To Hildegard of Bingen, the cosmos was not only above you. It was inside you. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German abbess and mystic, described creation as a network of interacting forces. Fire, ether, air and the cosmic winds were not isolated phenomena. They belonged to a single order governing the heavens, nature and life on Earth. She carried this logic into the human body. The cosmic winds had counterparts in the humors and bodily processes. The same pattern extended into the soul, where thought, speech, will and inner longing were understood as forms of movement and force. This shaped her understanding of health. The body was healthy when its forces remained in the right measure and relationship. Her idea of viriditas described the life-giving vitality that allows creation to grow and flourish, linking the vitality of nature with human health and spiritual flourishing. The same order also had a moral dimension. Human beings could live in harmony with creation or disrupt that harmony. Physical, spiritual and moral disorder could therefore belong to the same larger framework, without reducing every illness to punishment for sin. Only then does her central idea become clear. The human being was the microcosm, the small world, reflecting the macrocosm, the greater universe. The structure of creation was reproduced in the body and soul. Christ completed this picture. God became human, making humanity a meeting point between the material world, the soul and the divine. That makes the spherical Earth almost a side detail. Hildegard was not merely asking where Earth sits in the cosmos. She was asking how the entire cosmos, the human being and God belong to one order. Image source: “The Creation with the Universe and the Cosmic Man” (1230), Hildegard of Bingen. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Biblioteca Statale di Lucca. Version checked: 23 January 2005. License checked: 13 September 2026 - Public Domain (Public Domain Mark 1.0). “Werk Gottes” (1163–1173), Hildegard of Bingen. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Codex Latinus 1942, Biblioteca Statale di Lucca. Version checked: 3 February 2015. License checked: 13 September 2026 - Public Domain / Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Genesis begins with a Hebrew word that has a surprising Babylonian connection. Genesis 1:2 calls the primordial waters tehom, “the deep.” The word is related to the Akkadian tiāmtu, “sea,” and to Tiamat, the Babylonian sea deity from the Enūma Eliš. Both names likely go back to an older Semitic word for the sea or watery deep. In that story, Marduk kills Tiamat, splits her body apart and uses it to form the heavens and the earth. Genesis has no sea goddess and no battle. God speaks, and the waters are separated. But the older imagery appears elsewhere in the Bible. Psalm 74 describes God crushing sea monsters, while Isaiah 27:1 describes Leviathan as a twisting serpent in the sea. So Tehom isn’t Tiamat. But the resemblance is hard to miss. Did biblical writers take an older idea of the primordial sea and reshape it into a creation story where God doesn’t have to fight the waters at all? He simply commands them. Image source: “Chaos. State 1.” (date unknown), Wenceslaus Hollar. Source: Wikimedia Commons / University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection. Version checked: 15 March 2009. License checked: 24 September 2026 - Public Domain.