St. Hildegard: the Patron Saint of Crystal Healers

Herbal remedies, crystal healing, astrology, psychic visions and... Christian monasticism?

In my last article (In the Defense of Crystals and their ‘Energies’), I dissected the archetype of the modern New Age chick to explore why they are so collectively reviled. I concluded that the main reason is because New Agers are ungrounded individuals who lack any external metaphysical framework to validate their idiosyncratic spiritual worldviews. They lack any connection to a tradition and are often hedonistic, therefore all of the fringe psychic activities they engage in are written off as delusional and self-serving. That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised to find a saint who is the exact counter to this archetype. Rather than being individualistic and hedonistic, she was grounded in tradition and asceticism while simultaneously believing in the healing properties crystals and gemstones.

The day after I published my crystal article, I felt the need to look more into St. Hildegarde of Bingen. I’ve cited one of her visions in a previous article (Man as Microcosm: A Christian Explanation for Astrology), but there was no immediate reason for me to research her more; it felt like the urge to read more about her just came out of nowhere. I was shocked to find out that she used crystals and gemstones alongside herbal remedies to heal people. She believed that gemstones were created by God to contain heavenly energies within them. She also believed that by using these stones, we could transfer these energies into our souls and bodies for healing purposes. She believed that each species of stone had its own unique energetic properties and should be used for different areas of the body. She believed that leaving a gemstone in water and then drinking the water would have health benefits. She believed that certain stones should be charged in the sun to activate their health benefits. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

I now believe that it is no coincidence that I discovered these facts about St. Hildegarde the day after I published my first article on crystals. I had absolutely no idea that she believed these things about gemstones. In Orthodox Christianity, there is a belief that the saints who have passed away only appear to be dead here in the temporal realm, but in actuality, they are still alive in the parallel realm of eternity. Therefore, they are still present with us in this age and often enter our lives of their own accord. An example from my personal life: right after I had my first child, a beautiful icon of St. Stylianos spontaneously entered my life through a random chance encounter at my workplace. He is the patron saint of children, both Catholics and Orthodox Christians pray to him for the protection of their babies and younglings. I had no idea who he was, but he introduced himself to me at the perfect time. I believe the same thing happened here with St. Hildegarde.

The most interesting part of this synchronicity for me is that she is NOT a canonized saint in the Eastern Orthodox church, of which I am a baptized member of; she only was recently canonized in the Roman Catholic church, nearly a thousand years after her death. This was something that puzzled me for a little bit. But after some rumination, I remembered that God is the one who determines someone’s sainthood. The Church canonizing a saint is merely the clergy and laity’s collective recognition of the person’s sainthood. That’s why in the Church calendar, the Sunday after Pentecost is referred to as All Saints Sunday; during this service we venerate all of the saints within the Church, explicitly the ones who are unknown by the Church. St. Hildegard was born in 1098, which was 44 years after the beginning of the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054. Because she was a German monastic in the West under the Pope of Rome post-schism, she just barely lived past the cutoff for being a member of the single united Church of the first millennia. Had she been born less than a single human lifetime earlier, she would potentially be a saint in both churches.

Most Christians during the time period she lived in did not perceive the Eastern and Western Churches to be two completely distinct entities. Much like the fall of Rome, the Great Schism should be thought of as a slow 200 year long fission rather than a swift, decisive event. The beginning of the schism in 1054 was largely an ecclesiastical issue; many Christians laymen had no idea anything was even happening and still believed that they all belonged to a single united church. The Christians who actually knew about these clerical excommunications tended to believe that this was a short-term issue that could be reconciled. St. Hildegarde died in 1179, only 3 years before the massacre of the Latins by the Eastern Orthodox (1182) and only 25 years before the sacking of Constantinople by the Roman Catholics (1204). While most people knew there was ecclesiastical drama happening in the Church, these two violent events were historical moments when everyone suddenly realized the Church was not one big happy family anymore.

In a way, she lived in a strange and liminal gray area within Church history. Born after the beginning of the schism, but died before the beginning of its realization. She was also German, living in German monasteries her entire life until she the day she died. She was neither Latin nor Greek, which were the two main sides in the Schism. I find that these biographical facts are so fittingly symbolic for her, she is such a strange and unique saint who lived a very unconventional life. Similar to how the historical time period she lived in can not be placed in a neat little categorical box, her experience as a monastic in the Church is incredibly unique and her theological perspective can not be easily categorized. She exists at the fringe of the Church, yet she remains inside of the Church and shares her psychic experiences while grounded in Christ.

Ever since she was a little girl at the age of 3, she experienced intense visions about the grand scale of the cosmos. Once she grew old enough to realize that no one else could see these things, she began to keep these visions to herself. These visions she had were incredibly symbolic psychic insights into the interconnectedness of creation and how it all stems from its Creator. Her parents knew about these visions and thought it was a sign that she was holy, which is why they offered her to the Church as a monastic at a young age.

In ‘The Cosmic Mystery of Christ’, St. Maximus the Confessor intellectually articulates how the many ‘logoi’ of each and every created thing are all interconnected within the one Logos, the person of Christ:

If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (logos) according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is many logoi? This is evident in the incomparable differences among created things. For each is unmistakably unique in itself and its identity remains distinct in relation to other things. He will also know that the many logoi are one Logos to whom all things are related and who exists in Himself without confusion, the essential and individually distinctive God, the Logos of God the Father.

- St. Maximus the Confessor, from ‘Ambiguum 7’

But whereas St. Maximus wrote about it verbally, St. Hildegard saw the same exact reality visually in her mind’s eye. The interconnectedness between all created things is described by St. Hildegard as circular:

A description of the sphere of the whole world, with its circles, celestial bodies, and winds, as it appears in the form of a wheel upon the breast of the image that was described in the first vision.

For divinity has the form of a wheel, complete and whole, without beginning or end; and it is circumscribed by neither space nor time, but contains all things within itself.

- St. Hildegard von Bingen, from ‘Book of Divine Works’

A depiction of one of St. Hildegard’s visions in her “Book of Divine Works”. It’s worth noting that the 7 classical planets can be seen at the top, starting with the moon. The large middle star is the Sun.

St. Hildegard’s Theology on Crystals

There is so much to be said about St. Hildegard that can’t be fit into one short article; she was a herbalist, a healer, a musician, a composer, and a devout ascetic. But as the title of this article indicates, we’ll be discussing her work regarding gemstones. According to St. Hildegard, crystals and gemstones were capable of retaining and releasing heavenly energies. These energies could then be transmitted into the human body in order to regulate the energetic imbalances that cause illness. This line of thinking wasn’t exclusive to St. Hildegard, but was a naturalistic line of scientific thought throughout the ancient and medieval world. I think this is especially important to note: while today we might associate crystal and gemstone usage with New Age spirituality, to ancient and medieval peoples this was just considered a form of natural philosophy.

However, St. Hildegard’s explanation of where gemstones come from and how they are formed, in my opinion, should not be viewed as a scientific explanation. Rather, it should be viewed as a mythological narrative:

“Precious stones and jewels have their origin in the East, and in those areas where the heat of the sun is particularly strong. The mountains that occur in such areas have a great heat, like fire, which comes from the heat of the sun; similarly, the rivers that flow in these regions are always boiling hot, due to the same great heat of the sun. Accordingly, when at times the rivers flood and break their banks, increasing in volume and rising up to the mountains that are burning with the great heat of the sun, and when these come into contact with the rivers, then, in those places where the water makes contact with the fire, they throw up a kind of foam, in other words they, send out spray, just as a burning piece of iron or stone does when water is poured on it […] the drops of foam, which remain hanging at various locations in the mountains, are dried by the heat of the sun according to the various hours of the day and their corresponding temperatures. The stones therefore assume their colors and powers according to the temperature of the hour of the day at which they are formed, and once they have dried and hardened into precious stones, they drop like scales from their locations and fall into the sand. And when the rivers rise again in flood, they carry away the gemstones and deposit them in different regions, where eventually they are found by human beings.

[…] In this way, then, precious stones are made out of fire and water; they
therefore contain energy and moisture within them and they have many powerful qualities and effects, so that many actions can be carried out with them.”

Clearly, based on our modern understanding, this is not an accurate scientific explanation of how crystals are formed. After ruminating on her explanation, I have concluded that this is the best way to think about it: out of the 6 days of creation, which day did God create crystals? Obviously, there is nothing in Genesis that gives us this information, which leaves room for a mythological and symbolic narrative to be developed. St. Hildegard generically said that these stones have their origins “in the East”, I believe she unconsciously did not indicate a specific location to the East for a reason.

The East has a special significance not only in Christian religious symbolism, but many spiritual traditions. The East is where the sun rises from, which in the Christian paradigm is an image of Christ rising from the dead. Tradition states that when Christ returns in His 2nd coming, He will return from the East. That is why all Orthodox Churches are ideally constructed with the alter facing the East. Optimally, an Orthodox Christian should try and set up their prayer corner at home to face East as well. The Garden of Eden is also considered to be to the East, which is why I personally imagine that this process of gemstone formation that St. Hildegard describes takes place in the heavenly garden. It makes more sense to me to think that the various heavenly ‘forms’ of the crystals are developed in Eden; the four rivers that emanate from Eden flow to the four corners of the Earth. This would correlate to St. Hildegard’s explanation on how rivers carry these gemstones across the world. Of course, this is just my interpretation and shouldn’t be taken as gospel.

Another reason why it is more useful to think of this process as mythological is because St. Hildegard uses the astrological symbolism of the sun’s daily cycle to describe the energetic properties of each stone. Here is an example:

The emerald—which Hildegard calls the smaragdus—is said to have formed by the first rays of the morning sun, “when the sun is already warm but the air is cold.” It possesses the freshness of grass and morning dew, and as such “smaragdus is therefore effective against all human weaknesses and infirmities, because it is brought forth by the sun and because all its material springs from the greenness of the air.”¹

And another, for contrast:

Beryl is formed from the foam of the water burned by the sun at midday. As such, it has more of the properties of air and water, less so of fire.

As illustrated in all of the previous passages, St. Hildegard also uses the symbolism of the four classical elements to describe the energetic properties of the stones. In all forms of magical and spiritual thinking, the four classical elements are at the core of understanding the relationship dynamics between all symbols. That is why in the Tarot deck, the Magician card can be seen having all four elements present on his table. As a saint, St. Hildegard would certainly fall under the “magician” archetype; not because she is casting spells, but because she understands the high level interconnectedness of all things through the symbolic lens of these four elements. (Shameless self-promotion: In my article about the Christian symbolism within Tarot cards, I discuss a little bit of the symbolism associated with each element and how they relate to symbols within the Christian paradigm.)

Resemblances to New Age Crystal Usage

Ever since I went down this crystal rabbit-hole a month or so ago, I have been doing a lot of research into how modern New Age practitioners use crystals and gemstones for their own personal usage. While a lot of these people have their own idiosyncratic approaches due to the inherent individualistic nature of New Age spirituality, I have noticed a common thread of practices that each practitioner uses: cleansing, charging and ‘programming’ their crystals and gemstones. The first two sound a bit ridiculous at first, but aren’t so silly if you think in terms of dispersion and retention of physical energies (i.e. heat and electrical charges). But what the hell is ‘programming’ a crystal? Sounds like total gobbledy-gook. At least, that’s what I thought for a long time. But if you are a seriously religious person in any sense, especially an Orthodox Christian, it’s actually not that ridiculous.

The word ‘programming’ in this context is just a very modern way to say ‘consecrating’, which means to make something sacred and devote it to a specific purpose. In Orthodox Christianity, priests and bishops consecrate water to become Holy Water, oil to become Holy Unction, bread and wine to become the Eucharist, etc. All magical and spiritual objects are ‘charged and programmed’ through the externalization of intention. The highest form of this externalization can be found in religious rituals, such as the Divine Liturgy within Orthodoxy. This is exactly what New Age practitioners claim to do when they are ‘programming’, they are externalizing their intentions towards the crystal itself. Thus, the crystal becomes a container and vehicle for the user’s intentions to become actualized. Again, I know this sounds silly. But if we view this practice from a purely mechanical perspective, a priest is doing the same thing when blessing water or oil. The intentions of the priest, who is an apostolic successor to Christ, are being externalized into the physical object through prayer so it may become a container and vehicle for God’s uncreated energies.

However, there is certainly a hierarchy of efficacy to the psychic act of consecration or ‘programming’. I feel the need to clarify that, as an Orthodox Christian, I firmly believe that a priest blessing something in the name of Jesus Christ is far more powerful than some Joe Shmoe talking to a rock. But no matter how effective your act of consecration is, the most important question is what are your intentions? Are they good and aimed towards serving God? Or are they evil and serving only yourself?

Hildegard does admit that certain gemstones can be used for malignant purposes, and “through these stones both good and evil can be done, according to their natures, and as God allows it.”

If we look at how St. Hildegard approaches this matter, she essentially insists that the person in need of healing should be attentive to the stone and ‘program’ it with prayer:

For pains in the stomach, heart, or liver it should be carried about, and will warm the body. But in case of a sudden malady (for example, an epileptic fit), then the emerald should be placed in the mouth. After the person has revived, they should look at the stone attentively and say: “As the Spirit of the Lord has fulfilled the circle of the earth, so may the house of my body be filled with his grace That it may never again be afflicted.” They should repeat this again and again on the following days in the mornings, and they will be cured, Hildegard assures us.

Another example, this one is even more interesting:

Hyacinth is also recommended for those suffering from demonic oppression. Hildegard recommends baking a loaf of bread, cutting the shape of a cross into the load, then running the hyacinth over the cross while saying, “May God, who deprived the devil of every precious stone after he had broken his commandment, drive out from you, N., all phantasms and all magic spells, and may he release you from all the pain of this madness.” And again, drawing the stone transversely through the bread, they are to say: “Just as the splendor which the devil had was taken from him because of his transgression, so may this madness too, which oppresses you, N. through phantasms and through magic, be taken from you, and may it depart from you!”

New Age crystal practitioners will also talk about holding a stone and “meditating on it” in order to properly utilize its energies. Sounds absurd, but St. Hildegard also speaks about the mental faculties of focus and attention in regards to the usage of crystals:

Hildegard also says beryl can be used as a natural tranquilizer: “Whoever keeps a piece of beryl constantly about them, and frequently takes it in their hand and frequently focusses on it, will not easily argue with other people, nor will they be quarrelsome, but they will remain calm.”

I feel that this is an absolutely crucial point to make. In our modern materialist paradigm, the power of the mind has been completely removed from our theories of health and medicine. The scientific community will acknowledge the placebo effect as a real phenomena, but oddly enough, people use it as an excuse to write something off as ‘pseudoscience’. Unless an object has a directly observable mechanical function that causes change on the physical level, it is written off as ineffective. A point that St. Hildegarde and many New Age practitioners make is that these stones aren’t just useful for their physical properties, but their metaphysical properties as well. The ‘placebo effect’ doesn’t function on an arbitrary basis, it functions on an objective symbolic basis. If I were to give you a rubber ducky and tell you “holding it in your hand will make you more confident”, I doubt it would work. But if I were to give you a ruby or a piece of tiger’s eye quartz, you’d certainly be more likely to believe it. The mind as a faculty of the soul is extremely powerful, but it must interface with the physical world in an appropriate manner in order to actualize its powers.

To quote the infamous hermetic principal: “As within, so without. As the universe, so the soul.”

Conclusion

This is one of those articles that ended up being way longer than I thought it would be. There is a lot more I could mention, but for the sake of brevity I will end it here. I have to admit, I would have never guessed in a million years that I would be validating the New Age usage of crystals by citing medieval Christianity, yet here we are. It just goes to show that Christ can be found in all things.

If you are someone who uses crystals for psychic or spiritual purposes, please send me a message and let me know. I would love to discuss your personal experiences and practices for my research purposes.

1. The source on all these quotes about gemstones can be found here: https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2022/04/25/st-hildegard-on-gemstones/