Seven Ages of the Goddess by Trevor Greenfield

Author:Trevor Greenfield [Greenfield, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-559-2
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2018-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Female Mystics ~ Shaun Johnson

From the mid to late Middle Ages, between the East-West Schism of 1054 and the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, many of the most significant Christian Mystics were female, at a time when women had very little status within society. Their visionary experiences gave them a voice and an authority they otherwise wouldn’t have had, though not all wholeheartedly welcomed the idea. Mary Magdalen del Pazzi (1566-1607), for example, came to the conclusion that interaction with God was subjective and deeply personal, and as such rejected the written word. If ever left alone with notes taken by others when she experienced visions in trance, she would burn them.

There was a specific process women needed to go through for their works to reach a wider audience, involving the sanction and approval of higher religious authorities, invariably men. Hildegard Von Bingen, for example, sought guidance from Bernard of Clairvaux, himself one of the most important Christian Mystics of the age, who interceded with the Pope on her behalf to authorise the continued transcribing of her visions. This wasn’t just a bureaucratic process, as most female Christian Mystics were writing during the time of the Inquisitions, when many of their works could be classed as potentially heretical, particularly as they advocated a direct and personal interaction with God or the Divine, without the need for intermediaries, implicitly challenging the authority of the clergy. A failure to go through the accepted procedure could have serious consequences, as can be seen in the case of Marguerite Porete (c.1248/50-1310), whose visionary writings on the freedom of the soul led to her imprisonment, the condemnation of her works and her being burnt at the stake.

The first prominent female Christian Mystic was the multitalented Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1174), a painter, poet, composer, physician and healer, who almost set the template for the female Mystics who were to follow, being of noble birth, precarious health and experiencing intense altered states of consciousness from an early age. Being the tenth child, she was, as was customary at that time, handed over to the church as a form of tithe, at aged eight being put into the care of Jutta von Spanheim, an anchoress who lived in an enclosed cell attached to the Benedictine cloister of Saint Disibod. Since Hildegard had been having strange experiences since the age of three, when she saw “a brightness so great [her] soul trembled,” it’s not inconceivable her family were happy to get rid of her. It was common for wealthy families to put girls and women who were unusual or rebellious, or had disabilities or emotional issues, into convents, paying a dowry as a means of literally marrying them off to God.

In 1141, aged 42, Hildegard experienced a vision of blinding light, during which she was told to “write what you see and hear”. Over the course of the next ten years, she detailed 24 of her visions, with accompanying commentaries, published as ‘Scivias’, an extraordinary mix of intense explorations

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