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Chapter Three

Mystics and Madwomen

Subversive Piety

It’s amazing that most of the women profiled in this chapter weren’t burned at the stake! They are kindred of the “first ladies of literature” in spirit, if not in soul. They were writing at a time when it simply wasn’t seemly for women to express independent thought, to reinterpret the Bible in their own ways, or really, to be writing at all. Most fascinating of all is the one recurring theme in many of their mystic revelations: the feminine face of God, or “God as mother.” Despite decades and sometimes centuries separating these disparate mystics, their visions and revelations were similar in detail and description of a shining, goddess-like benevolent figure. Writing is a solitary venture, and these women have been the most solitary of all: anchorites imprisoned in monastic cells; spinsters in rooms of their own à la Emily Dickinson; pioneer wives stuck in remote parts of the rough-hewn New World; and faithfuls on pilgrimages through the most inhospitable of surroundings and circumstances. Their texts and tracts read like modern poetry—simple, spare, passionate, and beatific, in the original meaning as appropriated by the twentieth-century Beatniks.

Forward-thinking if nothing else, these women wielded their pens skillfully, unencumbered by fear of their fellow man. Saint Catherine of Siena’s dictated writings and the letters she sent to prominent men of the day influenced the politics of the medieval church, while Hilda of Whitby mentored the greatest Old English poet, Caedmon. At age fifteen, neo-Gnostic Jane Lead began having visions of Sophia, “the magical woman within the soul who would bring redemption to male and female spirits alike.” Indian poet-singer Mirabai became a wandering sadhu for her devotion to Lord Krishna, composing verse of unmatched beauty that is still sung four hundred years later. These transcendental talents are, in some cases, only now finding a readership, thanks to students of women’s literature and religious scholars. Superstar Sufi poet Rumi may have to make room for these ecstatic lyricists. After all, these women, too, were divinely inspired to write.

HILDA OF WHITBY patron saint

An Englishwoman born in 614 CE, Hilda spent most of her life teaching and creating a network of monasteries and abbeys across England. In 657, a patron gave her a piece of land in Whitby, Yorkshire, on which she established a monastery that would come to be an important breeding ground for the developing scholarship and literature of the age. Populated by both men and women who lived separately, Whitby attracted a wide group of intellectuals. Hilda herself taught the arts, medicine, grammar, music, and theology.

Old English historian the Venerable Bede writes about Hilda and her crucial role as advisor to kings, noblemen, and laypeople. But she also had a lasting effect on the world of letters. Whitby had a large library, and the scribes of the monastery produced the Life of Pope Gregory I, one of England’s earliest works of literature. Bede also tells of how the infinitely wise Abbess Hilda discovered the poetic potential of Caedmon, a lay brother who worked at the monastery, and encouraged him to write. As a result of her patronage, we have the earliest known examples of Christian poetry in Old English.

Originally a Celtic Christian, Hilda hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664, which was held to decide what direction Christianity would take. The synod voted to follow the Roman Catholic Church; independent though she was, Hilda went with the majority.

While most women were illiterate until relatively recently, the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Wynflaed actually willed her books upon her death to another woman, Æthelflaed.

SACRED SCRIBES THROUGHOUT THE AGES

In 1700 BCE, Amat-Mamu was an Assyrian priestess-scribe who for forty years made her living in a cloister of 140 other such women. The clay tablets on which they wrote have survived to this day. Three hundred years before she and her sisterhood were recording the spiritual beliefs of the day, the priestess Kubatum in Ur wrote and performed ritual enactments of holy erotic poetry such as the sweet—literally—lines incorporated into the Bible’s sexy Song of Solomon: “Lion, let me give you my caresses…wash me with honey.”

Marie de France was a French poet and the first women to write in a European vernacular. Many scholars regard her as the greatest woman writer of the medieval era because of her religious writing and short fiction, which preceded Chaucer and Boccaccio. Her identity is enshrouded in mystery, perhaps for her own protection. We hope that a modern scholar-sleuth will find this enigma a potent lure and challenge and will make her works and her identity accessible to us all.

J is believed to have been a tenth-century female Israelite of noble descent who wrote several narratives that are embedded in the Old Testament, though they were written six centuries before various scribes cobbled them together. The women she wrote about—King David’s lover Bathsheba, Rebecca, and Tamar—come alive in her stories. While “J” the person remains a cipher, and a very controversial one among biblical experts, her identity and authenticity have recently been recognized by such a noteworthy as Harold Bloom, and a volume of the J writings has been published.

Perpetua was an early Christian Carthaginian, citizen of the Holy Roman Empire, and member of the Montanist sect, which espoused equality for women. She converted her best friend, an African slave named Felicity, and both were jailed for soliciting their faith. In prison, Perpetua began to have visions and to write them down. Though facing death, she reaffirmed her faith in court and was executed by a combination of wild beasts and gladiators in a Roman circus. Her diary, a record of her trials and her unswerving faith, survives her.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a most practical mystic, wrote The Woman’s Bible, no small feat. This powerful text is both a testament to and a feminist critique of the male bias in the Judeo-Christian tradition; some sentiments were echoed in the “Declaration of Sentiments” printed for the Seneca Falls suffragette convention of July 19, 1848. “Resolved, That woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.”

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called to my attention.

Helene Hanff, on the joys of secondhand books, from 84, Charing Cross Road

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN the “Sibyl of the Rhine”

Although her canonization was twice undertaken in the fifteenth century, four hundred years after her death, no aspect of sainthood was ever realized for Hildegard von Bingen except for her inclusion in the Roman Martyrology. Hildegard began her life in Germany; the daughter of nobility, she discovered her calling at the age of three when she first started having visions. Throughout her life, she had frequent incidents of trances, fits, and frenzied states of godly joy.

At eight years of age, she entered the Benedictine Convent at Disibodenberg as an anchorite. As a religious devotion, anchorites were locked into tiny cells that they could never leave, receiving food through a small hole through which they also passed their wastes. Luckily for Hildegard, her cell was already occupied by a German anchoress named Jutta, who instructed her in the classics and certain sciences, notably botany. Hildegard lived that way for seven years, until word of her amazing brilliance and religious devotion had so spread that women who wished to study with her crowded her cell, and the order allowed her to leave her cell and become a nun. Hildegard had two confidantes: her anchorite teacher and her lifelong friend and biographer, a monk named Volmar. When Jutta died, Hildegard was made abbess in 1147 and went on to found her own convent in Rupertsberg, near Bingen.

Hildegard kept her visions secret until a voice told her to reveal them. She accurately prophesied a major papal event that took place nearly two hundred years later—the schism of the Catholic Church in 1378. She recorded her illuminating messages received in trance in her mystic trilogy, composed of Scivias, covering the period from 1142 to 1151, translated as Know Thy Ways; from 1158 to 1163, Liber vitae meritorium (The Book of the Lives of the Worthy); and from 1163 to 1173, Liber divinorum operum (The Book of Divine Works). Bernard of Clairvaux, a highly regarded religious philosopher and scholar of the time, was deeply moved by Hildegard’s work. With his imprimatur, Hildegard’s reputation and influence expanded, leading her to play an important role in the affairs of Pope Eugenius III and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. She also made four preaching tours, which was highly unusual for a woman.

A dynamic speaker and accomplished musician as well as a writer, Hildegard also invented a cryptic language and calligraphy. Her exquisite religious prayer and verse are heavily laced with an emphasis on the feminine divine. Yet her writing wasn’t limited to mysticism; she also wrote scientific treatises on subjects ranging from geology to botany, physiology, cosmology, ethics, and pathology. Dubbed the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” Hildegard von Bingen became in her lifetime a very famous woman. When she was elderly, she spoke of how she constantly saw a backdrop of radiance upon which her visions were projected. She called this “the shadow of living light.”

In the last century, both her poetry and music are enjoying a wide revival, and she is a mainstay in spiritual anthologies.

Sophia! You of the whirling wings, circling encompassing energy of God—you quicken the world in your clasp.

Hildegard von Bingen, from Antiphon for Divine Wisdom

JULIAN OF NORWICH the first Englishwoman of letters

Julian was an anchoress in the Church of St. Julian in Norwich and was thought to have been undergoing a “rite of enclosure,” a kind of burial service for the soul while in her solitary cell.

Julian became famous throughout England after she decided she had God’s permission to share the details of her mystical experiences, a total of sixteen separate visions. Though she was keenly aware of her status as a woman, she felt no risk in recording these important messages from above. This remarkable series of events occurred two days after she turned thirty, in the year 1372. At the time, Julian was gravely ill, but instead of concentrating on her own misery, she began to feel pity and compassion for the suffering of Christ on the cross. Her condition progressively worsened, and she hovered near death, even receiving last rites. Immediately after the rites, she experienced a “sudden change” and started seeing images from another realm.

Julian’s descriptions of these episodes, written in English, were published in a volume entitled Revelations of Divine Love. They tell of her visitations not just from Heavenly Hosts, but also from demons and Satan. She discussed God in terms of a maternal presence, in a section called “God the Mother.”

Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love was enormously popular reading and was copied repeatedly during her lifetime and after her death. She has never been officially beatified and is honored on the “casual” feast day of May 13. She is oft acknowledged as the first Englishwoman of letters.

As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother…and so Jesus is our true Mother in nature by our first creation, and he is our true Mother in grace by his taking our created nature.

Julian of Norwich, from Revelations of Divine Love

PASSIONATE PRIESTESS

Mechtild von Magdeburg, a nun from Germany, was installed by her wealthy, noble family in the convent of Helfta in Saxony, a prominent center for education and mysticism. Mechtild had been seeing visions from God since childhood, but had hidden the fact from everyone. In 1250, she began writing about them in Das ƒlieƒsende Licht der Gottheit (The Revelations of Mechtild). She wrote in a language of Swabian dialect, embedding prayers, hymns, and autobiographical information among short entries of her visions. Mechtild’s book is a rarity in medieval German literature and came to be read all over Europe. A snippet: “Lord, you are my lover. My longing, my flowing stream, my sun, And I am your reflection.”

CATHERINE OF SIENA poet of prayer

Catherine was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children born to Jacopo Benincasa, a craftsman who made his living as a dyer of cloth in the city of Siena. At the tender age of six, Catherine knew she wanted to devote her life to God, but she didn’t enter a convent as a novice until ten years later, in 1363. She became a nun in the Dominican order four years after that and began her lifelong work helping the sick and destitute. During the plague, she and her female followers tended victims and buried the dead.

Loved and respected for her devotion (she was eventually canonized) later in her life, she acted as a director to a circle of nuns as well as a spiritual minister to many people from her community. She was a mystic, given to visions, and a poet, creating prayerful verse celebrating her faith and the glory of God.

Catherine was also an activist at heart and participated in the politics of her time and place. She even went so far as to travel to Avignon to prevail upon the pope to return to the Vatican in Rome. She was always helping others and thinking of herself last, barely eating in her desire to purify her being and be closer to holiness. She flagellated herself three times a day, seeing her personal suffering as an offering in exchange for the good of the church, saying, “O eternal God, accept the sacrifice of my life within this mystic body of holy Church.”

Catherine never learned to write, but several of her fellow nuns wrote down her original verse, letters, and prayers. Those she uttered in solitude are lost to us forever. An ecstatic trance state often came over Catherine during her meditations, in which she would lie prostrate upon the ground. Other times, her words came in short bursts interchanged by lengthy silences. Often, she sang as she walked alone. Her health became very frail, probably due to starvation, and she died at the age of thirty-three, leaving a set of devotional works nearly unmatched in their innovative splendor.

There the soul dwells—like the fish in the sea

and the sea in the fish.

Catherine of Siena

Fifteenth-century nuns in St. Catherine’s Convent in Nuremberg, Germany, loved books so much that in less than fifty years, they grew their library from forty-six books to over six hundred, mostly by hand-copying sermons, parts of the New Testament, tracts, and records of the saints’ lives.

SAINT TERESA OF AVILA pierced by God

One of a dozen children of Spanish nobles, Teresa de Cepeda y Abumada was born to a life of privilege on March 28, 1515. Upon her mother’s death when Teresa was thirteen, the girl was sent to live at a convent school. She was miserable there, and after she fell ill, her mind turned to thoughts of death and hell. Though she longed to leave the strict confines of the convent, the images of hell enabled her to keep from running away; “in servile fear” she “forced herself” to accept the nunnery.

For twenty years, she continued to battle with her will, her frail body, and the harshness of life in the cloister, aspiring to a life of devotion and spiritual growth with a Franciscan book as her only aid. Finally, she underwent a second conversion, and using “the eyes of the soul,” began seeing visions with regularity. Her visions were colorful and like nothing she had ever seen before; she saw jewel-encrusted crucifixes and tiny, pretty angels, one of whom pierced her heart with a fiery, golden pin. When demons invaded her dreams, she merely threw holy water on them and they ran off. In one dream, she experienced “transverberation,” a golden lance from God that pierced her heart over and over. She also began to hear the voice of God sharing his hopes for her destiny.

Teresa was encouraged by the voice to found a small convent among the “discalced,” the unshod, sandal-wearing reform movement of the Carmelite order. The discalced felt the Carmelite order was too soft; they believed in “holy poverty,” including begging for alms in order to survive. Teresa and her fellow sisters were determined to live this ascetic life, and in 1563 they moved into the small St. Joseph’s convent, where they spearheaded the “barefoot” reformation, traveling under terrible conditions in a wooden cart to found seventeen more such religious communities.

She also wrote books, spiritual guides for followers of the movement. Her Life is still widely read and remains in print; The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle were also met with an immediate readership of significant proportions. In Uppity Women of the Renaissance, Vicki León says that The Interior Castle was so well regarded that it “eventually won her the title of Doctor of the Church from the twentieth century’s Pope Paul VI.”

Teresa was referred to as a saint while still alive, but she ignored such approbation, and until her death in 1582, got on with the real business of life, scrubbing floors, begging for alms, and cooking for her sisters and converts, remarking that, “The Lord walks among the pots and pans.”

All things are passing; God never changeth; patience endureth.

Teresa of Avila, from her Breviary

MIRABAI Krishna’s convert

An Indian bhakti or saint-poet, Mirabai (1498–1565) is the best known of all the northern Indian poets of this style. A Rajput princess by birth, she was steeped in literature and music by tutors in the court of her grandfather, Rao Dudaji.

Renowned for her sanctity, Mirabai married the crown prince of the kingdom of Mewar, but her religious feelings caused her to reject a husband-wife relationship with her royal groom. Instead, she worshipped her Lord, the incarnation of Krishna called Giridhara, whose great works included lifting a mountain. Tradition has it that the crown prince’s family tried to kill Mirabai twice, and that she rejected the family’s deities and the proper widow’s rite of immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre upon his death.

If these legends hold any truth, they could easily explain why Mirabai began wandering, leaving behind all semblance of a normal life and devoting herself exclusively to worship of her Lord Giridhara. Toward the time of her death, she stayed at the temple compound of Ranachora at Dvarka. Her devotional hymns, prayers, and poems are still sung all over India and have recently found their way into printed form in English.

Only those who have felt the knife can understand the wound. Only the jeweler knows the nature of the Jewel.

Mirabai

JANE LEAD Sophia’s prophet

Jane Lead is one of those wonderful early women writers who are ripe for rescue from obscurity. She was born in 1624 in Norfolk to the Ward family, and, in her own words, was brought up and educated “like other girls.” Her difference emerged when she turned fifteen and a voice began instructing her during a Christmas celebration. This was her first mystical experience. Six years later, she married William Lead, an older, distant relative, and her religious devotions went on the back burner. The couple raised four daughters, and after her husband’s death in 1670, when Jane was forty-six years old, her interests returned strongly to the study of mysticism and a state she called “Spiritual Virginity.” Jane had a powerful vision of Sophia, meaning “wisdom,” a female aspect of God.

Jane Lead pored over the writings of the German theologian Jacob Boehme, who was widely regarded as radical in his spiritual beliefs. Jane’s convictions about the mystical way grew more fervent than ever, and she moved into the household of Dr. John Pordage, founder of an unorthodox religious sect. When Pordage passed away, Lead began to publish her own visions and beliefs with the help of a younger assistant, Dr. Francis Lee. Together they founded the Philadelphia Society, based on Boehme’s doctrine.

Her writing and the intelligence shown therein were astonishing. In 1681, she wrote The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, followed by The Enochian Walks with God and the four-volume work A Fountain of Gardens, Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure. In a way similar to the work of other well-known writer-mystics, her work is not deliberately feminist; it is deliberately religious, but it does contain imagery of a female presence in the soul, imbued with the power to renew and redeem both men and women.

This is the great Wonder to come forth, as Women Clothed with the Sun…with the Glove of this world under her feet…with a Crown beset with stars, plainly declaring that to her is given the Command and Power.

Jane Lead

MARY BAKER EDDY true believer

Mary Baker Eddy was a farm girl from Bow, New Hampshire. Born in 1821, she came from humble circumstances, belying the will and passion that would make her the author of one of the most widely read books in the world, Christian Healing, and the founder of Christian Science. She spent the first part of her life in poverty, and details about her life are obscured by carefully edited authorized biographies. We do know that she was keenly interested in spiritualism and wandered from one boarding house to another, seeking out those run by spiritualists. In the mythology propounded by Christian Science historians, these wanderings are likened to those of Christ. One difference worth noting, however, is that Mary Baker was receiving channeled information from the dead, while the Bible makes no mention that Jesus heard such ghostly voices.

She got married along the way and served as a medium on many occasions, holding active seances where long-dead loved ones appeared and her voice would change to sound like other voices. An affidavit by one Mrs. Richard Hazeltine described Mrs. Eddy’s trances: “These communications [came] through her as a medium, from the spirit of one of the Apostles or of Jesus Christ.” Mrs. Eddy soon began to practice healing and eventually went on to deny that she had ever had anything to do with spiritualism.

Her life story is a confusing series of illnesses and cures of herself and everyone in her acquaintance, seemingly. Her dedication to her beliefs was mightily compelling to others, and her theories include such ideas as the Copernican reversal of the roles of mind and matter, man being “the image and likeness of God” and therefore “not matter.” Mrs. Eddy had, along with her other talents of mediumship, the ability to convince people and to lead them. She was nothing if not charismatic. She and her book have influenced, and perhaps even healed, many hundreds of people.

Change the mind, and the quality changes. Destroy the belief and tranquility disappears.

Mary Baker Eddy

EMILY DICKINSON white witch of Amherst

Emily Dickinson was one of the first female literary “superstars”—a rather unusual fate for a housebound recluse. Her brilliant, intense verse certainly created a legend for the poet, but her eccentricities added to the “glamour” in the original sense of the word, casting a spell that has lasted well over a century. Born in 1830 on December 10 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was the second child of a strict and sober lawyer, Edward Dickinson, and a sweet-natured and shy mother, also named Emily. Emily junior also had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia. By all accounts, the family was happy and prosperous, pillars of the community. Emily also benefited from a good education at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the first women’s colleges in America, located, fortuitously for Emily, right outside Amherst.

It was during her last year at Mount Holyoke that Dickinson showed glimmerings of the qualities that made her so different from her contemporaries. Lavinia, Emily’s sister, relayed an amusing story about Emily bluffing her way through a mathematics test: “When the [geometry] examination came and [she] had never studied it, she went to the blackboard and gave such a glib exposition of imaginary figures that the dazed teacher passed her with the highest mark.” And a classmate reported a shocking instance when the principal of Mount Holyoke, Mary Lyons, asked “all those who wanted to be Christians to rise,” Emily couldn’t “honestly accede” and was the only one of all the women students present who “remained seated.” This independence of will, mind, and imagination would inform her poetry and her life choices from that point on. She left school and returned home. (It is a topic of debate among her biographers as to whether evangelical pressure following this event caused Emily Dickinson to leave, and many believe that to be the reason, although Edward Dickinson also missed his elder daughter.) For the rest of her life, she rarely left the house and is now recognized to have been agoraphobic. She also fell victim to an eye disorder believed to have been exotropia, for which she was treated in Boston; this was nearly the only occasion upon which she would take a trip of any kind, except for a handful of journeys with her sisters to see their father, now a congressman living part of the time in Washington, DC.