HULDINE BEAMISH

b. 1836, Stockholm, Sweden
d. 1892, Stockholm, Sweden

WORKS  |  BIOGRAPHY  |  PUBLICATIONS

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

Huldine Beamish approx. 1878Huldine Beamish (née Mosander) was the daughter of the famous chemist Carl Gustav Mosander (1797-1859). Her mother, Hulda, hosted a salon that was regularly attended by prominent figures from the worlds of art, music, science, and royalty. After an unhappy marriage to an Irish brewer and her return to Sweden, Huldine Beamish became deeply involved in spiritualism in her mid-40s. She soon began to have mediumistic and mystical experiences and visions. In January 1883, Beamish became a founding member of the small spiritualist circle "Cloverleaf" (Klöverbladet) of her friend Bertha Valerius (1824-1895), who had long been receiving messages from disembodied entities as a medium. Both were also active as drawing mediums.

While traveling through Europe from the spring of 1884 to September 1885, Huldine had numerous visions and paranormal experiences. It began with an experience in London when she claimed to have died and been revived Huldine Beamish with the palm branch from Jerusalem, approx. 1889by magnetism. For Huldine Beamish, this was the death of the natural person and the birth of the spiritual person. The climax was a trip to the Holy Land when, on Palm Sunday 1885, the Patriarch of Jerusalem singled her out of the crowd at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and presented her with a palm branch. Back in Sweden, she founded her own association, the Edelweiss Society, based on spiritualism and the belief in reincarnation, with an original Christian ideal in mind. The palm branch from Jerusalem played a central role in the rituals of the Edelweiss Society.

As part of her communication with higher beings and disembodied entities, Huldine Beamish practiced mediumistic drawing from the beginning. Many transcendent messages manifested in this way in a very special universe of symbolic pictorial elements. She passed on mediumistic drawing to other mediums in the Edelweiss Society as a crucial component of spirit communication. Two years after the founding of the Society, Huldine Beamish died on Christmas Day 1892. The mediumistic drawings that were later cultivated in the Edelweiss Society, particularly by Maria Löwstädt (1854-1932), as well as by the drawing mediums of the group "The Five", such as Cornelia Cederberg (1854-1933), Anna Cassel (1860-1937) and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), follow the model of Huldine Beamish's drawings in form, style and the use of specific symbolic elements.

PUBLICATIONS

Faxneld, Per. ”Kvinnligt ledarskap inom svensk spiritism runt år 1900.” In: Simon Sorgenfrei & David Thurfjell (eds.). Kvinnligt religiöstst ledarskap. En vänbok till Gunilla Gunner. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2020: 123-136.

Faxneld, Per. ”Edelweissförbundet: En liten rörelse med stora ambitioner.”In: Kurt Almqvist (red.), Det esoteriska Sverige: Från Swedenborg till Strindberg. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023, 88–101.

Norgren, Amanda. Instruments of God: A study of women’s religious authority and political agency in the Edelweiss Society 1889- 1910. MA Thesis, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholms universitet, 2023.

Nyman, Anna. ”Edelweiss-Förbundet,” Sökaren, 1978, 8: 2-4.

Rhodin, Hans. Edelweissförbundets historia. MA Thesis, Uppsala University, 1985.