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In 1148 Hildegard received a vision telling her to found a new convent. When her abbot would not allow it, Hildegard became ill, a pattern that repeated itself throughout her life whenever she couldn't fulfill her visions. Eventually, the abbot relented and Hildegard built the Rupertsberg convent near Bingen. She later built another convent at Eibingen. Today, she has gained renewed popularity for her work as a writer, composer, and painter of illuminated manuscripts. |
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Another world-famous favorite among the religious psychics is also a femaleJoan of Arc. Born in 1412, Joan heard even as a child what she later described as voices. These voices prompted her as a teenager to don armor and lead the French army against the English to end the siege of Orleans, her home town. After Joan suffered several defeats at the hands of the English, they captured her and returned her to the French theologians (who were English loyalists). They called her a heretic due to her ability to hear voices. |
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To save herself, Joan recanted her reports of the voices she heard and appealed to the pope. However, she was shortly returned to prison and raped by her captors, after which she withdrew her recantation and espoused renewed faith in her ''voices," causing her captors to burn her at the stake as a heretic at age 19. A posthumous retrial in the mid-15th-century cleared her of heresy; it took only another 500 years or so before the Church proclaimed her a saint in 1920. |
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Nostradamus: Far-Seeing Psychic |
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Another famous visionary, probably the greatest yet known to humankind, is Nostradamus. Born Michel de Nostredame (Michael of Notre Dame) in Provence, France in 1503, he was the eldest son in a Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. Like most people of means in his day, Nostradamus received training not only in all the classical languages, but also astrology and medicine. He became an astrologer and physician, and is reputed to have created remarkable cures during outbreaks of the plague in France. |
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Nostradamus didn't start to glimpse into the future until he was in his early forties. First he would receive premonitions and then experience visual flashes of insight. His early prophecies were rather insignificant, such as which piglet in the back yard would be served for dinner. But eventually, when his prophecies concerned more important matters, he began to publish them. His rhymed prophecies, published under the title Centuries (1555), brought him the favor of the French court. He wrote them in the form of four-line predictions, such as this one: |
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Like the great king of the Angolmois
The year 1999, seventh month,
The great king of terror will descend from the sky,
At this time, Mars will reign for the good cause. |
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