Talking about Hildegarda de Bingen is not easy, considering that she was a woman clearly of her time-12th century-but also one of the most extraordinary in history.Join us to discover what made this abbess so unique , whose work, multifaceted, is still in force.
Hildegarda: a nun who described orgasm in the twelfth century
Hildegarda was the tenth and last daughter of a German family, noble and according to the medieval religious tradition, the tithe was offered to God, and she as daughter number ten was given and consecrated to the religious activity from the moment she was born.It ran the year 1098.
Her The family gave it to the Countess Jutta de Spanheim to instruct her in the reading of the Holy Scriptures, the Latin, the prayer of the psalter (or psalms) and in the Gregorian chant.Several years both lived in the castle of Spanheim, and when Hildegarda turned 14 years they were locked in the monastery of Disibodenberg , which was masculine but had an attached cell for a small group of nuns closing .
In a short time, that cell had become a monastery thanks to the amount of girls who entered.In 1114, our Hildegarda embraced the monastic life under the Benedictine order, and under the direction of Jutta.At death she was in 1136, Hildegarda was elected abbess, counting only 38 years.
Since childhood , since he was 3 years old, he suffered visions that he would have throughout his whole life, and this is the feature he is most known for; In fact, the epithets of "Sibyl of the Rhine" or "Prophetess Teutonic", make very clear the consideration that came to have in the society of his time.It was due to these visions that he began to write, because I hear a voice that he ordered to write down “everything he saw and heard”.It happened in 1141, when he was 43 years old.
She was a woman with great firmness, who became councilor of kings and ecclesiastics -something very rare in the European twelfth century-and with a fervent will, that he achieved what he intended.
For example, when one of his nuns committed suicide because of a pregnancy , Hildegarda imposed himself and demanded to divide the monastery, and proposed to found only one for women, inspired by one of his visions; despite the rejection of many (and even some of the nuns), I manage to found the Rupertsberg monastery , closer to the Rhine, with about 20 nuns; and not only that one, also that of Eibingen , which I visited twice a week.She was abbess of both.
Being nun, and closing, did not prevent him from writing about many topics, including that of sexuality, with great clarity and without blunt.Note that also insisted that sexual pleasure was a matter of two , and that the woman felt it (a scandalous statement at the time, when it was believed that the taste for sex was a clear sign of morally questionable inclinations).We transcribed her description of the female orgasm:
"When the woman joins the man, the heat of her brain, which has pleasure in itself, makes it savor that pleasure in the union and ejaculate its semen.And when the semen has fallen into its instead, this very strong heat of the brain attracts and retains it with it, and immediately the woman's kidney is contracted and all the members that during the period are ready to open are closed...”
Here we can see several novel ideas, for example, that pleasure is in the brain , and that feminine pleasure stimulates masculine.Considering that she was a nun, and that she lived in the twelfth century It is no surprise, and above all, that it was not silent or isolated.
His visions were recognized by the church as intervention of the Holy Spirit ; covered by them, I talk about sex in his medical book, Cause et curae .Because Hildegarda, as well as a writer, was a composer, philosopher, theologian, mystic, painter and scientist , whose contributions still feed certain alternative medicines that are based on botany.So, then, in his scientific writings, Cause et curae and the Physica , which is its complement, outlines its own attempt to understand the cosmos and physical reality, from the physiological point of view.strong> sex is treated here as a human physical manifestation , without any judgment of moral or ethical value.
Even, she describes the sexual act as something full of beauty and totally natural , which serves to unite man and woman.To emphasize this aspect, he says that consensual union and mutual love help to procreate happy, healthy and intelligent children...
This ability of you to "see" things, suggested by divinity, is an important part of your life, along with a fairly broken health even though he lived until he was 81.Oliver Sacks, the well-known psychiatrist, suggests that Hildegarda suffered from intense migraines, that made her see that "intense and living light" she described.
Among her bulging work is her Scivias (1151) (“Know the ways of the Lord”), which is the first compilation of his visions, and then there are Cause et curae and Physica , both of the same era, that collect their deep knowledge of herbology, medicine and medical treatments, based on the properties of plants and animals.
He wrote between 1158 and 1163 Liber vite meritorium ("Book of the merits of life"), a moral work where it catalogs the main 35 spiritual vices and its opposite virtues.In 1163, Liber divinorum operum began, where he describes 10 visions and forms a structured cosmology of the universe, in correspondence with the human body.He also wrote numerous books of religious and moral doctrine.
Hildegarda combined his monastic and closing life with the preaching trips, which in total were 4, to bring the word of God to people and also denounce the levels of corruption of the church.She is the author of the "Lingua Ignota", the first artificial language of history , and cons devised the antecedent of Esperanto.
His fame was such that even Emperor Federico I Barbarroja himself invited her to meet him.He wrote numerous letters to famous people of the moment, such as Leonor de Aquitaine and her husband, King Henry II, or Bernardo de Claraval, a Cistercian monk of great influence.
He also composed liturgical music for the community of his monasteries; in total, composed 78 musical works .Murio at the advanced age of 81 years, in 1179, and passed to posterity as one of the most influential women of his time.
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI named her doctor of the church for her immense work and numerous contributions to Christian doctrine, while granting her an" equivalent canonization " that made her a saint.There are at least two movies, "A beautiful mind", winner of the Oscar in 2001, and "Vision: the story of Hildegard von Bingen ”, by the German Margarethe von Trotta , whose dialogues are textual phrases from her writings, and whose soundtrack is Hildegarda's music.We place a small piece,« Generous Bird »:
If you want to know more about this extraordinary woman who was true to herself, you can click here and here.We leave you the trailer of the movie Vision , and if You are interested in seeing it complete, this is the link.It is subtitled in Spanish.
And if you want to know about other exceptional and incredible women, read Hypatia de Alejandria: wisdom and tragedy, Agnodice, the first gynecologist in history and Olympe de Gouges, the woman who defended our rights and was beheaded.
Images: CEBImager and, DIRECTMEDIA, paniko.cl, Laurel, Commons Wikimedia
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