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seem to try to escape from the confines of the paper, and two in poster colours
on blue and grey paper.

There is something to be said for each method. Those on dark paper certainly
have force, but not the delicacy required. Watercolour gives an illusive and
liquid quality so I tried a mixture of water colours and poster paint, and a few
with touches of tinted inks, during which many days slipped by most
delightfully.

I think that one of the essentials is joy in the work, and a calm that cannot be
ruffled by the trials of normal life, or by disappointment in the work. So many
sketches must be abandoned, so many fail just at the last touch. The hand
trembles and falters in a stroke, or the whole looses life by laborious
accuracy, so that patience is necessary as well as pleasure in dabbling with
colour.

After many failures, suddenly there comes a day when the brush is part of the
hand, when the spirit flows, and a Deva, albeit a pale likeness of the real
thing, is born. In swift sure strokes on a spotless sheet the mental image takes
shape without any effort at all.

Altogether 29 spirit paintings were produced and were completed in 1937. One third of
them depict spirits from South Africa and many of those are from the Cape. They provide a

glimpse into the non-material invisible Angelic Kingdom and the patterns of earth energies

that exist in parallel with the material visible Human Kingdom. Each deva (Sanskrit: the
shining ones), sylph or god is a concentration of energy that is in constant motion,

expanding and contracting and changing colours, so that a painting is, at best, just a split-
second snapshot-representation and “a pale likeness of the real thing.” The core of each

painting is the energy centre, or chakra, from which the aura or life-force pulsates
outwards, sometimes for hundreds of metres. To fully appreciate the beauty and understand

the content of the paintings one must study Hodson’s book. A selection of the paintings is

shown in Figs. 4.60 – 4.70.

Subsequently, Hodson had the paintings made into 35mm colour slides which he showed in
the many countries where he lectured. Eventually, in 1952, after sufficient funds for

publication had been gathered, they appeared in his book The Kingdom of the Gods, which,