Good night, dear readers.

Tonight's good night is The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood (1907), tempera on paper mounted on canvas, approximately 10.5 feet tall, by Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862–1944).

In 1904, a spirit guide called Amaliel asked Hilma af Klint to build a temple. Two years later, she said yes — and began painting the works that would become Paintings for the Temple, 193 canvases created over nine years, including this one. Her spiritual guides instructed her to make ten paradisaically beautiful paintings giving the world a glimpse of the four stages of life, straught from Source, as a message to humankind. She painted all ten in forty days. Then she locked them away, convinced the world wasn't ready. She was right by about a century.

Stand in front of this painting in person and it overtops you. Af Klint almost certainly painted it lying flat on her studio floor — the scale demanded it. At the center sits a luminous orb, ringed in gold, containing two intertwined forms in yellow and blue. Around it, white lily-like blossoms arc in a loose garland across the upper half. To the upper right, pink rose forms spiral inward on themselves, nested like cells dividing under a lens. And across the lower half, loose orange cursive loops and coils — not quite letters, not quite pure abstraction — moving like the first electrical firing of a nervous system just waking up. The scripted shape the life is supposed to take.

Af Klint left notebooks explaining exactly what she painted. The central orb contains two egg or grain-of-wheat shapes, and the letters inside — "a" and "v" — stand for "ascetic" and "vestal," the male and female spiritual principles. Yellow carries the masculine; blue carries the feminine. The lily represented the feminine principle and the rose the masculine — and in the childhood paintings, individual shapes consistently appear in pairs, reflecting her fascination with duality as something that forms a whole rather than opposing halves.

By 1907, European science had already published detailed microscopic photographs of fertilized egg cells. The imagery of conception — sperm, ovum, the moment of union — was circulating in educated culture. Af Klint, scientifically curious and rigorously self-educated, almost certainly knew it. And so this central orb reads simultaneously as a spiritual symbol, a cosmological diagram, and a microscope slide. She wasn't choosing between science and mysticism. She was insisting, a hundred years before anyone else thought to say so, that they were the same thing.

As someone who has had a near-death experience, I find her story more than credible — I find it familiar. There are states of perception that ordinary waking consciousness cannot reach. People who have touched those states come back with things: images, certainties, structural knowledge they cannot fully account for in rational terms. Af Klint didn't just touch those states — she built a practice around accessing them, and what she brought back looks, to our twenty-first century eyes, like cell biology, like cosmic geometry, like the diagrams scientists wouldn't draw for another fifty years. Like the lessons many of us learn when we cross over.

She was, in the most precise sense, a time traveler. Amaliel sent her somewhere the rest of us couldn't go yet, and she came back and painted what she saw. Then she waited for us to catch up.

We're still catching up.

Rest gently tonight.

— Alisa