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Unknown Language
Unknown Language | Huw Lemmey, Hildegard Von Bingen
3 posts | 3 read | 2 to read
Long, long before the Information Age ended, young Hildegard of Bingen finds beauty in the moral and spiritual ruins of her medieval world. In her forty-third year, she inscribes her cosmic visions into Scivias, an indescribably beautiful codex of writing and illuminations thought to be destroyed during the evacuation of Earth. In a sea cave with cracked amethyst walls on Avaaz, Pinky Agarwalia discovers fragments of this visionary text containing hitherto unknown pathways to a lost vision of human co-existence with plants and non-humans - and the seeds of its rebirth on Avaaz. Bursting with mythic quantum energy, Hildegard's vital linguistic potion viriditas, threaded throughout her communiqués, is a lush, verdant, renewable life-force. Her ecological message may be just the magic needed for rebirth on Avaaz. Hildegard's mystic toolkit for the future includes a cosmology, medicine, a morphology of crystals, recipes - and the symbols of a new language. As Pinky Agarwalia traces the diagrams with her fingertip, she suddenly understands - a vision that appears without warning in her own mind - that she must first immerse these materials in water, a guarded substance. In the water, the molecules of the hidden language dissolve, freeze then reconfigure into new shapes, the crystalline language communicated not through sound but by feeling and light. Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's mysterious invented 'unknown language', arrives just in time for a world in flux, one whose coordinates are being recast.
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Ididsoidid
Unknown Language | Huw Lemmey, Hildegard Von Bingen
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Pickpick

Unknown language is a curious and engrossing sci-fi apocalypse/evolving dystopia informed by, and interspersed with, the texts of a 12th Century Abbess (now saint). Probably not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. 8/10

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quietlycuriouskate
Unknown Language | Huw Lemmey, Hildegard Von Bingen
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Mehso-so

Well, this is a conundrum: wtf have I just read?!
A public health official escapes the city after a Biblical apocalypse that has angels carrying out quasi-Stalinist purges. This narrative is bracketed by a mystical prose poem and a biographical essay on Hildegard. It sounds weird enough but felt oddly prosaic. Named as co-author, I expected more Hildegard. The *ideas* may be hers; perhaps I just wish she'd been allowed to articulate them herself.

TrishB Wow 😯 2y
26 likes1 comment
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Moray_Reads
Unknown Language | Huw Lemmey, Hildegard Von Bingen
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Pickpick

An ambitious, obscure and ambiguous riff on the writing of twelfth-century saint Hildegard of Bingen. With an unknown narrator and setting that shifts imperceptibly between the present, past and future it tackles spiritualism and Christianity and recreates themes of Hildegard's visions as a modern apocalypse. It's impossible to pin down and will probably reveal more and more through rereads. #bookspin @TheAromaofBooks

batsy I've been a bit obsessed with an album of Hildegard of Bingen's compositions ever since Susanna Clarke mentioned it here as an inspiration for Piranesi https://www.waterstones.com/blog/susanna-clarke-on-the-art-of-writing and have been wanting to get the Penguin book of Hildegard's writings. This sounds really fascinating! 4y
Moray_Reads @batsy oh, I didn't know about the Piranesi link, I loved that book. This is really good, mind-bending and weird but good 4y
TheAromaofBooks Woohoo!! 4y
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