Hildegard and Estrogen — Medieval Sacred Feminine

Les plantes qui marchent avec les cycles — pas pour les optimiser, pour les habiter.

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Les plantes qui marchent avec les cycles — pas pour les optimiser, pour les habiter.

— Les plantes qui marchent avec les cycles — pas pour les optimiser, pour les habiter.

TL;DR

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) — Rhenish Benedictine, abbess, composer, theologian, physician. She wrote two medical works — Physica and Causae et Curae — in which she describes plants by their viriditas: the greening force that rises within them and passes into the human body. Her medicine is rooted in a sacred feminine cosmology — Sapientia (divine feminine Wisdom), Ecclesia the mother, Maria viridissima virga. Today, nine centuries later, ethnobotany confirms it: several of the plants she prescribed for women carry documented phytoestrogens. Trifolium pratense (red clover) — isoflavones. Vitex agnus-castus (chasteberry) — dopaminergic modulators that regulate prolactin. Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus) — steroidal saponins close to diosgenin. Damiana (Turnera diffusa) — aphrodisiac flavonoids. Hildegard did not know the word "estrogen." She knew viriditas. And viriditas is precisely what modern chemistry is rediscovering.

Viriditas — the key concept of Hildegardian medicine

Viriditas, in medieval Latin, means greenness, green-life, green vital force. Hildegard forged it as the central concept of her cosmology: it is the divine force that rises within every living thing and that can, through plants, pass into the ailing human body to restore it.

« Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God. » Hildegard, quoted by Matthew Fox in Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen.

Viriditas is not a metaphor. For Hildegard it is a transmissible physical reality. A green plant (comfrey, nettle, clover) carries more viriditas than a dried or denatured one. A plant gathered at the right lunar moment carries more than one picked at random. Viriditas can be drunk, infused, applied — it moves through bodies.

Nine centuries later, phytochemistry is rediscovering what Hildegard named: the bioactive compounds of green plants — isoflavones, flavonoids, saponins — are indeed transmissible and bioactive within the human body. Viriditas has a contemporary name: plant pharmacology.

The medieval sacred feminine — Sapientia, Ecclesia, Maria viridissima

Hildegard's theology rests on three cosmic feminine figures. Sapientia — divine Wisdom, feminine in biblical Latin (Proverbs 8, the Wisdom of Solomon) — is not, for Hildegard, an attribute of God; she is a hypostasis. She co-created the world.

Ecclesia — the Church — appears in the illuminations of the Scivias as a gigantic mother giving birth to humanity. Not a legal institution, but a cosmic womb.

Maria viridissima virga — the greenest branch — is Hildegard's Marian epithet. Mary is the branch that flowered without human seed, viriditas absolute, the sacred vegetal made flesh. Hildegard's Mariology is botanical before it is doctrinal.

This cosmology allowed Hildegard — a woman abbess in the twelfth century — to preach publicly against the counsel of the canons, to correspond with four popes and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to found her own monastery against the will of the abbot of Disibodenberg, and to be recognised as a Doctor of the Church in 2012 by Benedict XVI. The medieval sacred feminine was not timid — it was theologically armed.

Physica and Causae et Curae — the medicine of the nuns

Hildegard wrote two distinct medical works. Physica (c. 1151–1158) is a botany-zoology-mineralogy: 230 plants, 60 trees, 60 birds, 25 fish, 17 quadrupeds, metals and stones. For each entity, Hildegard describes its temperament (hot/cold, moist/dry according to humoral medicine), its viriditas, and its therapeutic uses.

Causae et Curae (c. 1158–1163) is a medical treatise: the etiology of illnesses, treatment, regimen, gynecological counsel. It is the first complete medical treatise written by a woman in the West. It contains explicit chapters on menstruation, conception, childbirth, nursing, menopause — subjects the male physicians of the age treated only in passing.

Hildegardian gynecology stands apart on two counts: she regards menstruation as a cleansing process essential to a woman's health (not as a biblical curse), and she systematically uses plants containing what we now call phytoestrogens. Coincidence? Probably not — a thousand-year clinical observation handed down within the monasteries of women.

Trifolium pratense — red clover and the isoflavones

Trifolium pratense. Red clover, meadow clover. Hildegard mentions it in Physica as a "hot and temperate" plant, good for the blood and for feminine fertility. She recommends an infusion of the flowers for irregular menstruation and hot flushes — terms she does not use, but which her clinical descriptions let us recognise.

Red clover is today one of the most studied plant sources of isoflavones — biochanin A, formononetin, genistein, daidzein. These compounds are plant SERMs (selective estrogen receptor modulators): they bind preferentially to the β estrogen receptors, modulating — without overloading — the body's own estrogenic activity.

A 2013 Cochrane meta-analysis (Lethaby et al.) on red clover for menopausal symptoms shows a modest but statistically significant reduction in hot flushes. Hildegard, with no laboratory, had observed the same thing nine centuries earlier, offering Trifolium as an infusion to the peri-menopausal nuns of her monastery.

Vitex agnus-castus — the chasteberry of the chaste lamb

Vitex agnus-castus. Chasteberry. Hildegard cites it in Physica as a "cold" plant useful for the regulation of feminine moods. The Latin name agnus castus — chaste lamb — comes from medieval use: monks chewed the berries to dampen the libido during Lent. The nuns used it to steady the cycle.

Documented active compounds: iridoids (aucubin, agnoside), flavonoids (casticin), diterpenes (vitexilactone, rotundifuran). Principal action: dopaminergic modulation at the hypothalamic-pituitary level, which lowers prolactin secretion and restores an estrogen/progesterone balance.

A 2017 systematic review (van Die et al., Planta Medica) on Vitex agnus-castus for premenstrual syndrome synthesises 17 clinical trials: a significant reduction in PMS symptoms across most studies, with a favourable safety profile. The contemporary clinical route typically uses 20 to 40 mg of dried extract standardised to agnosides, to be confirmed with a practitioner. Hildegard simply used the dried, ground berry.

Shatavari — she of a hundred husbands

Asparagus racemosus. Shatavari — literally "she who has a hundred husbands," in Sanskrit. The queen plant of Ayurvedic gynecology, named in the Charaka Samhita (~1000 BCE) as a royal rasayana for women.

Active compounds: steroidal saponins (shatavarins I to IV), flavonoids, oligosaccharides. The shatavarins are structurally close to diosgenin — precursor of the industrial synthesis of steroidal hormones (progesterone, cortisone) devised by Russell Marker in 1944 from the Mexican yam Dioscorea villosa.

Ayurvedic use of Shatavari documents four windows: adolescence (steadying the cycle), motherhood (a strong galactagogue), peri-menopause (hormonal modulation), post-menopause (general tonic). The traditional form: root powder in warm milk, in the evening, 3 to 5 g a day, over a course of 6 to 12 weeks, as the vaidyas have done for three millennia.

Hildegard never knew Shatavari — the plant does not grow in Europe. Yet the convergence is striking: two geographically separate sacred feminine traditions (ancient India, medieval Rhineland) independently identified the same categories of plants for the same feminine functions. Hildegardian viriditas and the shatavarin rasayana are two names for one thousand-year observation.

Damiana — the Mexican feminine aphrodisiac

Turnera diffusa. Damiana. A small yellow-flowered plant native to Mexico and Central America. Used by the Maya and the Aztecs as an aphrodisiac and a tonic for the intimate sphere, documented in the Codex Florentinus (Sahagún, sixteenth century).

Active compounds: flavonoids (apigenin, luteolin), terpenes (damianin), arbutin, essential oils. Documented mechanisms: mild aromatase inhibition (modulating the testosterone/estrogen ratio), action on serotonergic receptors, a light vasodilatory effect on the mucous membranes.

Hildegard did not know Damiana — a late European discovery (nineteenth century). But the cross-tradition convergence holds: Mesoamerican peoples and medieval nuns independently identified feminine plants with convergent hormonal mechanisms. This is the universal viriditas — observable wherever humans watch plants closely.

INFUSE's feminine sister-plants

The INFUSE ecosystem of feminine plants rests on seven principal allies, four of which converge with the Hildegardian pharmacopoeia:

Vitex agnus-castus (chasteberry) — cycle regulation, premenstrual syndrome

Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus) — every feminine window, lactation, menopause

Damiana (Turnera diffusa) — the intimate sphere, sensuality, vitality

Maca (Lepidium meyenii) — peri-menopause, energy, mood

Red clover (Trifolium pratense) — hot flushes, menopause

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) — painful periods, the Hildegardian plant par excellence

Lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) — cyclical unease, peri-menstrual sleep

FAQ — real questions

Gems & legends

1. Hildegard began receiving her visions at the age of three. She published them only at forty-two, after Pope Eugene III had personally validated them at the synod of Trier (1147–1148). Without that papal validation, her medical and theological work would most likely not have survived.

2. Hildegard's compositions — Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum — contain 77 original liturgical chants. It is the largest medieval corpus signed by a single person. Her music is still performed and recorded today (Sequentia, Anonymous 4, Sinfonye).

3. When Hildegard wished to found her own monastery at Rupertsberg in 1150, the abbot of Disibodenberg refused. Hildegard then developed a mysterious paralysis — which lifted the moment the abbot relented. A story she tells herself in the Vita, with her habitual mischief.

4. Régine Pernoud, the medieval historian, wrote (Hildegarde de Bingen, 1994): "She is probably the only woman of the twelfth century who dared write to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa to tell him he was mistaken. And who survived such audacity."

5. The convent of Rupertsberg was destroyed during the Thirty Years' War (1632). Hildegard's original manuscripts were saved and scattered across several European libraries — Wiesbaden, Lucca, Berlin. The most precious, the Riesencodex, holds the complete works.

6. Russell Marker, the American chemist who in 1944 devised the industrial synthesis of progesterone from the Mexican yam (Dioscorea villosa), was working on diosgenin — a plant steroidal precursor. His discovery made possible the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1960. The chain leading to the modern pill runs through a Mexican plant — viriditas applied.

7. Shatavari means, literally, "she who has a hundred husbands" in Sanskrit — not a sexual allusion but a reference to its capacity to support a woman through every phase of her reproductive life. The etymology is a teaching.

8. Hildegard's most powerful staple remained rye (Secale cereale) as a daily porridge — which she prescribed to all the nuns for feminine health. A modern curiosity: rye contains lignans — another category of phytoestrogens.

Principal sources

1. Hildegarde de Bingen. Physica. Critical edition: Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum, MGH, 2010. French trans. Pierre Monat, Jérôme Millon.

2. Hildegarde de Bingen. Causae et Curae. Critical edition: Hildegardis Bingensis Cause et cure, ed. Laurence Moulinier, Akademie Verlag, 2003.

3. Pernoud, Régine. Hildegarde de Bingen, conscience inspirée du XIIe siècle. Le Rocher, 1994.

4. Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine. University of California Press, 1987.

5. Schipperges, Heinrich. Hildegard von Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos. Markus Wiener, 1997.

6. Lad, Vasant & Frawley, David. The Yoga of Herbs: An Ayurvedic Guide to Herbal Medicine. Lotus Press, 1986.

7. Pole, Sebastian. Ayurvedic Medicine: The Principles of Traditional Practice. Churchill Livingstone, 2006.

8. Lethaby, A. et al. Phytoestrogens for menopausal vasomotor symptoms. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2013.

9. van Die, M.D. et al. Vitex agnus-castus extracts for female reproductive disorders. Planta Medica, 2013.

10. Bone, Kerry. A Clinical Guide to Blending Liquid Herbs. Churchill Livingstone, 2003.

11. Mills, Simon & Bone, Kerry. Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy. Churchill Livingstone, 2nd ed., 2013.

12. Romm, Aviva. Botanical Medicine for Women's Health. Churchill Livingstone, 2010.

Secondary sources

13. Fox, Matthew. Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen. Bear & Co, 1985.

14. Strehlow, Wighard. Hildegard of Bingen's Spiritual Remedies. Healing Arts Press, 2002.

15. Frawley, David. Ayurvedic Healing. Lotus Press, 2nd ed., 2000.

16. Tirtha, Sada Shiva. The Ayurveda Encyclopedia. Ayurveda Holistic Center Press, 1998.

17. Hoffmann, David. Medical Herbalism. Healing Arts Press, 2003.

18. Wood, Matthew. The Earthwise Herbal: A Complete Guide to Old World Medicinal Plants. North Atlantic, 2008.