SACRED SCRIBES THROUGHOUT THE AGES
In 1700 BCE, Amat-Mamu was an Assyrian priestess-scribe who for forty years made her living in a cloister of 140 other such women. The clay tablets on which they wrote have survived to this day. Three hundred years before she and her sisterhood were recording the spiritual beliefs of the day, the priestess Kubatum in Ur wrote and performed ritual enactments of holy erotic poetry such as the sweet—literally—lines incorporated into the Bible’s sexy Song of Solomon: “Lion, let me give you my caresses…wash me with honey.”
Marie de France was a French poet and the first women to write in a European vernacular. Many scholars regard her as the greatest woman writer of the medieval era because of her religious writing and short fiction, which preceded Chaucer and Boccaccio. Her identity is enshrouded in mystery, perhaps for her own protection. We hope that a modern scholar-sleuth will find this enigma a potent lure and challenge and will make her works and her identity accessible to us all.
J is believed to have been a tenth-century female Israelite of noble descent who wrote several narratives that are embedded in the Old Testament, though they were written six centuries before various scribes cobbled them together. The women she wrote about—King David’s lover Bathsheba, Rebecca, and Tamar—come alive in her stories. While “J” the person remains a cipher, and a very controversial one among biblical experts, her identity and authenticity have recently been recognized by such a noteworthy as Harold Bloom, and a volume of the J writings has been published.
Perpetua was an early Christian Carthaginian, citizen of the Holy Roman Empire, and member of the Montanist sect, which espoused equality for women. She converted her best friend, an African slave named Felicity, and both were jailed for soliciting their faith. In prison, Perpetua began to have visions and to write them down. Though facing death, she reaffirmed her faith in court and was executed by a combination of wild beasts and gladiators in a Roman circus. Her diary, a record of her trials and her unswerving faith, survives her.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a most practical mystic, wrote The Woman’s Bible, no small feat. This powerful text is both a testament to and a feminist critique of the male bias in the Judeo-Christian tradition; some sentiments were echoed in the “Declaration of Sentiments” printed for the Seneca Falls suffragette convention of July 19, 1848. “Resolved, That woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.”
I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called to my attention.
Helene Hanff, on the joys of secondhand books, from 84, Charing Cross Road
HILDEGARD VON BINGEN the “Sibyl of the Rhine”
Although her canonization was twice undertaken in the fifteenth century, four hundred years after her death, no aspect of sainthood was ever realized for Hildegard von Bingen except for her inclusion in the Roman Martyrology. Hildegard began her life in Germany; the daughter of nobility, she discovered her calling at the age of three when she first started having visions. Throughout her life, she had frequent incidents of trances, fits, and frenzied states of godly joy.
At eight years of age, she entered the Benedictine Convent at Disibodenberg as an anchorite. As a religious devotion, anchorites were locked into tiny cells that they could never leave, receiving food through a small hole through which they also passed their wastes. Luckily for Hildegard, her cell was already occupied by a German anchoress named Jutta, who instructed her in the classics and certain sciences, notably botany. Hildegard lived that way for seven years, until word of her amazing brilliance and religious devotion had so spread that women who wished to study with her crowded her cell, and the order allowed her to leave her cell and become a nun. Hildegard had two confidantes: her anchorite teacher and her lifelong friend and biographer, a monk named Volmar. When Jutta died, Hildegard was made abbess in 1147 and went on to found her own convent in Rupertsberg, near Bingen.
Hildegard kept her visions secret until a voice told her to reveal them. She accurately prophesied a major papal event that took place nearly two hundred years later—the schism of the Catholic Church in 1378. She recorded her illuminating messages received in trance in her mystic trilogy, composed of Scivias, covering the period from 1142 to 1151, translated as Know Thy Ways; from 1158 to 1163, Liber vitae meritorium (The Book of the Lives of the Worthy); and from 1163 to 1173, Liber divinorum operum (The Book of Divine Works). Bernard of Clairvaux, a highly regarded religious philosopher and scholar of the time, was deeply moved by Hildegard’s work. With his imprimatur, Hildegard’s reputation and influence expanded, leading her to play an important role in the affairs of Pope Eugenius III and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. She also made four preaching tours, which was highly unusual for a woman.
A dynamic speaker and accomplished musician as well as a writer, Hildegard also invented a cryptic language and calligraphy. Her exquisite religious prayer and verse are heavily laced with an emphasis on the feminine divine. Yet her writing wasn’t limited to mysticism; she also wrote scientific treatises on subjects ranging from geology to botany, physiology, cosmology, ethics, and pathology. Dubbed the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” Hildegard von Bingen became in her lifetime a very famous woman. When she was elderly, she spoke of how she constantly saw a backdrop of radiance upon which her visions were projected. She called this “the shadow of living light.”
In the last century, both her poetry and music are enjoying a wide revival, and she is a mainstay in spiritual anthologies.
Sophia! You of the whirling wings, circling encompassing energy of God—you quicken the world in your clasp.
Hildegard von Bingen, from Antiphon for Divine Wisdom
JULIAN OF NORWICH the first Englishwoman of letters
Julian was an anchoress in the Church of St. Julian in Norwich and was thought to have been undergoing a “rite of enclosure,” a kind of burial service for the soul while in her solitary cell.
Julian became famous throughout England after she decided she had God’s permission to share the details of her mystical experiences, a total of sixteen separate visions. Though she was keenly aware of her status as a woman, she felt no risk in recording these important messages from above. This remarkable series of events occurred two days after she turned thirty, in the year 1372. At the time, Julian was gravely ill, but instead of concentrating on her own misery, she began to feel pity and compassion for the suffering of Christ on the cross. Her condition progressively worsened, and she hovered near death, even receiving last rites. Immediately after the rites, she experienced a “sudden change” and started seeing images from another realm.
Julian’s descriptions of these episodes, written in English, were published in a volume entitled Revelations of Divine Love. They tell of her visitations not just from Heavenly Hosts, but also from demons and Satan. She discussed God in terms of a maternal presence, in a section called “God the Mother.”
Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love was enormously popular reading and was copied repeatedly during her lifetime and after her death. She has never been officially beatified and is honored on the “casual” feast day of May 13. She is oft acknowledged as the first Englishwoman of letters.
As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother…and so Jesus is our true Mother in nature by our first creation, and he is our true Mother in grace by his taking our created nature.
Julian of Norwich, from Revelations of Divine Love
PASSIONATE PRIESTESS
Mechtild von Magdeburg, a nun from Germany, was installed by her wealthy, noble family in the convent of Helfta in Saxony, a prominent center for education and mysticism. Mechtild had been seeing visions from God since childhood, but had hidden the fact from everyone. In 1250, she began writing about them in Das ƒlieƒsende Licht der Gottheit (The Revelations of Mechtild). She