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In Europe and America, the
trade of precious stones is booming and exhibitions of common minerals
attract more visitors every year. The sheer volume of advertising for
alternative therapy alone is astonishing. Increased dissatisfaction with
the results of scientific medicine is promoting a search for different
treatments. This quest for healing has led to the rediscovery of all sorts
of forgotten cures and remedies for disease, among them the therapeutic
use of precious stones. The practice of healing through the use of such
stones has a long tradition. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer who perished
at Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, wrote at length about the
healing properties of gems and minerals in his Historia naturalis,
an encyclopaedia of natural science. Later Pope Gregory the Great (c.
540—604) and the Benedictine monk known as the Venerable Bede
(672/73—735), the founder of English historiography and author of De
natura rerum, joined the circle of those "in the know" on the healing properties of precious stones. These two men drew
their inspiration from the Revelation of St John the Divine, which
mentions crystals and precious stones in connection with his vision of the
Heavenly Jerusalem. During the Middle Ages, the first person to advance
the practice of this type of alternative medicine was a woman: St Hildegard of Bingen
(1098—1179), an abbess who was later canonized and is today regarded as the first German mystic and one of the great women of
the Middle Ages. Her writings deal with the aetiology of disease and the
treatment of patients, and she even corresponded with emperors, kings,
popes and scholars on the subject. St Hildegard's natural remedies
included herbal infusions and elixirs distilled from metals or precious
stones dissolved in wine, and according to one: "A sufferer from gout
should place a diamond in some wine for a whole day and then drink of it.
The gout will depart from him." By the late Middle Ages, however, healing
with precious stones was seen as witchcraft and black magic, and its
practice seemed threatened into oblivion. In the fifteenth century,
Paracelsus (1493—1541),
alchemist and the city physician to Salzburg and Basel,
staunchly defended this form of alternative medicine, and encouraged the
therapeutic use of mineral baths and minerals as medicine. Jakob Bohme
(1575—1624), and his circle of mystic philosophers, also defended
nature-based medicine — their teachings later exercised great influence on
the German Romantics, especially the nineteenth-century poets who
reawakened interest in alternative medicine.
Today, at the close of the twentieth century, St
Hildegard of Bingen's remedies, the resurgence of nineteenth-century
homeopathic medicine, together with the flower-essence therapy developed
by English herbalist Edward Bach, form the basis of a type of medical
treatment advocated by New Age circles. Furthermore, St Hildegard's
knowledge of the psychological aspects of disease finds its resonance in
modern psychosomatic medicine. In the work illustrated here, the saint and
visionary is seen dictating a letter in her cell, whose columns symbolize
the Old and the New Covenant, and above her is the five-tongued ray of
divine inspiration.
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