Viriditas: The Living Green Energy in Ancestral Nutrition

So much of modern eating has forgotten something our ancestors knew in their bones. Nourishment was never merely fuel. It was a living connection to the energy of the earth itself. This life energy is what the remarkable 12th-century healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen called viriditas (greenness, or greening power), and I keep returning to it in my own practice as one of the truest frameworks I know for understanding how ancestral foods nourish not just the body, but the mind and spirit as well.

The Wisdom of Hildegard: Understanding Viriditas

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, visionary, composer, and one of history's earliest documented women healers. She gave us the concept of viriditas (greenness) as a cornerstone of her healing and spiritual teachings. For Hildegard, it was far more than a color. It was the divine animating energy flowing through all living things.

In her healing writings, she described viriditas as the greening power of the Divine, a vital energy showing itself as physical vigor, spiritual vitality, fertility, and the capacity for healing. She believed this energy could be depleted through illness, poor nourishment, and disconnection from the natural world, and, just as importantly, restored through proper eating, healing plants, and a renewed closeness to nature.

I find it striking how close this comes to what I work with every day in Ayurveda. The idea of a vital life force moving through the body is Ayurveda's Prana (life force energy), and the notion that food either carries that force or drains it sits at the very heart of how I understand nourishment.

The Cosmic Dimensions of Viriditas

Hildegard saw viriditas as a cosmic principle, the unified energies of sun, moon, and earth working together to fill the world with life-giving power. The sun gave warmth and light, the moon governed moisture and the cycles of growth, and the earth held it all as the vessel where this energy became tangible life.

For Hildegard, it held four interwoven dimensions:

1. The Divine Life Energy in Nature. Viriditas was the invisible yet palpable power that causes seeds to germinate, plants to lean toward the sun, and living things to flourish. She saw it as nature's own creative force, endlessly renewing and sustaining the world.

2. Spiritual and Physical Vitality. Hildegard never separated the health of the body from the health of the spirit. Viriditas was the proper flow of life energy through body, mind, and spirit together. When that flow moved freely, the result was robust health, mental clarity, and a felt sense of connection. Unwellness, to her, was a diminishment of viriditas that asked to be restored.

3. The Living Bridge Between Worlds. Hildegard understood viriditas as the connecting thread between the divine, the natural world, and human creativity. When people engaged with plants full of this greening power, through cultivation, gentle preparation, or mindful eating, they took part in an exchange of energy. She believed her own music and art rose from the same force flowing through her.

4. The Essential Moisture of Life. Most concretely of all, Hildegard tied viriditas to a certain moistness, a juiciness she considered essential to health. Dryness, to her, signaled a dangerous depletion of life energy, while succulence in plants and in bodies revealed viriditas present and thriving.

This dimension moves me most, because it echoes Ayurveda so faithfully. In my practice, dryness is the signature of Vata (Air energy), which turns cold, light, and depleting when it grows out of balance, and the answer is much the same as Hildegard's: warm, moist, grounding, nourishing foods that restore what dryness takes. Two healing traditions, born centuries and cultures apart, arriving at the same quiet truth.

Viriditas in Our Ancestral Diet

Looking at traditional indigenous eating through the lens of viriditas, I see ancestors who recognized this living energy intuitively. They did not simply consume calories. They cultivated a relationship with foods that carried life energy from earth to body:

• Wild-harvested plants gathered at their peak, holding their fullest measure of phytonutrients

• Freshly gathered foods eaten close to harvest, their life-giving properties still intact

• Seasonal eating that aligned the body with the natural cycles of the year

• Fermentation, which deepened rather than diminished a food's living energy

• Preparation methods that preserved the very moistness Hildegard tied to vitality

Our ancestors noticed that vibrant green foods, the spring greens, the wild herbs, the young vegetables, carried a particular power to revitalize. Modern nutritional research confirms what they sensed: these foods are dense with chlorophyll, antioxidants, and the micronutrients the body needs to thrive. In Ayurvedic terms, most carry the bitter and astringent tastes of Shadrasa (six tastes of Ayurveda), the very tastes that cleanse and cool and lighten the body after a heavy winter.

Celtic Wisdom: Viriditas in Another Tradition

Celtic culture, with its deep reverence for the natural world, offers a striking parallel to Hildegard's viriditas. Our Celtic ancestors recognized a similar life energy pulsing through everything, most visible in their veneration of sacred trees and plants.

In Celtic tradition, certain plants were held as vessels of extraordinary power. The rowan, oak, hazel, and especially mistletoe were seen as conduits of vital energy. Celtic healers, the Druids among them, gathered healing plants according to precise lunar and seasonal cycles to catch them at their most potent, an intuitive reading of life energy at work.

The Celtic idea of neart (vigor, might, potency) shares much with viriditas. Both traditions understood that this power could pass from plant to person through right relationship with food, and that eating something at its peak vitality carried that living energy into the one who received it.

This finds its face in Celtic mythology through the Green Man, who embodies the interconnectedness of all living beings and the ecosystems they inhabit. Much as Hildegard named viriditas the greening power of the Divine, the Green Man represents the vital energy flowing through nature, a symbol of growth, renewal, and the intimate bond between our people and the living land around them.

Reclaiming Viriditas in Nourishment Today

In my own kitchen and my own practice, this old wisdom shapes how I eat and how I gather. A few threads guide me.

I reach first for living foods. Fresh, sprouted, and fermented foods hold their life energy in a way processed foods simply cannot. The vitality in a just-picked garden green is palpable beside its shipped and stored counterpart.

I follow the seasons. Our bodies grew up in step with what each season offered, and I still feel the wisdom of it: spring greens to lighten and cleanse after winter, summer fruits to cool and hydrate, autumn roots to ground us as the cold returns. This is constitutional balance in its oldest form, the seasons themselves tending our doshas.

I harvest with attention. Whether from garden, hedgerow, or market, I try to stay aware of the life energy passing into my hands. Hildegard favored gathering at the peak moment, and many plants reach their fullest potency just before they flower.

I prepare with care. Cooking method matters. A gentle steaming or a quick sauté keeps more of a food's living energy than long, hard heat that scatters both nutrients and vitality.

And I keep it a relationship, never a transaction. Our ancestors knew the plants and animals that fed them, their habits, their haunts, their gifts. I find that the more I know

a food, the more it seems to nourish me.

Viriditas as Everyday Prevention

Hildegard's whole approach was built on prevention. She understood that maintaining viriditas through good nourishment kept the imbalances that lead to unwellness from ever taking hold. Her principle of discretio (discernment and moderation), the discernment to find balance in all things, sits beautifully alongside viriditas as a framework for health. In her work Causae et Curae, she drew the vital connection between the green health of the natural world and the whole health of the human person.

Among the foods long associated with her approach, one stands on especially firm ground: fennel. Hildegard regarded fennel as an all-purpose herb that promoted general good health and a happy disposition, and she returned to it often. Other foods linked to her teachings over the centuries, such as spelt, chestnuts, and beets, are frequently named as restorers of vitality, though some of these associations owe as much to later tradition as to her original writings. What draws me is how naturally her favor for fennel aligns with Ayurveda, where fennel is prized for tending Agni (digestive fire), the cornerstone of health in my own tradition. Two lineages of wisdom, once again, pointing to the same hearth.

The Living Table

Bringing viriditas to my own table looks like small, steady practices, the kind our ancestors would recognize.

• I grow something edible, even if only herbs on a windowsill

• I shop where I can meet the people who grow the food

• I fold in wild foods when they are safely at hand: dandelion, nettle, berries

• I preserve the season's abundance through fermentation, which adds life energy rather than draining it

• I prepare meals mindful of the living energy passing through them

• I offer a moment of gratitude for the viriditas in my food before I eat

Our ancestors understood what modern science is only now rediscovering: the vital connection between healthy soil, vital plants, and human wellness. The microbiome of living soil shapes the nutrient density of the plants that grow in it, which in turn shapes the microbiome within us. A single green thread, running from the earth straight through to our own bodies.

Conclusion: The Green Thread

Viriditas offers a gentler and truer alternative to the mechanical view of nutrition. Rather than food as molecular fuel, it invites us to see food as a carrier of the same life energy that moves through all living things. That shift turns eating from consumption into communion, from nutrition into relationship.

In reclaiming this old wisdom, whether through Hildegard's medieval world or the traditional knowledge of our Celtic ancestors, we weave ourselves back into the living fabric of nature. Our health, we remember, is inseparable from the health of our food, which is inseparable from the health of our earth. It is the very same understanding I meet again in Ayurveda, where a life lived in rhythm with nature is not a philosophy but the foundation of wellness itself.

The greenness Hildegard celebrated still flows through our world, waiting to be recognized, honored, and folded back into the way we nourish ourselves. In that recognition lies not only physical health, but spiritual vitality, a wholeness our ancestors carried easily and that so many of us, in our separation from the land, quietly long for.

This is not wellness as trend. It is wellness as remembrance.

Julie Wardwell, Clinical Ayurvedic Practitioner

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Sources and Further Reading

• Hildegard of Bingen. Physica (Book of Simple Medicine) and Causae et Curae (Book of Compound Medicine), c. 1150 to 1158. Her primary works on the natural world, healing plants, and the concept of viriditas.

• Sweet, Victoria. "Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1999. A scholarly study of viriditas and Hildegard's view of nature and health.

• Throop, Priscilla (trans.). Hildegard von Bingen's Physica: The Complete English Translation. Healing Arts Press.

• On Celtic tradition: The reverence for sacred trees (rowan, oak, hazel, mistletoe), the concept of neart, and the Green Man are drawn from traditional Celtic lore and folklore, much of it preserved orally rather than in a single written source.

• Modern nutritional research on chlorophyll, phytonutrients, and the soil microbiome supports the connection between plant vitality and human wellness.