Aaron Mahnke

When Hildegard was old enough, she chose to follow in her mentor's footsteps, joining the cloister to become a Benedictine nun.

But that wasn't the start of her holy journey.

No, that had begun years earlier when she was only three years old, because that's when she had her first divine vision.

Hildegard herself described the experience as a heavenly light which made my soul tremble.

The visions weren't rare or regular.

They appeared at any time, day or night, while she was awake and alert.

One vision was described as a great star, splendid and beautiful, which followed a bunch of other falling stars southward.

Suddenly, the stars were gone, having transformed into black coals and disappearing into a void until they could no longer be seen.

Despite these miraculous visions, Hildegard kept them to herself.

She worried that she wouldn't be taken seriously in a religion dominated by powerful men.

It's also possible that she didn't want to stand out, choosing instead to remain humble and discreet like other nuns.

Unfortunately, Hildegard's gift came at a high cost.

She was beset by pain so severe it rendered her paralyzed and bedridden.

She believed that God was punishing her for refusing to share her visions.

Finally, when she was 42, God sent down a vision that she couldn't ignore.

He commanded her to write down what she was seeing and hearing.

It was after she had done as he had asked that the pain she suffered from for so long finally relented.

Over the next decade, a monk named Vollmar assisted her with writing down her visions.

First, she would scribble them down on a wax tablet she rested on her knee, which she would then pass to Vollmar to transcribe onto parchment.

The visions were compiled into a book called the Scyvius, the first of a trilogy.