In the Texts
Hildegard of Bingen described the lux vivens, a light that came to her with illness and weakness, and drew its forms in the Scivias: falling stars, fortified cities of light, concentric shimmering circles, and points that spread and extinguished. The discernment of visions in the manuals asks whether they come with illness, which was a mark against them, and whether their fruits are good, which was a mark for.
What Medicine Makes of It
Singer (1917) and Sacks (1970) read the forms as migraine aura: the fortification spectrum, the scintillating scotoma, the showers of phosphenes, which Airy drew in 1870 and which have the same geometry in everyone. Lashley (1941) timed his own scotoma at 3 mm a minute across the cortex, Leão (1944) found the spreading depression at that speed, and Hadjikhani (2001) imaged it during an aura. The illness Hildegard reported with the light is the migraine.
The Evidence
- Singer (1917) proposed that Hildegard of Bingen’s visions, with their falling stars, fortified cities of light, and points of shimmering, were migraine aura, from her own description of the “living light” that came with illness, and Sacks (1970, 1992) took the case up with her illuminations beside the drawings of migraineurs.
- Lashley (1941) mapped his own scintillating scotoma and calculated from its drift that a wave was crossing his visual cortex at about 3 mm a minute; Leão (1944) found the cortical spreading depression in rabbits at the same speed, and Hadjikhani et al. (2001) imaged it in a migraineur’s cortex during an aura.
- The fortification spectrum, a zigzag of bright lines that expands from near the centre of vision over twenty to thirty minutes, is reported by about a quarter of migraineurs; its geometry, Airy noted in 1870, is the same in everyone, which is what one expects of a cortical event and not of a vision.
- Podoll and Robinson (2002) collected the Alice in Wonderland syndrome of migraine, the distortions of body size and time, and the autoscopic and out-of-body experiences that a mystical reading would take for ecstasy.
- The texts that Canale and Menghi use to discern a true vision ask for its content and its fruits, not its shape; the aura has the shape without the content, and the reading does not say Hildegard’s theology was a headache.
Where They Part
The aura has the shape of the vision and not the content: the neurology accounts for the fortified city and not for what Hildegard made of it. The manuals’ test by fruits is the one the neurologist cannot apply, and the reading does not say her theology was a headache.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Singer, C. (1917). “The scientific views and visions of Saint Hildegard,” in Studies in the History and Method of Science. Oxford.
- Sacks, O. (1992). Migraine, rev. ed. Picador, appendix on Hildegard.
- Lashley, K. S. (1941). “Patterns of cerebral integration indicated by the scotomas of migraine.” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 46.
- Hadjikhani, N., et al. (2001). “Mechanisms of migraine aura revealed by functional MRI in human visual cortex.” PNAS 98.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.