This illumination portrays the captured devil, whose vile attributes Hildegard described in the accompanying vision. Prose and image complement and inform the play in the Vision of Music (Book 3, Vision 13), lending detail to the devil that the play does not go into—assuming the reader's previous knowledge of this earlier vision. Hildegard described that the devil "lay on its back like a worm, wondrously large and long…black and bristly, covered with ulcers and pustules, and it was divided into five sections…full of deadly poison. But its head had been so crushed that the left side of its jawbone was dislocated. Its eyes were bloody on the surface and burning within; its ears were round and bristly; its nose and mouth were those of a viper, its hands human, its feet a viper's feet, and its tail short and horrible. And around its neck a chain was riveted, which also bound its hands and feet; and this chain was firmly fastened to a rock in the abyss…sharp arrows whistled loudly from its mouth…." At the top of the illumination, we see a burning light as high as a mountain, looking like many tongues. Below the light, a screen of translucent crystal with people dressed in white before those clad in colored garments. These people, protected by God's power, could tread the Devil underfoot and torment it, unaffected by the Devil's flame and poison.

{Return to text} {View Illustration 3}