Hildegard (1098-1179)  – also called Saint Hildegard – is a Traveler and one of the most remarkable women of the Medieval Era. Hildegard ran a large Benedictine abbey in Germany’s Rhineland Valley during the Twelfth Century and became a prominent leader and preacher. She wrote poetry, music and an opera plus a variety of religious works.

Hildegard is also known for the Scivias (Illuminations) – three books describing twenty-six allegorical visions. Many of the visions suggest that Hildegard was a Traveler, but the direct evidence comes from the suppressed chapters of a later work:

Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works).

The young nun first crossed over to a barrier at the age of twenty-six, but kept this knowledge to herself. Like most Travelers, her experience was not a result of fasting or hallucinations; it occurred suddenly, and took her by surprise. After the first experience, Hildegard remained "on this earth" until the age of forty-two when she crossed over on numerous occasions and learned how to control the process.

In a letter to the monk, Guibert of Gembloux, she stressed that she did not "see with my external eyes or hear with my external ears" (Literal translation from the original Latin). She had the sensation that her "body of light" broke out of  her "body of flesh" and that it was this body that passed to another world. The original manuscript of Liber divinorum operum is currently held at the library of the University of Ghent. Some time during the early 1920s, agents working for the Tabula removed the crucial middle section of the book (Note: We assume that it is currently held in the Tabula archive in London). In these missing chapters, Hildegard describes falling through an "endless blue sky" until "the doorway appeared." She also "swam in a vast sea" and went to a village where she was surrounded "by a ring of  fire." It does not appear that she went past the barriers to other realms.

The suppressed chapters are known because an amateur German historian named Otto Williger photographed each page of the manuscript in the months before the beginning of World War I. The glass plates with the images were bought in a Munich antique shop in 1948 by Amanda Tedford, a Canadian tourist who spent the rest of her life trying to prove the authenticity of the images. After Tedford's sudden death (hitting her head and drowning in her bathtub), the plates disappeared.

Hildegard's interpretation of these Traveler experiences was shaped by her Christian faith. She felt that her vision gave her the right to challenge the male hierarchy of the church during the Papal Schism (the eight-year period when there were two contending Popes). Her continued attacks on "corruption and impiety" caused the church leadership to place an interdict on her community of nuns.

(to examine the life of another Traveler, see Isaac Newton)