:24:37.440 I can't hate my own ancestors.

00:24:41.020 Though I raged at some of their choices and the systems they were cogs in, the classist, racist air they breathed,

00:24:46.820 breathed. I want to polish the things that do shine and trace the fine lines of light across

00:24:51.820 hundreds of years to follow the web that has been there and strengthening all the time. The light

00:24:58.480 of powerful creatrixes, spiders and fungi and theorists and poets and nuns, the rhythm of love

00:25:06.300 beyond boundaries. Hildegard wrote, we shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously

00:25:14.300 toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its

00:25:20.780 endangerment with passion. And she wrote, gaze at the beauty of earth's greenings, what delight

00:25:28.140 God gives to humankind with all these things. All nature is at the disposal of humankind.

00:25:34.480 We are to work with it, for without it we cannot survive.

00:25:38.180 i used to fight with my grandfather over this idea that nature was given to humans

00:25:44.700 that it's all for us i still don't think that feels accurate it feels more to me like life

00:25:50.020 emerges in concert and we have a role to play in the ways that riotous noise can be a music

00:25:54.860 i have new thoughts on this since reading a piece by lila june indigenous activist musician and

00:26:01.800 educator when she wrote, we belong on the land. We belong in active participation with the land.

00:26:10.000 Without our gentle, loving, and reciprocal touch, our clipping, burning, pruning, and manicuring,

00:26:17.660 our mother falls apart. Just look at the pine beetles ripping through our national park forests.

00:26:23.700 Just look at the catastrophic fires gobbling up lands where our light indigenous fires used to

00:26:28.540 clear the light fuel load every single season for thousands of years. The earth needs us.

00:26:35.040 Do you really think creator would make humans without purpose? In the Yoruba language they 0.91

00:26:40.360 call humans the chosen ones because they were chosen to take care of and steward the land.

00:26:45.560 This is why it aches so deeply to see our mother earth crumble all around us.

00:26:50.900 To see coyote destroy ancient systems. To see coyote hijack our greed and fear to do so.

00:26:58.380 Because deep down in the marrow of our bones, we know we were created to care for her.

00:27:02.900 These big brains are not meant to maximize profits for the next fiscal quarter.

00:27:07.700 They are here to leverage skill and precision in the upkeep of complex, biodiverse ecosystems.

00:27:14.280 Time for us to relearn these practices again and do it together, as many hands make light work.

00:27:20.820 This land was densely populated by indigenous communities and extensively managed because we had the people power.

00:27:27.380 And we had the scientific know-how.

00:27:29.740 Some elders retain this knowledge, despite it being beaten out of us

00:27:33.200 and even demonized by the boarding school and parochial school systems.

00:27:37.720 Here we are, poised, ready to take it back again.

00:27:42.300 Take back our mantle and our role as Earth stewards.

00:27:47.460 Hildegard wrote,

00:27:49.160 The truly holy person welcomes all that is earthly.

00:27:53.360 All this leaves me with one of my few remaining prayers.

00:27:57.380 please make me of service to thee.

00:28:02.380 Hildegard writes and crafts and cooks and sings and brews beer and makes wine

00:28:06.880 in a time when fermentation isn't known or understood,

00:28:10.200 and it's considered a divine act.

00:28:12.880 God emerges in the bubbles when they choose. 1.00

00:28:16.020 It had been women tending to these kitchen miracles 0.95

00:28:18.280 until those crafts were gilded, and it was, surprise, 0.99

00:28:22.200 illegal for women to join the guilds, 0.65

00:28:24.480 and monks took over, with mostly unnamed women now assisting them.

00:28:29.320 Hildegard writes and studies at this small opening of time,

00:28:32.760 before the university system overtook the dominance of the abbeys and monasteries. 0.66

00:28:38.160 Under the university system, women were excluded and dehumanized again more completely, 1.00

00:28:43.660 pushed further out of circles of knowledge and power. 1.00

00:28:46.820 Working land they could never own, running industries they weren't allowed to profit from.

00:28:52.080 Murdered for having too much skill, too much voice. 0.97

00:28:56.240 Burned alive and called witch. 0.71

00:29:02.000 It's in this context, this between time behind a wall, 0.90

00:29:06.520 that she lets down her hair and begins to say the burning things she hears inside her own mind.

00:29:12.800 This flourishes into recipes, like hundreds of them,

00:29:16.060 dozens of utterly unique musical compositions written for the voices of her nuns,

00:29:21.820 startling illustrations of the geometry of the universe,

00:29:24.920 and remarkably accurate, for the 12th century, ideas about healing with plants.

00:29:30.860 In a paper called, Are the Correct Herbal Claims by Hildegard von Bingen Only Lucky Strikes?

00:29:37.600 A New Statistical Approach, a team of German and Swiss scientists focused on Hildegard's

00:29:42.340 references to 85 specific plants, one still being used today for medical purposes. They found 212

00:29:50.020 health claims by Hildegard from this group of plants, 30 of them cross-referenced as correct

00:29:55.020 in their claims according to contemporary standards. If she had been making the claims

00:30:00.060 up randomly, only between six and seven of her cures would have been accurate.

00:30:04.580 The study finds the probability of this happening just by chance is one in 10 million. They conclude

00:30:11.500 the hypothesis that Hildegard could have achieved her correct claims by chance

00:30:14.880 is to be clearly rejected on the basis of the highly significant level of our new statistical procedure.

00:30:20.600 The finding from this approach that medieval medical claims are significantly correlated with modern herbal indications

00:30:26.020 supports the importance of traditional medicinal systems as an empirical source.

00:30:31.620 This kind of statistical approach, beginning from a baseline of

00:30:34.880 she was guessing at random rather than

00:30:36.980 She was reading everything available at the time, including new translations from other cultures' knowledge bases,

00:30:42.220 and working in the monastery clinic and kitchen and testing plants and combinations,

00:30:46.140 and listening carefully to the women and men around her is useful, I guess?

00:30:51.880 And it's also kind of insulting and limited, and just a taste of how indigenous knowledge has been treated for hundreds of years by capitalist and settler science.

00:31:00.900 Patriarchy and industry combine to cut deep gashes in our understandings of the natural world still today.

00:31:06.980 Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree, said in an interview

00:31:13.180 recently, I was always on the outside because it was a man's world. Women weren't allowed 1.00

00:31:18.140 into forestry until my generation. The whole perspective on forests was all from this one 0.99

00:31:23.520 gendered perspective. It very much focused on competition and dominance. Later in the interview 0.97

00:31:30.560 she goes on to say, even Darwin understood collaboration and now we know, after many

00:31:35.560 decades starting with Lynn Margulis who came up with the endosymbiotic theory that really evolution

00:31:41.600 is a co-evolution. With the microbiome we know that we're all this kind of consortium of species

00:31:49.400 but by the time the science got to that point the practices in agriculture and forestry

00:31:55.820 were really entrenched around trying to manage competition.

00:32:00.620 I think of it as trying to see with only one eye.

00:32:05.560 I think Hildegard was trying to see with more than one eye.

00:32:10.560 Should we be surprised that one who showed such determination to communicate the secrets of the heavens

00:32:15.080 should also want to reveal the workings of the earth, writes Fiona Maddox.

00:32:20.440 And she describes Hildegard's massive labor of love for the workings of the earth in this way.

00:32:25.960 The Physica, consisting of nine books listing almost a thousand plants and animals in German,

00:32:30.740 is a study of botany, zoology, stones, metals, and elements.

00:32:35.560 describing their physical and medicinal properties.

00:32:39.560 Cause e Cure, as its title indicates, examines the causes and cures of diseases,

00:32:45.720 relating them to what has been clumsily called an allegorical microcosmic physiology,

00:32:52.340 and offering remedies mainly using plants.

00:32:55.520 Hildegard includes details that would have to have come from her vast reading,

00:32:59.420 but also from conversations with local midwives, farmers, and fisherfolk.

00:33:03.640 not all her knowledge came from first-hand experience she includes for example the whale

00:33:09.220 listed as a fish rather than a mammal with a hearty recommendation to eat the flesh as a

00:33:14.700 panacea for most ills from fevers and egg to scruffula just as using a knife handle made

00:33:21.260 from whale bone will cure a painful arm and wearing shoes or a belt made from the skin

00:33:26.660 will banish infirmities in this way her books are a compendium of oral and written and channeled

00:33:33.140 knowledge. It doesn't all hold water today, but it's remarkable for the scale of the effort as

00:33:38.800 much as for the combination of sources and insights. Some of the many bits that have been

00:33:43.560 polished by contemporary writers and practitioners include her recipes for hoppy beers and happiness

00:33:48.880 cookies, two potions of which I am particularly fond myself. As a recent piece in Atlas Obscura

00:33:57.320 summarized, for a weak heart she proposes a daily teaspoon of wine for the heart consisting of boiled 0.54

00:34:02.640 parsley, honey, and wine. For stomach pain, a nightcap of wine mixed with powdered ginger,

00:34:08.380 Galangale, a ginger relative from Southeast Asia, and Zedoweri, another ginger cousin from India.

00:34:14.940 And for melancholy, she offers her cookies of joy, or nerve cookies, wielding the key ingredients of

00:34:21.280 spelt flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves to calm all bitterness of the heart and mind.

00:34:26.780 Open your heart and impaired senses, and make your mind cheerful. Hildegard is also

00:34:32.460 weirdly, delightfully beloved in hipster beer circles, and to be clear, I love hipster beer

00:34:37.600 circles, because she's responsible for the earliest surviving writings on the use of hops in beer.

00:34:43.520 As a result of its own bitterness, Hildegard wrote in the Physica circa 1150,

00:34:49.200 hops stops putrefaction when put in beer, and it may be added so that it lasts much longer.

00:34:57.100 Hops were in use by brewers before this mention, but Hildegard's writing is the first place we

00:35:01.520 find reference to it. She was noticing the natural world and how it weaves with us through food and

00:35:08.540 healing. Hildegard's opuses of music and drink and food and ecology come from the same place,

00:35:16.140 the same wellspring of love for the world. She wrote underneath all the texts, all the sacred

00:35:21.960 psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious,

00:35:29.500 whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse ebb and flow of the

00:35:37.080 music that sings in me her love of the world and her sense of the watery terrifying gestating and

00:35:45.780 gentle sound of the world came from a particular experience of being in a body from my early

00:35:51.700 childhood before my bones nerves and veins were fully strengthened i have always seen this vision

00:35:57.960 in my soul even to the present time when I am more than 70 years old. In this vision my soul

00:36:05.060 as God would have it rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads

00:36:11.700 itself out among different peoples although they are far away from me in distant lands and places

00:36:17.320 and because I see them this way in my soul I observe them in accord with the shifting of

00:36:22.980 clouds and other created things. I do not hear them with my outward ears nor do I perceive them

00:36:30.120 by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses but in my soul

00:36:35.460 alone while my outward eyes are open. So I have never fallen prey to ecstasy in the visions but

00:36:42.200 I see them wide awake day and night and I am constantly fettered by sickness and often in

00:36:48.740 the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me. But God has sustained me until now.

00:36:57.980 There is a way that constant chronic pain transforms the texture of the world.

00:37:03.700 If you've experienced it, it's recognizable in Hildegard's visions, and I think I know that.

00:37:11.080 I mean, I can remember something like it, and when I think about it, it's always right there,

00:37:15.400 creeping up my back

00:37:17.720 lighting up behind my left eyelid

00:37:20.340 I struggled for a long time

00:37:23.700 wanting to talk about chronic pain

00:37:25.360 and the mind

00:37:26.120 connections with others

00:37:28.560 the way it makes this weaving

00:37:30.320 and dissolution of the self

00:37:32.240 but not knowing how

00:37:34.220 there's nothing more boring

00:37:35.580 than a decade full of days

00:37:37.280 with the same pain

00:37:38.520 and yet

00:37:39.400 sometimes there would be a loss of vision

00:37:42.980 the lights would get all blurry on the left side

00:37:46.220 I could see auras and halos

00:37:49.560 I had a migraine for ten years

00:37:52.400 it ebbed and flowed but it never stopped

00:37:56.040 until strangely it melted away

00:37:59.140 like Hildegard I experienced the most common feature of migraine

00:38:03.960 other than the headache

00:38:05.000 what Oliver Sacks describes as

00:38:07.540 a shower of phosphines in transit across the visual field

00:38:10.860 their transit being succeeded by a negative scotoma, or as she puts it, a great star most

00:38:17.380 splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars, which with the star

00:38:23.060 followed southward, and suddenly they were all annihilated. She rides the pain. Sometimes she

00:38:32.440 seems to use it, like the times when she's paralyzed until she gets her way, even when it's

00:38:37.560 not involved in her fighting for what she sees is needed against massively more powerful adversaries.

00:38:44.000 It fuels her vision of the kind of wisdom God wants us to find in the sparkling, joyful,

00:38:48.940 laughing beauty of the world. Pain turns the colors of the world up to eleven.

00:38:54.680 Matthew Fox in the intro to Civius writes, Hildegard does not lay out her theology of

00:38:59.900 wisdom abstractly. It was won by her at the cost of great pain. Physical, emotional, spiritual,

00:39:07.140 psychological, political, often sick, often misunderstood, often put down by males of

00:39:14.420 privilege in a church that was sexist. Hildegard knew what pain meant. She had tasted it. Her

00:39:20.940 response included a mature anger, a moral outrage at what she called the multiple imperfections of

00:39:26.860 the church, and a second response was a personal recycling of pain. One is able to be saved through

00:39:34.340 the bitter price of pain. Pain is in all grit building visions and redemption. It also fragmented

00:39:42.560 my focus so I couldn't properly plan or handle logistics. I don't think it made me a nicer

00:39:48.440 person. I could do groceries or cook or dishes, not all three in a single day. Or I could go to

00:39:55.480 work or school and if you added interpersonal interactions of any kind of emotional complexity

00:40:00.640 to that fragile pile. Then the pain would come from where it always sat at the base of my neck.

00:40:06.900 It would shoot out black arms around my waist so I couldn't breathe deeply for hours, sometimes

00:40:11.400 causing blackouts. The house was a mess all the time and we got behind on rent. Pain acts like

00:40:18.860 hunger on the brain. We narrowed to our snapping reptile selves. Pain stifles motivation. Hildegard

00:40:25.580 wasn't a visionary just because of pain, but because she listened through it. She watched,

00:40:33.640 and crucially, she dared to be exactly who she was, even though that brought her way off the

00:40:39.620 edge of the known world to share a vision that had room for both pleasure and joy in a way that

00:40:44.600 was completely challenging to the church and to patriarchy. Matthew Fox again, wherever patriarchy

00:40:51.200 in culture or in persons fails to teach the art of savoring and the joy of living, it is failing

00:40:58.480 in instructing us in wisdom. The building of a house of wisdom in ourselves as individuals and

00:41:05.160 in community with other humans and all other creatures of our earth is, for Hildegard, the

00:41:11.360 essential task of personhood and citizenship. It is the setting up of the unfurled divine tent that

00:41:18.080 exists in all creation and in every human being since it is the common task we are called to

00:41:24.740 this enterprise and none other is the source of community the communio the common task which

00:41:31.480 will render us a whole living breathing celebrating forgiving justice making compassionate and wise

00:41:39.840 people this is why we were born it is worth the struggle

00:41:48.080 Hildegard doesn't join in the struggle against patriarchy 1.00

00:41:52.560 in all the ways my modern feminism wants her to, of course.

00:41:57.480 She says some classically homophobic things

00:42:00.260 even while writing of her profound love for her student, Richardis.

00:42:04.960 Richardis died two years after leaving the Abbey

00:42:07.700 at the insistence of her brother and family,

00:42:10.440 and she died wishing she had never left Hildegard's side.

00:42:14.220 we can't know but i think she loved this woman and a community of women and i think she loved

00:42:23.220 the earth and wine and beer and thought perfectly spiced cookies could light you up with joy 1.00

00:42:29.460 she wasn't radical in all the ways i would have wanted she was classist and her love for the 0.99

00:42:35.260 church sounds like stockholm syndrome to me and i don't blame her being walled up would have bent

00:42:40.240 my brain. And as a witch, I would have used my fierce will to emerge in any way I could

00:42:45.800 trust me. And I think that's what Hildegard did. And I think she was wildly brave.

00:42:55.560 She wrote, dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the

00:43:02.740 boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there,

00:43:10.340 you must be prepared to leap. I think she left and changed the world. I think she found the way

00:43:17.260 to be an intellectual and a musician and a leader without getting burned alive.

00:43:24.220 Hildegard walks a very fine line in a dangerous time to grasp a power for herself and for the

00:43:30.300 living light of all that's green and she makes it out alive. Hildegard said women shouldn't wear 0.93

00:43:37.100 men's clothes and they shouldn't do men's work and the rules for nuns made clear they shouldn't

00:43:41.500 preach or travel and yet in her 60s she embarks on no less than four speaking tours. She leads

00:43:48.300 and writes and tells the truth she sees that the church is like a woman in danger at the hands of

00:43:54.520 a rapacious man, an image only more painful and potent today. She is caught in the language and

00:44:02.840 logic of the tools she had to think with, and she is illuminated by visions which exceed the grasp

00:44:08.780 of that net. From the age of three she sees, when fully awake, glowing symbolic images which land

00:44:15.960 with their meaning in her mind and give her insights about the time of Christ, the nature of

00:44:20.740 the church, the world to come, and the right move for the women she leads and protects.

00:44:26.660 She wrote, It happened in the year 1141 of the incarnation of God's Son Jesus Christ when I was

00:44:33.000 42 years and seven months old, that the heavens were opened and a fiery light of great brilliance

00:44:38.640 came and suffused my whole brain and set my whole heart and breast afire like a flame, yet not

00:44:44.180 burning but warming as the sun warms an object on which it sheds its rays. Suddenly I came to

00:44:50.180 understand the meaning of the Book of Psalms, the Gospel, and the other canonical books of both the

00:44:54.900 Old and New Testaments. Although I could not interpret the words of their texts nor divide

00:44:59.960 the syllables, and I had no knowledge of cases or tenses, yet in a marvelous way I had sensed

00:45:06.240 the power and mystery of secret wonderful visions in myself from girlhood, from the age of five even

00:45:12.780 to the present time. Barbara Newman writes, Hildegard herself was aware that the visions

00:45:18.220 had some connection with her delicate health and frequent sickness at the end of her last book on

00:45:24.060 the activity of god she describes her temperament as airy that is prone to suffer infirmities caused

00:45:30.440 by wind air and rain so that she can by no means enjoy any security of the flesh yet she adds that

00:45:38.180 otherwise the inspiration of the holy spirit would not be able to dwell in her as if the spirit were

00:45:44.480 literally a wind to which she had been physically sensitized. The further I go with Hildegard,

00:45:52.120 the further I want to go. I am in my 42nd year as I write this, and my feelings and words move

00:45:59.780 through me in clear reflection of the light on the lake, as though the spirit were the wind,

00:46:05.640 or the wind were spirit enough. I spent a day up to my elbows in roots and soil and mycelium,

00:46:11.020 digging plastic out of my neighbor's stream

00:46:13.080 and came home and canceled an interview I had lined up 1.00

00:46:16.300 for a very high-paying, stupid job. 1.00

00:46:19.580 I don't know where I'm going these days, 1.00

00:46:21.220 but I'm trying to listen.

00:46:25.240 I spent years in the grip of migraine

00:46:27.320 until I learned to move in collaboration with my muscles,

00:46:30.760 bones, nerves, and mind,

00:46:33.500 not trying desperately always to control and protect them.

00:46:37.760 my mind finally moved out of my neck and into the air around me the space i take up with all

00:46:46.500 my gestures all my dances with faith in the way that i can float out of a chair i started to say

00:46:54.100 exactly what i wanted to say in my writing it comes out in fits and starts it came out first

00:47:00.020 in network maps and papers spread across the floor and getting up to write down the things

00:47:05.100 that suddenly sounded clearly in the night.

00:47:08.680 It did not come from visions,

00:47:10.860 although I think I had one once.

00:47:12.920 I asked it to go away, and it obliged.

00:47:16.460 I cried and apologized to the empty air that was left after,

00:47:20.020 and I never talked about it.

00:47:22.480 But I walked in the windstorm of life

00:47:24.520 toward the work of opening myself,

00:47:27.780 telling the stories and calling out the questions I saw

00:47:30.260 with all the honesty I could,

00:47:32.160 and that was the deal I think I wrought

00:47:33.900 with the vision shown to me by my mind

00:47:36.020 or by whatever you believe in.

00:47:39.060 An emergence from the vast network of ideas

00:47:41.740 and experiences intersecting with the vast network of beings

00:47:44.980 that cohabitate with me in the air and the rain

00:47:47.460 and memories and ideas of our ancestors

00:47:50.220 and of all species.

00:47:53.420 A deal I think we all make.

00:47:56.360 The task of finding what will suffice,

00:47:59.300 as Wallace Stevens puts it.

00:48:00.720 scrambling to find what would suffice i came closer and closer to making the leap across the void

00:48:07.640 my singing voice would crack loose shortly thereafter and it was all a part of it

00:48:13.520 of walking out of migraine and into being this utterly strange and perfectly familiar self

00:48:20.040 to myself hildegard wrote we cannot live in a world that is not our own

00:48:25.600 in a world that is interpreted for us by others.

00:48:29.560 An interpreted world is not a home.

00:48:32.840 Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, 0.98

00:48:36.800 to use our own voice,

00:48:39.180 to see our own light.

00:48:42.560 Don't stop singing. 0.97

00:48:45.840 Witches, or whatever you call yourself,

00:48:48.440 oh person imbued with the electricity of unique thought, 0.95

00:48:51.940 brought to your knees by awe,

00:48:53.320 blessed with pleasure and joy and sadness and anger

00:48:56.800 in your own ways of feeling and healing

00:48:59.220 and being rooted in this world which holds and owns us

00:49:02.880 hear her calling to you across the centuries

00:49:06.100 don't stop singing

00:49:08.840 hear it as a song

00:49:11.700 the chant of women told they were poison 0.90

00:49:14.100 dangerous, less than 0.99

00:49:16.600 witches raising their voices and knowing they are of beauty

00:49:20.620 hear it in the song that courses through all things and calls life forth from other cultures 0.98

00:49:26.140 into sacred ancient sakes and our daily bread take back your own listening dare to declare who

00:49:34.080 you are call yourself what you like love and honor what you can from your ancestors far and wide and

00:49:40.940 deep in the soil beneath us cross the shores of silence when it's time to sing out in praise or

00:49:47.120 to mourn or to rage and right a wrong. Grow your hair long. Give yourself a tiara of self-love.

00:49:53.860 Build a world of protection for the vulnerable as best you can, even if that vulnerable one you

00:49:59.100 protect right now is you, you strange and familiar being you. For witches writing to us or bringing

00:50:06.060 up the question about coming out of the broom closet in our coven conversations, perhaps imagine

00:50:11.180 this. There is no closet. There are only circles of protection. All the places we have hid have

00:50:20.960 been a shelter and a home. Even our own shame has been an act of love outstretched by our

00:50:27.900 shadow selves, trying to understand what we need in response to the shaming world, trying

00:50:33.900 to keep us safe as best she can.

00:50:37.820 Thinking of the key, we confirm the prison, as Elliot wrote.

00:50:42.520 It matters what thoughts we use to think other thoughts.

00:50:46.560 So choose your keys and tools and songs.

00:50:51.240 Map your circles of protection and give them new names.

00:50:55.020 And give yourself the grace to choose how you enter and exit

00:50:58.260 and use them day to day, context by context.

00:51:01.880 if you are walled within an abbey or trapped within chronic pain mental illness or the

00:51:07.320 infuriating mire of inequality remember to breathe in the unseen ancestors and with them begin to

00:51:15.360 chant or dance or chart against the insides of your eyelids the vastness of your own mind

00:51:22.080 and the dancing spheres of your own breath see the brilliance of your imagination and your

00:51:27.700 interaction with the unseen world, the living light, the greenness. Take back your own listening

00:51:34.380 and hear this 12th century saint calling to you with love and all us witches calling to you.

00:51:40.440 Don't stop singing. Dare to declare who you are. We are here in the circle the darkness

00:51:49.080 makes between our ears, listening and singing with you. 1.00

00:51:57.700 You must be a witch. 0.99

00:52:27.700 Thank you. 1.00

00:52:57.700 Thank you.

00:53:27.700 Thank you.

00:53:57.700 Thank you.

00:54:27.700 Thank you.

00:54:57.700 Thank you.

00:55:27.700 Thank you.

00:55:57.700 Thank you.

00:56:27.700 Thank you.

00:56:57.700 Thank you.

00:57:27.700 Thank you.

00:57:57.700 Thank you.

00:58:27.700 Thank you.

00:58:57.700 Thank you.

00:59:27.700 Thank you.

00:59:57.700 Thank you.

01:00:27.700 Thank you.

01:00:57.700 Thank you.

01:01:27.700 You

Missing Witches - October 17, 2021

MW Hildegarde of Bingen - Dare to Declare Who YOU Are

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