St Hildegard of Bingen: Viriditas, Visions and a Tarot Spread

Not long after I began referring to myself as a Christian Witch—a label I no longer feel any need to cling to—I learned about St Hildegard of Bingen.

My immediate thought was that she had essentially been a Christian Witch too. Here was a woman who received visions, wrote about herbs and healing, explored the properties of stones, composed sacred music and perceived the whole of creation as alive with divine meaning.

She simply never used the label. Because God forbid.

Of course, calling a twelfth-century Benedictine abbess a Christian Witch tells us considerably more about modern categories than it does about Hildegard. She understood herself as a faithful daughter of the Church, a recipient of divine revelation and a prophetic voice commissioned to speak uncomfortable truths to those in power.

Yet I still understand why I recognised something familiar in her.

Hildegard inhabited the kind of Christianity many of us have been told no longer exists: visionary, symbolic, embodied and alive to the sacred meaning woven throughout creation. Maybe I reached for the Christian Witch label because I had not yet realised how much mystery Christianity once contained—and could contain again. Tomorrow, 17 September, is her feast day, so let’s get to know this amazing Saint a little better.

Jump to the Viriditas Tarot Spread

Who Was St Hildegard of Bingen?

Hildegard was born in the Rhineland in 1098. At the age of eight, she was entrusted to the care of Jutta of Sponheim at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. She later took religious vows and eventually became leader of the growing community of women there.

Her life did not remain safely enclosed behind monastery walls.

Around 1150, Hildegard established an independent community for her nuns at Rupertsberg, near Bingen. A second monastery followed at Eibingen in 1165. She travelled to preach, corresponded with popes, bishops, emperors and ordinary people, and challenged corruption within the Church.

She was not the only medieval woman whose visionary authority shaped the Church. St Bridget of Sweden would later become equally influential, particularly through her revelations concerning Mary’s Sorrows.

That would be quite enough for one medieval lifetime. But Hildegard also produced major works of visionary theology, writings on medicine and the natural world, hundreds of letters, sermons, poetry and a remarkable body of sacred music. She even created her own language, the Lingua Ignota. Tolkien approves.

Pope Benedict XVI described the range and quality of her surviving work as unmatched by any other female author of the Middle Ages. In 2012, he declared her a Doctor of the Universal Church.

That title is reserved for saints whose teaching holds particular value for the whole Church. Hildegard’s visions, cosmic imagery and fierce intelligence were not awkward extras to be quietly overlooked. Her spiritual gifts formed part of the reason the Church eventually recognised her teaching so highly.

St Hildegard’s feast day falls on 17 September, the anniversary of her death in 1179.

St Hildegard and the Living Light

Hildegard experienced visions from early childhood. For many years, she spoke about them only with a few trusted people.

Then, in 1141, when she was around 42, she received an instruction to write what she saw and heard. She resisted. Illness followed, which Hildegard understood as the consequence of refusing the work entrusted to her.

The result of her eventual obedience was Scivias, usually translated as Know the Ways. Its visions move through creation, the Fall, redemption, the Church, the virtues and the final fulfilment of salvation. Her later visionary works continued this vast theological project.

Hildegard did not describe these experiences as dreams or unconscious trances. She remained awake and perceived the imagery inwardly, within what she called the reflection or shadow of the Living Light. On rarer occasions, she experienced the Living Light itself.

The visions arrived through symbols: stars, flames, wheels, buildings, mountains, animals and human figures. Hildegard then interpreted what she had seen through Scripture and Christian theology. Image and meaning belonged together.

She also sought discernment rather than declaring herself infallible. St Bernard of Clairvaux encouraged her, while Pope Eugenius III authorised her to record the visions and speak publicly after part of Scivias was examined at the Synod of Trier. Pope Benedict XVI later compared her symbolic visions with those of the Old Testament prophets.

That combination interests me deeply: vivid personal revelation, careful interpretation and a willingness to test what had been received.

How Would Hildegard React to the Tarot?

Hildegard never used Tarot. The cards appeared in Europe centuries after her death, so we cannot know what she would have thought of them.

Based on her theology, she would probably have insisted that any spiritual practice remain subject to prayer, Scripture, reason and careful discernment. She would certainly have rejected using cards to bypass God or surrender personal responsibility.

Yet Hildegard understood the spiritual power of symbolic imagery. Her visions arrived through stars, flames, animals, buildings and cosmic forms. She knew that an image could open a door that ordinary language could not.

This is one reason I continue to value Tarot as a form of divination and spiritual listening. The cards do not replace prayer, Scripture, reason or discernment. They offer a method through which we can hold questions before God and examine them from a symbolic angle.

If you would like to explore that relationship further, I have written separately about reading Tarot as a Christian mystic.

What Is Viriditas?

One of the most beautiful ideas associated with St Hildegard of Bingen is viriditas. The Latin word is often translated as greenness, viridity or greening power. None of those English terms fully contains it.

For Hildegard, viriditas conveyed vitality, freshness, fertility, growth and fruitfulness. It was the living power of God at work in creation. Plants displayed it visibly, but greenness also belonged to the body, the soul, virtue and spiritual life.

Creation was not divine in itself. Nor was viriditas an impersonal energy floating free of God. Hildegard’s greening power flowed from the Creator and revealed His continuing love for what He had made. Creation remained fruitful because it continually received life from God.

Dryness was its opposite.

A plant deprived of water withers. In Hildegard’s imagery, the human soul can also become dry through sin, despair, neglect or separation from its divine source. Grace restores moisture and movement. Virtue begins to grow again.

The idea feels especially useful when spiritual life has become another list of duties. We can become so preoccupied with being correct that we stop asking whether anything within us is actually alive.

Where is there freshness, movement and fruit?

What has become brittle or depleted?

Which part of the soul is waiting for living water?

Viriditas does not promise constant comfort. Pruning, composting and winter all belong to the life of a garden. Spiritual greenness is the capacity to receive life from God and bear the fruit appropriate to the season.

Mary, the Greenest Branch

Hildegard’s theology of greenness reaches one of its loveliest expressions in her music for the Virgin Mary.

In the antiphon O Viridissima Virga, Hildegard addresses Mary as the freshest or greenest branch. Divine warmth enters her and the branch blossoms. Christ is the flower and fruit through whom the dry world receives life again.

The image draws upon the biblical branch growing from the line of Jesse. It also places Mary within Hildegard’s great vision of creation, Incarnation and renewal. Through her receptive yes, the Creator enters creation.

Hildegard contrasts Mary’s fruitfulness with Eve’s loss. Yet this is not a simple tale of one bad woman being replaced by a good one. Her theology gives Mary an active place in the restoration of humanity. Within the feminine body that bears Christ, divine grace and earthly matter meet.

As I find my way back to Mary, this image speaks to me powerfully. She is not remote from the living world. Mary is the Greenest Branch: rooted in the human story, open to heaven and fruitful because she allows the divine life to move through her. My return to Marian devotion has also led me to explore Mary and the Divine Feminine, including the ways she continues to carry the sacred feminine within Christian imagination.

There is also a lesson here for our own creativity. Fruit cannot be forced into existence by anxious effort. Our task is to remain rooted, receptive and willing to nourish what God has planted.

When Creation Becomes a Symphony

For Hildegard, creation was not only green. It was musical.

She composed hymns, antiphons and sequences with melodies that still sound startlingly free and luminous. Her music stretches beyond the narrow range typical of much medieval chant, as though the voice itself were reaching towards heaven.

Hildegard regarded sacred song as humanity’s answer to the creative Word of God. Pope Benedict XVI summarised her vision by saying that the whole of human life could be understood as harmonic and symphonic. The voice sings outwardly in worship, while a virtuous life becomes the song of the heart.

Her musical drama, Ordo Virtutum or The Play of the Virtues, stages a struggle for the human soul. The personified Virtues sing. The Devil alone cannot: his lines are spoken or shouted.

He can accuse and tempt, but he cannot make music.

I love that. Evil can create noise, but only the Good can create harmony.

In Hildegard’s world, holiness restores us to the divine music. Each virtue brings the soul back into tune until human life can answer its Creator again.

The Woman Who Finally Wrote What She Saw

It is tempting to remember Hildegard only as an exceptionally confident woman who strode through the Middle Ages telling emperors where they had gone wrong.

She did eventually do that.

When Emperor Frederick Barbarossa supported a series of antipopes and helped deepen division within the Church, Hildegard wrote to warn him of divine judgement. Advanced age and poor health did not prevent her from undertaking preaching journeys. Bishops, abbots and religious communities sought her counsel.

Her public authority began, however, with reluctance. Hildegard was frightened of presumption. She questioned her visions, sought advice and delayed writing.

That makes her courage far more interesting. She did not speak because self-expression was sacred or because every inner impression deserved an audience. Hildegard spoke because she came to believe that silence would be disobedience.

There is a lesson here for writers, readers and anyone entrusted with a spiritual or creative gift. Hiding can resemble humility from the outside. Sometimes it is simply fear wearing a modest dress.

The work is not ours to inflate the ego. Neither is it ours to bury.

The Christianity I Was Trying to Find

Looking back, I can see why Hildegard appeared to confirm my identity as a Christian Witch. She lived in a cosmos filled with spiritual meaning. Herbs, stones, music, colour, visions, the body and the turning seasons all belonged within her religious imagination.

Nothing about her world was spiritually flat.

Yet Hildegard does not fit neatly into modern witchcraft. Her universe was thoroughly Christian, sacramental and Christ-centred. Creation revealed God because it had been created through the divine Word. Healing served life. Visions called people to conversion. Spiritual power was measured by the fruit it produced.

Perhaps I was not searching for permission to combine two incompatible identities as much as I was searching for an enchanted Christianity.

I wanted a faith in which mysticism was real, creation carried meaning and the feminine had a voice. Hildegard had been there all along, blazing a trail of Living Light and waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

Her feast offers a good opportunity to ask where divine life is moving now. The following Tarot spread draws upon viriditas as an image of spiritual renewal. It can be used when you feel depleted, creatively blocked or uncertain about what is trying to grow through you.

The Viriditas Tarot Spread

Before shuffling, take a few slow breaths. Ask God to show you where life is present, where it has become obstructed and how you can cooperate with grace.

1. Dry Ground

Where has life become depleted, stagnant or disconnected from its source?

This card identifies the area requiring attention. It may show spiritual weariness, physical depletion, creative frustration or a relationship that no longer supports growth.

2. The Hidden Seed

What remains alive within me, even if I cannot yet see its growth?

Not everything dormant is dead. This card reveals a gift, desire, hope or possibility being protected beneath the surface.

3. Living Water

What grace or nourishment is available to me now?

Look here for the help already being offered. It could arrive through prayer, rest, study, friendship, practical support or renewed contact with the natural world.

4. Necessary Pruning

What is draining life and needs to be released or reduced?

Pruning is not punishment. It directs energy towards what can bear fruit. This card may identify an obligation, habit, attachment or belief that consumes more than it gives.

5. The Green Shoot

What is ready to emerge and begin growing?

This is the tender new life at the centre of the reading. Treat it with patience. A new shoot requires protection before it can withstand every kind of weather.

6. Sacred Song

How am I being asked to give this new life expression?

Hildegard turned vision into theology, music, healing and service. This card shows how your own greening may seek a voice through words, art, prayer, action or a different way of living.

7. Fruit for the World

How can this renewal become a blessing to others?

Viriditas does not end in private fulfilment. Divine life moves through us and becomes nourishment for the world. The final card reveals the fruit your growth may eventually bear.

Check out the world’s largest collection of FREE Tarot Spreads for personal & spiritual development!