This article accompanies the fable
Sacred Prostitute

Hildegard of Bingen

The most influential religious women of the medieval era worshipped the feminine spirit associated with the Virgin Mary rather than Mary Magdalene.

Consider the great 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), a contemporary of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Bernard of Clairvaux (both of whom she corresponded with).  She was very forthright about the dangers posed by sexuality but she had a women’s perspective:

"...a woman who takes up devilish ways and plays a male role in coupling with another woman is most vile in My sight, and so is she who subjects herself to such a one in this evil deed..."

"...And men who touch their own genital organ and emit their semen seriously imperil their souls, for they excite themselves to distraction; they appear to Me as impure animals devouring their own whelps, for they wickedly produce their semen only for abusive pollution..."

(translation by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop)

But if Hildegard condemned homosexual behavior and masturbation (along with the ordination of women) and praised virginity instead, many nuns in the world of the medieval monasteries found a place for Mary Magdalene’s message of playfulness and sexual curiosity that always came along with her penitence.

For example, below is the Hildegard Codex, "The Universe" (from 1151): is this in fact a sexual image?