Note 91 — THE SCIENTIFIC VIEWS AND VISIONS OF SAINT HILDEGARD (1098–1180)

The word cancer is here used, but the crab goes sideways, not backwards. By cancer Hildegard, who had never seen the sea, probably means the crayfish, an animal fairly common in the Rhine basin. It is the head of a crayfish or lobster that is figured in the miniatures of the vision of the macrocosm in the Lucca MS., and a similar organism frequently serves for the sign Cancer in the mediaeval zodiacal medical figures, as in Plate XV of this essay.