Missing Witches - October 23, 2023


Hilma af Klint + Anna Cassel： Life Is A Farce If A Person Does Not Serve Truth.

WF Nadra Nittle on bell hooks： We Can Create Our Own Spirituality WF Julia Voss, author of Hilma af Klint： A Biography - Put Your Feelers Out

Episode Stats


Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

144.53

Word count

5,978

Sentence count

264

Harmful content

Misogyny

18

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The Missing Witches podcast is brought to you by the Missing Witches Coven.
00:00:04.440 Our covenmate, poet, son, said,
00:00:07.120 I came to this coven because nobody else was centering mutual aid and informed resistance like the Missing Witches,
00:00:13.100 but this community is also hugely loving and supportive and full of artists and thinkers and healers
00:00:18.420 who have such a huge diversity of experience.
00:00:22.100 Even when we're not in circle, there's magic afoot.
00:00:25.100 Also, I have a chronic illness, which makes it really hard not to swear all the time,
00:00:29.260 so I am in fabulous company here. 1.00
00:00:31.700 Bless the fucking being. 0.99
00:00:34.140 And Covenant Jen from Wheel of My Year wrote, 1.00
00:00:37.980 I discovered missing witches through Queen of All Queens,
00:00:41.140 Jinx Monsoon's podcast.
00:00:43.660 After reading their Contributor Covenant,
00:00:45.680 I thought I would give it a chance
00:00:46.740 and attended a new moon circle.
00:00:48.920 As a queer person of color living in a flyover state,
00:00:51.760 I had very low standards.
00:00:53.880 I was used to being burned by performative allyship
00:00:56.680 and virtue signalers.
00:00:58.420 These witches were different.
00:01:00.500 My first circle was a transformative experience as a solitary witch.
00:01:04.960 Missing Witches Kevin is what was missing from my practice.
00:01:07.700 I'm so grateful to be found.
00:01:10.720 Anyway, those are some of the people who bring you this podcast.
00:01:14.600 And if that sounds like your people, then come find out more at missingwitches.com.
00:01:20.880 We've been missing you. 1.00
00:01:22.600 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:01:27.800 You must be a witch. 1.00
00:01:33.440 This is a spiral story about hidden work that comes to light and changes the history of art, which is the history of seeing and of craft.
00:01:43.260 This is a story about the shapes of the world and the shapes of ideas, about abstraction and what it means to go seeking.
00:01:50.580 in this story a missing artist a swedish woman named hilma gets added to the pantheon of greats
00:01:59.420 it's official a woman painted the first abstract expressionist painting years before kandinsky
00:02:05.320 claimed the title she paints for the future and she predicts it and she is caught by it and
00:02:11.340 finally celebrated and then in an attic in a dusty archive other journals by other women
00:02:20.160 are found. Artists, channelers, nurses, lovers, point after point in this constellation are
00:02:28.560 discovered and the story of the lone genius is upended, expanded, spiraled open. Genius has
00:02:35.440 collaborators and they are interlocking circles of people and ideas. This is a story about emergent
00:02:42.780 properties like love and inspiration, and beautiful, beautiful paintings.
00:02:50.840 This is a queer story about care and authorship, and so it requires new shapes.
00:02:57.760 This is a story about Hilma Afklint, and also Anna Cassell, Cornelia Sederberg, Sigrid Hedman,
00:03:06.180 Matilda Nilsen, Gustin Andersen, Thomasine Andersen,
00:03:10.240 and more and more creative, passionate women,
00:03:13.200 flawed people, and hopeful, magical, powerful spirits both. 1.00
00:03:22.340 Helmhf Klint was born in a castle that had been converted
00:03:25.100 into a naval barrack and military school,
00:03:27.460 born in 1862 near Stockholm, Sweden.
00:03:31.240 Her grandfather was the first person to map great stretches
00:03:33.900 of the wild and rocky Nordic coastline.
00:03:37.180 He created nautical maps of what lay beneath.
00:03:41.420 Hilma broke with family and social convention
00:03:43.420 by choosing to study art.
00:03:45.520 She was part of the first generation of women artists
00:03:47.860 allowed to attend art academies, 0.55
00:03:50.200 and the women had to pay more than the men.
00:03:52.960 She studied and practiced at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts
00:03:55.720 in Stockholm from 1882 to 1887. 1.00
00:04:00.140 The women weren't welcomed. 1.00
00:04:01.960 They were mocked and harassed. 1.00
00:04:03.900 They weren't allowed to study or paint nudes with their contemporaries, but Helma did it anyway.
00:04:09.980 At the Academy, she met a fellow artist and one of the great creative and emotional partners of her life, Anna Cassell.
00:04:18.380 Graduating with honors, the Academy provided her with a studio in the Art Center of Stockholm,
00:04:23.480 shared with other women artists, where she worked until 1908,
00:04:27.160 mostly painting landscapes and portraits, which she exhibited and sold, which she continued to 1914.
00:04:33.900 With the money she earned, she took study trips to Belgium, Norway, Holland, Italy, and Germany.
00:04:41.480 She also created many careful botanical studies of plants and flowers,
00:04:45.580 and worked as an illustrator at a Stockholm veterinary institute.
00:04:50.300 She traveled across Europe with Anna alone in the museums and churches.
00:04:55.880 All this time, and for a decade in total, she and Anna met weekly with fellow artists
00:05:00.560 Cornelia Sederberg, Secreted Hedman, and Matilda Nielsen. They called themselves the Five.
00:05:07.880 They prayed and meditated and gave lectures to each other on what they were learning.
00:05:15.680 In Hillmuff-Klint, a beginning anthroposophical commentary, David Adams writes,
00:05:21.420 while kneeling around an altar with a triangle and cross, they contacted disembodied spirits
00:05:27.060 and spiritual guides. At least one of the crosses they used on the altar was a white rose cross with
00:05:33.160 a glass rose in the middle on a three-level base, and they seemed to feel the communications and
00:05:37.900 guidance they received was associated with the Rosicrucian stream. Taking turns as trance
00:05:45.040 mediums, they also received messages through a psychograph, an instrument to record psychic
00:05:50.940 transmissions and via automatic drawing and writing in pencil. Over time, various messages,
00:05:58.140 images, and symbols were recorded in a series of five notebooks and nine sketchbooks documenting
00:06:03.360 their weekly seances, books that Afklimt kept her whole life and used as a resource.
00:06:13.000 Hilma brought a scientific diligence to the work of Looking Beyond,
00:06:16.580 and she treated their ideas and images and discoveries seriously.
00:06:21.900 In this way, she built a visual language that would lead her to create what is now considered
00:06:26.060 the first abstract expressionist art, although it feels like countless indigenous art traditions
00:06:31.240 have to be ignored to make that claim. Better may be to acknowledge that Hilma,
00:06:36.680 Anna, and their collaborators were drinking widely and deeply from their sources.
00:06:41.660 This was part of how they practiced and prepared for the channeling.
00:06:44.860 They studied world religions alongside their devotion to studying Christian and Lutheran spiritual philosophy, as well as occultist movements, including theosophy, spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, and Anthroposophism.
00:06:59.700 In 1889, she had joined the Swedish Theosophical Society, founded that same year, until 1915 or 1916, and in 1920, the Anthroposophical Society.
00:07:14.100 Yet during the 1890s, she also ran a Christian Sunday school on a family farm with a cousin.
00:07:22.480 Hilma was already attending seances and thinking about maps and the sea and how humans have
00:07:27.800 communicated with symbols when, at 18, her 10-year-old sister Hermina died of influenza.
00:07:34.840 And for the rest of her life, she felt the boundaries between life and death differently,
00:07:38.820 and her circles always included the dead.
00:07:44.140 When the five disbanded, she did not cease in this work of collaboration and investigation.
00:07:49.800 We know now she had another circle, this time of thirteen, with whom she met and channeled
00:07:55.320 throughout her life, even after members of the circle had passed.
00:07:59.440 Perhaps she communes with them still.
00:08:03.280 Mad Doc Cairns, reviewing Julia Voss's biography of Hilma for The Guardian, writes,
00:08:07.840 Some were artists, others were writers, but all were adherents of the new philosophies sweeping Europe in the late 19th century.
00:08:15.660 spiritualism rosicrucianism theosophy mixing psychology christianity and buddhism historical
00:08:24.560 fantasy and science fiction new age ideals were amazingly popular particularly
00:08:30.480 were amazingly popular particularly among educated women who use these ideologies to
00:08:37.060 carve themselves new social niches outside the suffocating strictures of church and family
00:08:42.800 her visions speaking of secret pasts and a luminous egalitarian future drew others to her
00:08:50.680 and in this underground of dreamers and outcasts f clint found friends allies and lovers like
00:08:58.340 everything else in her life the artist's relationships with women were secretive
00:09:01.560 intense and suffused with supernatural meaning f clint experienced her sexual encounters with
00:09:08.300 friends, Voss writes, from a place beyond clear gender relationships. This is a spiral story.
00:09:16.260 Hilma's other collaboration begins as a teenager, and she practiced diligently for years how to
00:09:22.340 enter a channeling state, an open state to new thoughts, wherever you believe those come from.
00:09:29.060 And in that state, she and her friends would draw new shapes and write symbols.
00:09:32.960 this other thinking led her to a life outside the dominant conservative swedish culture
00:09:39.500 she bought a ramshackle house on an island and had an expansive studio built where both she
00:09:44.980 and anna and others would work she painted and lectured about spirits and science both
00:09:51.460 she cared for her mother when she was blind and after her mother died she continued to
00:09:57.460 live with her mother's nurse, Thomasine. After trying repeatedly to share her art,
00:10:04.460 making traveling museums, as she called them, fat books full of page-by-page documentation of the
00:10:10.440 work, her hundreds of illuminated paintings speaking truths far ahead of her time, Voss
00:10:16.160 writes, Af Klint had never expected to be understood by the art world per se.
00:10:21.300 she had no ambition to exhibit at the academy or in commercial galleries she was not interested
00:10:28.140 in buyers she wanted an audience of seekers people who would see in her paintings an alternative
00:10:33.520 a way out of materialism and toward new thoughts and new feelings she wanted to open people's eyes
00:10:41.000 to the fact that life did not have to be merely quotidian that the world was larger than what
00:10:46.340 could be seen, that it was mutable and subject to transformation. Consciousness could determine
00:10:52.580 being. Humankind could connect with the living spirit that she thought united all beings,
00:10:58.160 from fauna to flora, and even, as she pointed out several times, the mineral world.
00:11:03.960 No one had to accept the cage of external reality. The livelier, the vibration of the thoughts,
00:11:10.980 she had written in 1919,
00:11:13.960 shortly before setting off for Switzerland the first time,
00:11:16.980 the more flexible life on Earth becomes.
00:11:20.020 Anyone will be able to work on matter with their imagination.
00:11:27.060 She made her work with the future in mind
00:11:29.400 because she believed in our ability to shape what the future could become.
00:11:33.600 She worked with her great friends, great loves,
00:11:36.780 to receive it and to create it and to try and share it
00:11:39.760 and finally to archive it all.
00:11:42.200 They marked boxes of paintings to be kept closed for at least 20 years.
00:11:46.820 They met in secret circles to study and teach and to listen.
00:11:51.080 They worked together in support of a vision from beyond.
00:11:56.040 Channeling is a practice that supported Hilma
00:11:58.160 and her community of women seekers throughout her life. 0.99
00:12:01.460 What happens in those kinds of containers? 0.62
00:12:05.080 Each person brings their own worlds of knowledge and experience
00:12:07.880 and lays it down quietly in the background.
00:12:10.560 And under the right circumstances,
00:12:12.440 something emerges from our world's meeting.
00:12:15.700 Something about how they put each other at ease
00:12:18.580 and also called each other's background world forward
00:12:21.880 allowed for the possibility of something more.
00:12:28.840 In Afclint's notebook entry from January 1st, 1906,
00:12:32.160 she wrote that one of her guides, quote,
00:12:34.600 presented me with a task and I immediately said yes.
00:12:37.880 The expectation was that I would dedicate a year to this task.
00:12:41.640 In the end, it became the greatest work of my life.
00:12:45.620 She was to depict, quote, the immortal aspect of man and paint a message to humanity.
00:12:52.900 She gave up her more realistic painting, underwent a 10-month alchemical purification to prepare herself involving prayer and fasting,
00:13:00.380 and began in November 1906 at age 43 by creating 34 preparatory paintings
00:13:07.060 as preliminaries to the major task, Paintings for the Temple.
00:13:13.380 Hilma was 43 when the great project of her artistic and spiritual life took shape,
00:13:18.380 when she received and accepted her commission.
00:13:22.180 Stop here with me because I'm 43 and I need to feel that in my body. 0.99
00:13:26.240 when i was younger i thought 43 would feel old but it turns out 43 has a fuck it vibe to it 0.95
00:13:33.040 that feels surprisingly strong at 43 maybe the kinds of people who assumed you wanted certain 0.96
00:13:39.760 things have thrown up their hands at your weirdness your failure your otherness maybe 0.92
00:13:45.500 they've decided they like you or maybe they have begun to hate you at 43 a woman can be terrifying
00:13:52.680 to a certain sort of mind. At 43, Hilma studied the universe and read and thought and met with 0.85
00:14:00.660 others to talk about how it all worked and why. And when they hit the edges of what science had
00:14:05.700 figured out, they experimented sincerely with means of looking beyond. Kate Kelleway interviewed
00:14:13.460 Hilma's family for The Guardian at the time of the Hilma-Flint retrospective at the Serpentine
00:14:18.060 gallery. Hilma's nephew told her she had intensely blue eyes. She was tiny, about five feet, which
00:14:25.120 makes her full-scale works all the more phenomenal. She painted on the ground. Johan detected, on one
00:14:31.560 painting, a small footprint. Hilma was here. His father judged her unsentimental, no fantasist,
00:14:39.800 high-minded. A word that reappears is resolute. She was a vegetarian. Like Chekhov's Masha,
00:14:47.180 she always wore black. Life, she declared, is a farce if a person does not serve the truth. 0.75
00:14:55.200 She sounds formidable, not cozy at all, but who knows? Did she have a sense of humor?
00:14:59.920 Oh yes, says Johan. She never married. Women seem to have answered her emotional needs.
00:15:07.860 Johan mentions Gustin, one of her group who died. Hilma poured her friend's spirit into her painting.
00:15:14.560 according to johan prophecy ran in the family
00:15:19.980 she poured herself into her relationships with women and she poured their spirit into her work
00:15:28.900 and though she was treated as quote crazy witch by the other inhabitants of the small wild island
00:15:36.260 where she lived because they could not understand what those two women living alone up there were 1.00
00:15:40.940 doing with all those eggs. They were making temper paint, and they were painting. And though 1.00
00:15:47.520 she did not find support for her work in the wider world in her lifetime, and though she is buried in
00:15:52.720 a grave that bears only her father's name, and though her paintings met with outright rejection
00:15:58.460 by curators and scorn from reviewers, Hilma and her coven and their astonishing collaborative
00:16:05.600 communications were slowly and then phenomenally brought to light by her family and the community
00:16:12.240 of astonished art lovers who rose up around this work. The Moderna Musi, the Modern Art Museum in
00:16:20.920 Stockholm, whose director in the 1970s had rejected the work without looking at it upon hearing that
00:16:26.420 the artist was a medium and a woman, hosted Hilma of Klint, pioneer of abstraction, with 230 of her
00:16:34.300 paintings in 2013, and it was the most popular show the museum has ever held, traveling to seven
00:16:40.800 further venues throughout Europe, seen by more than a million people. The Guggenheim show dedicated
00:16:47.420 to Clint in 2018 was the most visited in its 60-year history. People waited in long lines.
00:16:57.340 people wept unexpectedly
00:17:00.200 and maybe what those thousands and thousands of people saw
00:17:06.100 what made them cry
00:17:07.340 is that there is so much love in them
00:17:10.840 Julia Voss writes
00:17:13.680 despite what people think
00:17:16.900 she would insist she wasn't alone
00:17:18.740 she was moved by what she saw as contact with higher beings
00:17:22.260 and there were two great loves in her life
00:17:24.660 the artist Anna Cassell
00:17:26.800 and the nurse Thomasine Anderson
00:17:28.560 without these women
00:17:30.800 the story told here would have been
00:17:32.520 unthinkable 0.71
00:17:33.360 without love, Af Klint was convinced
00:17:36.080 there could be no insight
00:17:37.760 to achieve wisdom
00:17:39.980 she wrote in December 1919
00:17:41.980 two individuals must travel together
00:17:44.920 for the path makes it impossible
00:17:47.020 for one person to proceed alone
00:17:49.020 she was sure
00:17:51.440 we would read those words one day
00:17:53.280 af clint never realized one of her most ambitious ideas she wanted us to view her paintings in a
00:18:00.260 spiraling multi-story building proceeding all the way out to an observatory at the top
00:18:05.580 she called her sketches for this project designs for a temple
00:18:10.540 the exhibition that opened in fall 2018 at the guggenheim museum's famous frank lloyd wright
00:18:17.380 building, came closer to fulfilling her vision than anything had before.
00:18:22.560 F. Clint wanted a spiral-shaped building, and thanks to the Guggenheim, her works were
00:18:26.800 shown in one.
00:18:28.280 Yet the temple building was only part of it.
00:18:30.500 She also dreamed of a departure from the art world as we know it.
00:18:34.300 She wasn't eager merely for a place in the history of painting.
00:18:38.140 Her works, she believed, could help us leave behind everything that makes the world small
00:18:42.540 and rigid, entrenched thought patterns and systems of order, categories of sex and class,
00:18:49.360 materialism and capitalism, the binary view of an Orient and an Occident, and the distinction
00:18:54.600 between art and life.
00:18:59.060 Hilma wants a temple in the mind, in the living temple of the minds of the future, 0.56
00:19:04.540 as well as a physical place for us to walk through.
00:19:07.380 she wants for us the love and freedom she glimpsed herself at times i think
00:19:13.320 quote when in 1912 she resumed work on the series of paintings for the temple
00:19:19.500 she steadily modified her method of working her contact with spiritual guides became freer and
00:19:26.140 more personal she said she had gone through an occult education to become independently
00:19:31.520 clairvoyant and able to research spiritual worlds in a more conscious way. She continued to work
00:19:37.680 serially and systematically, creating paintings in series with subgroups numbered like scientific
00:19:43.360 research. These works continued to explore a path toward a possible harmony between spiritual
00:19:49.440 and material worlds, good and evil, female and male, religion and science.
00:19:56.000 she creates to chart paths toward a possible harmony the spiraling show at the guggenheim
00:20:05.000 comes incredibly close to matching what hillman and describe as the temple where these paintings
00:20:09.660 belong and it feels like the end of the story the artist's prediction is gloriously fulfilled
00:20:14.500 and she is canonized run credits but then anna's journals are found they were in the attic of a
00:20:21.960 house that had been donated to the Anthroposophical Society. Hilma had edited her journals and
00:20:28.220 archived her art, marking boxes with a plus and X symbol to indicate they weren't to be opened
00:20:33.140 for 20 years. As Sandra Huber told us in our interview, they were like a gift from her to us,
00:20:39.840 we who are here now in the future, and the gift is incomplete without the works of Anna Cassell.
00:20:45.800 Hilma, Thomasine, and Anna created albums, traveling museums wherein each set of facing
00:20:53.360 pages contain a black and white photograph of a painting alongside a small colored watercolor
00:20:58.240 of the same work, or sometimes small details from the larger work with dates and titles.
00:21:04.520 The title page includes the dimensions and dates of the original works, as well as the
00:21:08.520 attribution by Hilma of Klint.
00:21:11.440 specifications were written by Thomasine Anderson in red pen. Together, the reproductions filled
00:21:17.440 ten landscape-format albums with dark blue bindings. Three more volumes contain reproductions
00:21:23.920 of Anna Cassell's series from 1913. Photographing, copying, pasting, labeling, dating. Soon,
00:21:33.360 the paintings for the temple and Anna Cassell's painted Tale of the Rose were available in miniature.
00:21:38.320 In The Saga of the Rose, the first publication of Cassell's body of work,
00:21:45.300 Kurt Anquist writes one of the first-ever catalogue essays for Cassell, and says,
00:21:51.120 Anna Cassell's special role in the group involved creating The Saga of the Rose,
00:21:55.200 which is described partly as a group prayer book,
00:21:58.440 partly as paintings that depict the past history of the world up to that point.
00:22:03.480 While Hilma F. Klint's contributions were to be prophetic, consisting of future paintings,
00:22:09.120 You have received a commission from us.
00:22:10.880 You have been assigned to create paintings for the prayer book, The Saga of the Rose.
00:22:16.320 Hilma also wrote, a first section of WU is called The Saga of the Rose.
00:22:22.360 That indicates that these paintings might have been done by or in collaboration with Anna Cassell,
00:22:28.060 whose task was to create The Saga of the Rose.
00:22:31.800 The Saga of the Rose has been given to you, Anna, to interpret the two of us,
00:22:36.920 Guston Anderson and Hilma, have taken on the task of first attempting to interpret A and O,
00:22:45.040 and then the two O, finally O and A, but Anna, you have been assigned to investigate the notion
00:22:51.760 that lies in the letter A. In a way, that letter contains the entire summary of our joint work.
00:23:01.240 Anna Cassell and Hilma F. Klint were convinced that they were in contact with the Space Chronicle,
00:23:06.600 the same work theosophists and anthroposophists prefer to call the Akasha Chronicle,
00:23:12.280 said to contain mankind's collective memory as well as future events.
00:23:17.600 Anna Cassell's task was to interpret the past, designated as A in Hilma's notes, 0.93
00:23:22.340 while Hilma would do O, the future, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.
00:23:28.980 Julia Voss has emphasized that the paintings were a joint effort,
00:23:32.060 including those after the Temple series from 1915.
00:23:36.600 The collective work at Munso was to start with an eight-year period of research
00:23:40.900 when they would study the plant kingdom, animals, and minerals.
00:23:44.680 According to the promise, this work would help to strengthen their cohesion.
00:23:49.240 As Hilma F. Klint put it, shared work premises.
00:23:52.360 After that point, our work is not separate from one another's.
00:23:58.260 On 18 January 1914, Hilma F. Klint wrote,
00:24:01.820 The guru has a message for you, Anne.
00:24:04.260 the path is nearly ready for you. Your power will soon grow, and you will become a sturdy
00:24:11.300 pillar like few others. You have been called as one, and I as the other, to erect the entry arch.
00:24:23.660 I want the temple and the prayer book. I want the beginning and the end. I want to walk through
00:24:29.880 both sides of the arch, don't you? Isn't it in the acceptance of the true wild spectrum of
00:24:36.560 experience? All the rainbow and beyond of light and shade and identities and perspectives where
00:24:43.340 that possible future harmony might be found? I want the temple and the saga of the rose.
00:24:51.240 I want the full story that hovers just out of reach. The living text. I want the full story
00:24:58.920 that hovers just out of reach.
00:25:01.220 I want to imagine the complex truths
00:25:03.240 woven into the living text of everything.
00:25:06.940 Quote, a message directed to Cassell in 1900
00:25:10.600 and recorded in a notebook of the five
00:25:12.980 referred to this.
00:25:17.000 You should read the document,
00:25:18.880 not written by human hands,
00:25:21.320 but engraved in the finest material of human life.
00:25:26.560 For you should know this,
00:25:27.940 For those who have eyes to see, there is a living text in everything, a diary of the changing fates of worlds.
00:25:38.060 You are to look at the many lives of individuals and a fraction of this text.
00:25:45.880 The living text is given various names in the friend's notebooks.
00:25:50.600 Sometimes it is referred to as the Akasha Chronicle, after a concept from Theosophy.
00:25:56.260 Other times it is called The Tale of the Rose.
00:26:01.340 Natalie Alder wrote in a piece called
00:26:03.460 Him, F. Clint's Queer Clairvoyance for Paper Magazine,
00:26:06.960 If you are attuned to a certain frequency, 0.83
00:26:09.420 you can receive the kind of queer future F. Clint envisions. 1.00
00:26:13.360 But if you are too mired in the here and now, 0.99
00:26:15.600 as opposed to the there and then,
00:26:17.560 you might not pick up what F. Clint puts down.
00:26:20.200 Not everyone is clairvoyant.
00:26:22.360 If most critics have brushed aside her queerness
00:26:24.900 along with the mystical implications of her work as speculative concerns at best,
00:26:29.780 then perhaps not everyone is spiritually commissioned to receive her messages.
00:26:34.940 For hyperallergic, John Yao comes close to calling her queer
00:26:38.180 when he compares her decision to withhold her work from the public
00:26:40.960 until two decades after her death to Emily Dickinson's own reluctance
00:26:44.700 to publish her poetry in her lifetime.
00:26:47.360 Both have been treated by critics as unsexed recluses
00:26:50.700 in spite of their respectively intense relationships with women.
00:26:55.620 And as with Dickinson, critics have treated F. Clint's vision of the future as hyper-contemporary, and yet impossibly distant, a horizon that we can see, but not reach.
00:27:06.760 It's a familiar kind of future for queer people who aspire towards a liberation that would mean a form of life so radically different, it is almost unimaginable.
00:27:17.400 Over the rainbow somewhere. 1.00
00:27:19.020 Envisioned as stretching from the tiny, intimate darkness
00:27:25.220 of Anna's saga of the rose paintings in prayer book form,
00:27:29.060 a symbol story about the past, the origins,
00:27:32.460 out to Hilma's wide, spiraling temple of the future
00:27:35.540 and all its lilac promise.
00:27:37.820 This is a story about opposites, binaries,
00:27:40.500 and the truth of all the shades and colors in between.
00:27:44.320 Parallel lines meet.
00:27:46.960 Every atom has its own midpoint.
00:27:49.020 but each midpoint is directly connected to the midpoint of the universe,
00:27:54.120 as Hilma wrote in one of her paintings in the Atom series.
00:27:58.140 People identifying along a spectrum of gender roles and energies and performances and selves,
00:28:03.460 people in respectful communication with the spirit of the land,
00:28:06.880 each plant its own spirit as both Anna and Hilma meditated on and painted,
00:28:12.480 letting love and all experience lead to new kinds of life and freedom.
00:28:16.160 All this and more is contained in the great vision of this work.
00:28:20.480 I think that's why some of us cry when we see it.
00:28:23.920 It sings of our collective, longed-for liberation.
00:28:29.480 Julia Voss suggests that Hilma and Anna connected with theosophy as a woman's liberation philosophy. 0.86
00:28:37.760 Theosophy said, sure, you can be priestesses.
00:28:41.180 And they were.
00:28:42.200 anya ventura wrote in freeze magazine october 2018 why does af klint speak to us in the present 0.72
00:28:50.600 perhaps because she represents values female spiritual ecological collectivist 0.99
00:28:57.120 eroded by the rise of industrial modernity
00:29:02.980 values we desperately need to reclaim
00:29:05.240 As hero webs of historians, detectives, and translators work to find and tell us Anna's
00:29:12.080 story and the stories of this work from many more perspectives, they force the telling of
00:29:16.680 missing values and practices. Values and practices for collaboration, for creating work that meets
00:29:23.400 and crafts the future. Practices for liberation. Halina Drischka, German film director and producer
00:29:32.960 of Beyond the Visible, Hilma F. Klint, told The Guardian, 0.97
00:29:36.240 It's easier to make a woman into a crazy witch than change art history to accommodate her. 0.98
00:29:41.320 We see a woman who is spiritual as a witch while we celebrate spiritual male artists as geniuses. 0.89
00:29:47.880 When Drishka first saw Hilma F. Klint's paintings seven years ago,
00:29:52.260 they spoke to me more profoundly than any art I had ever seen.
00:29:56.880 It felt like a personal insult that those paintings had been hidden from me for so long.
00:30:02.960 The story about Hilma isn't simple.
00:30:06.060 With Anna, she saw herself in a masculine role,
00:30:08.600 but the descriptions of their relationship
00:30:10.260 emphasized their identities as ascetic and virgin.
00:30:14.180 The message from the voices they channeled emphasized purity.
00:30:18.920 They painted and collaborated together,
00:30:21.720 but it's not clear the nature of their relationship.
00:30:25.420 But in the journals of Sigrid Lansen,
00:30:27.680 it seems Hilma's desire arrives at a passionate next place.
00:30:31.680 Lanson writes
00:30:33.680 On July 28th
00:30:36.160 I felt a connection in those moments
00:30:37.960 between my beloved Hilma and me
00:30:39.700 that is the answer to the enigma of my life
00:30:42.080 On July 29th
00:30:44.800 I was surrounded by H's arms
00:30:46.500 feeling an endless love
00:30:47.940 so that we could die together
00:30:49.400 On August 2nd 0.60
00:30:52.260 H and I sit next to each other
00:30:53.880 H, serious, embraces me gently
00:30:56.980 On August 28th
00:31:00.060 I never lived so intensely, so truly in bright light with H's soul, as in this time.
00:31:10.300 Voss writes,
00:31:11.400 Was this the first time that the relationship led to kisses and embraces?
00:31:15.240 Or was Lanson just beginning to record the experiences?
00:31:19.000 As an athletics instructor, she would have been used to thinking about and describing the body.
00:31:23.840 Perhaps for this reason, she was chosen to document the shared physical experiences.
00:31:27.880 six years had passed since hilma was warned by her invisible companions not to come to harm
00:31:34.520 through careless touches which sln instigated four years had passed since the same messengers
00:31:42.160 had urged lanson to strive to be the eyelet in order to connect with the hook as kept when the
00:31:49.760 two friends came together in lanson's bed the warnings and euphemisms finally fell away
00:31:54.540 physical love brought them closer to the mystery the kisses and embraces passed into visions of
00:32:01.640 raining flowers and light in her paintings she had already portrayed the man woman and woman
00:32:07.080 man dozens of times as asket and vestal eyelet and hook blue and yellow as saint george or
00:32:13.540 parsifal with the sword and shining armor as girl and boy as early as 1906 this primordial chaos she
00:32:20.540 had painted man and woman emerging from the shell of a snail, the hermaphroditic animal that unites
00:32:26.060 the sexes. The artist called her work the fifth gospel. This is a gospel that wants to offer us
00:32:34.800 missing parts of ourselves. It sees both women and men finding paths and roles and bodies for
00:32:42.320 themselves beyond the narrow terrorizing barbed wire definitions of gender that had been constructed
00:32:48.460 just as whiteness was constructed to enable tyranny. 0.66
00:32:53.280 Hilma was troubled with the tyranny and terror she foresaw.
00:32:57.000 It had its choking roots around her.
00:32:59.160 She had briefly been a member of the Edelweiss Society in her youth.
00:33:02.880 She attended seances with them as she worked on developing her own philosophy and practices.
00:33:08.120 In later decades, she would have been aware that women related to the group had become Nazis.
00:33:13.300 She studied theosophy, whose founder, Helena Blavatsky,
00:33:16.600 wrote of root races and was taken up by fascists on one side and social activists on the other.
00:33:23.320 She was devoted to Rudolf Steiner and to anthroposophy for most of her life,
00:33:27.880 only turning away from the movement after Steiner died, when she felt she had a deeper
00:33:31.860 personal connection with the spirit of the man. Steiner's work and writings impacted millions of
00:33:37.600 people, working toward peace, liberation, and communion with land and spirit, but he said some 1.00
00:33:43.280 stupid racist shit also this to say then as now stupid terrifying racist shit loomed and choked 1.00
00:33:52.800 the air hilma and her twin soul thomasine the sturdy love with whom she found the peace she 1.00
00:33:59.180 had been seeking in the later years of her life felt the cruelty mounting around them as they
00:34:04.500 worked channeled and painted in the years between world wars voss writes the armistice of november
00:34:11.960 11th 1918 officially ended the war but neither hilma nor thomasine believed there would be a
00:34:17.080 lasting peace thomasine recorded a grim prognosis in the first of a series of notebooks written in
00:34:23.320 german a new doctrine will arise with selection at its core everything which is physically weak
00:34:32.600 must be disposed of only those with normal physical abilities and intelligence will be
00:34:38.040 helped forward strength beauty intelligence and spiritual flexibility must prevail on earth
00:34:46.080 animals will be seen as tools and mercilessly discarded when they are no longer useful
00:34:52.560 behind these concepts are dark powers that want to convince people that the goal of a single
00:34:59.080 lonely individual can be achieved
00:35:01.760 in thomasine's vision the dark powers were coming and their progress their vision of a lonely
00:35:10.100 individual succeeding was dependent upon destruction of the weak and of seeing animals as tools
00:35:16.980 spiritual flexibility had to prevail
00:35:21.160 hilma had dark visions too eric f clint said in 1932 she made two watercolors in the shape of maps
00:35:30.640 One of Northern Europe, the other of the Western Mediterranean.
00:35:34.600 They clearly represent the bombings of London
00:35:36.720 and the battles in the Mediterranean during the Second World War,
00:35:39.900 1939 to 1945.
00:35:43.800 She showed me these works many years before the war began.
00:35:49.120 They saw what was coming,
00:35:51.020 and their response was to create a temple,
00:35:53.740 a prayer book, a set of messages for the future.
00:35:57.940 And these were messages about the living spirit
00:36:00.640 in all things. They were messages about the singing sacredness of life itself.
00:36:08.080 Hilma read Magic, White and Black by Franz Hartman. Hartman wrote in the very first sentence,
00:36:14.000 whatever misinterpretation ancient or modern ignorance may have given to the word magic,
00:36:19.100 its only true significance is the highest science or wisdom based upon knowledge and
00:36:24.020 practical experience. Anyone who embraced this wisdom could set in motion the spiritual powers
00:36:29.760 that all people possessed, though few understood.
00:36:33.300 This was the essence of mysticism.
00:36:35.160 Spirit could move matter.
00:36:36.680 It was more powerful than matter
00:36:38.100 because it was the source and cause of all things.
00:36:41.300 The beings who spoke to the five were of the same opinion.
00:36:44.100 In November 1898, Matilda Nilsson received a message
00:36:48.560 through the psychograph explaining the white cross.
00:36:53.360 The symbol stood for the descent of the spirit into matter,
00:36:58.340 the rising of matter.
00:36:59.760 through spirit. Professor Hannah Loric describes Hilma's paintings and the greater meaning of
00:37:06.940 what they call her, quote, thinking of progression and transformation, as follows. They are about the
00:37:14.000 virtual in the sense of making operations of the other thinkable, thus establishing a way of
00:37:21.480 conceiving of nature and the supernatural beyond the dichotomies characteristic of classical thought
00:37:28.060 and action. What makes the operations of the other thinkable?
00:37:35.160 How do we find a way beyond the classical dichotomies?
00:37:40.040 For Hilma and her collaborators, the other becomes thinkable by being honest about who they were,
00:37:45.820 what they longed for, who they loved. Following those movements, even when it hurt and the nature
00:37:52.240 of relationships changed, led them through darkness to be there for each other.
00:37:58.060 Anna and Hilma found the loves that balanced them out,
00:38:01.500 remained collaborators, fought over money, and reconciled.
00:38:05.960 Julia Voss writes,
00:38:09.120 Anna Cassell died in 1937 at the age of 77.
00:38:13.900 Hilma continued to interact with her oldest friend and confidant,
00:38:17.380 her vestal, her accomplice in breaking from the five.
00:38:21.820 Thomasine Anderson died April 14, 1940, and was buried in Malmo.
00:38:26.220 Hilma drew the grave in her notebook
00:38:29.260 once she wrote
00:38:30.900 I will come to you as soon as you call me
00:38:33.480 I will be happy
00:38:34.660 I want when I fall asleep from my right side
00:38:37.980 to touch your left
00:38:38.920 and thus we will walk together
00:38:41.160 toward the summit of the light
00:38:42.500 this is the season
00:38:46.460 where we slip further and further away
00:38:48.660 from the summit of the light
00:38:50.040 and there is something there
00:38:52.980 just beyond what I can see
00:38:54.760 where the darkness becomes the trees
00:38:57.720 this is the time of year when leaves fall one by one
00:39:02.120 and each release is an individual step
00:39:04.300 by an individual stranger in the night
00:39:06.420 and an individual sorrow
00:39:08.900 the sound is both hello and goodbye
00:39:12.160 witches, listeners
00:39:15.940 may the whispers and operations of the other 0.97
00:39:19.840 become thinkable for you
00:39:21.480 may you find the end point of the universe within you
00:39:26.160 may you find a partner whatever that looks like for you who can walk with you each step a hello
00:39:34.440 and a goodbye picture hill by an animal two pillars of the archway dark and light
00:39:41.520 the temple and the prayer book and picture all the people and beings they included in their embrace
00:39:47.620 the snails the moths the whole world of colors and stories voices and ideas
00:39:55.960 orgasms and abstractions calling to us past the edges of our isolation
00:40:02.080 in this season each plant drops its seed hoping to find a new home hoping that life will go on
00:40:11.140 this is all part of the living text and in this way we have our ancestors with us
00:40:18.260 in us as we spiral from our deepest feelings and memories out into the great vibrating orchestra
00:40:25.100 of it all the living text that hilma painted from insists even in the face of fascism misogyny
00:40:33.280 racism ecocide that we can end the loneliness and sense of meaninglessness that drives so many of us
00:40:40.440 mad, we can make a safe and joyful place to land. We can follow the call of love and walk together
00:40:48.580 to the summit of the light. You must be a witch. The Missing Witches podcast is created by Risa 0.99
00:40:58.340 Dickens and Amy Turok with insight and support from the coven. Amy and Risa are the co-authors
00:41:04.760 of Missing Witches, reclaiming true histories of feminist magic and of new moon magic, 13
00:41:11.000 anti-capitalist tools for resistance and re-enchantment. Available now wherever you
00:41:16.580 get your books or audiobooks. Find out more at missingwitches.com.