Bibiel Hears Things: Anúna – “O Ignis Spiritus” (O Fire of the Spirit)

Hey people! Today is Whit Monday, or the Monday in the Octave of Pentecost, and I thought we could celebrate it with an appropriately themed piece. I would’ve featured it yesterday, since that would be even more fitting, but it’s only today that I was reminded of it. As some of you might perhaps guess from the title, this is a liturgical sequence for Pentecost, “O Ignis Spiritus Paracliti”, written by St. Hildegard of Bingen, or rather an abridged version of that text. (For the non-Catholics or anyone unfamiliar with the term, a sequence is a hymn traditionally sung at Mass before the Gospel, on certain major feasts. There were a lot of them in medieval times, of which only a small handful are still in use today.) Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th-century German Benedictine abbess, mystic, composer, theologian and all-round polymath, and one of only four women ever named a Doctor of the Church. She did set this text to chant originally, but Michael McGlynn – the founder, artistic…