Dream Illustration - King with Eyes Closed - Hildegard of Bingen

This dream is from the Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by Matthew Fox:

In her first letter to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Hildegard tells of a dream wherein a king “fails to open his eyes” and the result was that “a dark haze came which covered the valleys and ravens and other birds tore everything all around to pieces. - The Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by Matthew Fox, pg 41

I wanted to illustrate this dream as an homage to Hildegard and her method of dictating her own visions. According to Fox:

We do not know exactly who did the actual painting. It was most likely either the monks of the abbey of St. Eucharius in Trier, whose abbots were friends of Hildegard, or her own sisters at Rupertsburg. What is most important, however, is that Hildegard describes in great detail each of the images, and that she supervised the entire operation of the paintings. - pg 9

I was grateful to learn of this method of dictating vision and dream material to others to draw, and I am curious to explore how this practice might amplify personal dreaming and the communal dream space. Of course, I don’t have Hildegard here to work with (wouldn’t that be awesome!), so this is an illustration, not a rendering.

This dream felt like a prophecy, a warning. I did not know the age of Emperor Frederic Barbarossa when I drew this; I did a brief google after completing the picture, and the internet suggests he may have been in his 50’s or 60’s. I chose a younger looking king as this was Hildegard’s first letter, and the warning seemed to suggest there was still time to correct a course of action that might lead to disaster. I incorporated imagery for the Tower tarot card as a way to call upon my own visual language of archetypal destruction, and I placed one raven on the windowsill, insistently calling to the king to open his eyes. I suppose I was hoping to summon the desire to wake up from the same forces that are now tearing everything apart.