8 Communicating With The Spirit World

Hilma af Klint was one of the first class of women allowed to attend art school in Sweden. She studied landscape, portraiture and botanical drawing. She also met another artist there Anna Cassel.

Together with Sigrid Hedman, Mathilda Nilsson, Cornelia Cedarburg they formed “The Five,” and met every Friday for ten years to conduct investigations into the world of the invisible.

At the time Spiritualism was very popular, with artists and also with the general public and there was also a great interest in the scientific discoveries of that time period: Electricity, atoms, energies that were invisible and yet fundamental to understanding how the world worked.

Spiritualism believed investigating the nature of both the physical and the invisible world and believed truth was the ultimate goal of both science and art.

Hilma af Klint, and the other members of the five met every Friday night to pray and to communicate with spirits they called “High Beings,” — Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor. Today might refer these as Ascended Masters — spirits, who, unlike Angels had spent time living earthly lives and through experience had attained spiritual mastery.

The five would not only practice communicating with these High Beings but in addition to doing automatic writing, their taking dictation also took the form of channeled drawings.

Hillma and the other members of the five met for ten years. They practiced listening, communicating and translating messages from the spirit world. Initially Hilma was the notetaker for the group, but over time her role changed and became one of the ones who most often channeled drawings.

This period of meeting every Friday with the five was a kind of spiritual apprenticeship and it’s worth considering that like art, being able to communicate with the spirit realm requires commitment and practice. Faith, like the ability to draw, is something one learns and develops with dedicated practice.

At the time I learned of Hilma, I had been doing quite a bit of doodling and certain themes had begun to emerge, one of them being drawings about space, the stars and the cosmos.

Above is one of the doodles I did from this period.