PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

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English
Miscellaneous
15 December 2020
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 communiques, 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.

By:   ,
Afterword by:  
Introduction by:  
Imprint:   Miscellaneous
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
ISBN:   9781999675912
ISBN 10:   1999675916
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Huw Lemmey is a writer and publisher. He writes on culture, politics and sexuality, and is the author of the novels Chubz and the forthcoming Red Tory. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath. She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. Bhanu is a British-Indian artist and poet. She is the author of five full length works of poetry/prose, most recently Schizophrene (2011) and Ban en Banlieue (2015). She lives in Colorado where she teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University.

Reviews for Unknown Language

Unknown Language really is unlike any other book I've read this year. It merges poetry, prose, and essayic writing into a book much greater than the sum of its parts. Each section alone offers something that resonates beyond the page, and in concert they all feel necessary towards conveying Hildegard von Bingen's expansive impact. The book is stirring and evocative, even for someone like me with little connection to the Christian mythos. But Unknown Language's true strength is in creation. Like Hildegard von Bingen herself, Unknown Language imagines a new mode of being, a way of life outside of the confines of contemporary society. By introducing a new vocabulary, it offers access to an expanse beyond its covers. -Chicago Review of Books


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