A rainbow-colored Tree of Life with jeweled apples, a singing cloud bursting with the light of a thousand suns; just reading about Hildegard von Bingen's visions is hallucinogenic experience!

A rainbow-colored Tree of Life with jeweled apples, a singing cloud bursting with the light of a thousand suns; just reading about Hildegard von Bingen's visions is hallucinogenic experience!

Visited by these colorful, brilliant visions from a very young age, she initially considered them a curse, blaming them for getting locked up in a monastery when she was only eight. How real these 'illuminations' seemed: “These visions which I saw were not in sleep nor in dreams, nor in my imagination nor by bodily eyes or outward ears nor in a hidden place; but in watching, aware with the pure eyes of the mind and inner ear of the heart," she wrote.

At 42, she had an epiphany: she was given her these visions for a reason, and now she had to speak and write everything she saw and heard. Like the ancient seeress Weleda, she had to start using her power of prophecy. Over the course of ten years, the prolific nun wrote down all her visions in her magnum opus 'Scivias'.

Hildegard's greatest legacy however is the fact that she had the imagination and the courage to envision a world where women could live freely, without oppression. And for a while, in her abbeys, she manifested that dream. A visionary in every sense of the word.