If you follow the history of stone healing from its beginnings to the present day, it inevitably leads you to an important personality in naturopathy: Hildegard von Bingen.
Who was Hildegard von Bingen?
Her extraordinary personality is based on her numerous activities. She was a Benedictine and one of the first representatives of German mysticism in the Middle Ages. Due to her great interest in natural science and medicine, she was way ahead of her contemporaries and was therefore venerated by them as a messenger of God. In the spirit of her scientific observations, she wrote books about nature, the book of stone healing being one of her most important.
Hildegard von Bingen and stone healing
The book she wrote reports on 24 healing stones and their effects, whereby she created the first basis for modern stone healing. Her uses from the 12th century may seem strange today (e.g. she moistened some stones with saliva and then placed them on the affected part of the body), but her observations contributed a large part to today's knowledge in stone healing. Because of its fundamentals, stone healing has become an extensive research and can today report on numerous stones and their effects.
How do the stones affect people?
Precious stones were used by Hildegard von Bingen as a natural remedy. She viewed gemstones as God-given treasures of nature that can aid in healing. Their treatment on the human body was based not only on the symptoms of a disease, but also on its cause. The basic theory of today's naturopathy focuses on the same procedure. Hildegard von Bingen also says that the effect of the stones depends on the shape, the color and the metals present in the gemstone. In order to guarantee this effect, von Bingen carried the stones as jewelry or in bags. Besides that, she often put the stones in the water to drink as an elixir and to increase the stones' effectiveness.