The Alma Drawings

I watched Jeremiah Munce's award-winning documentary The Alma Drawings on my great big TV tonight. It was very intriguing. Alma Rumball's paintings resembled acid paintings done by hippies in the psychedelic era. She was a devout Christian who lived a sheltered life in Huntsville, Ontario. She started creating her powerful paintings when she was in her 50's. The documentary asks the question, was she psychic or psychotic?

French surrealist André Breton once coined the term “psychic automatism” to describe this kind of phenomenon. The more contemporary interpretation would be that Alma suffered from schizophrenia. But even if it's true, this doesn't explain where, exactly, the extraordinary images in her drawings came from.
Why do some pictures appear to contain symbols from Tibetan Buddhist tradition – something of which Alma knew nothing? Why did she fashion a strange work depicting the fall of Atlantis? And what were the dangerous spiritual secrets she sometimes claimed to have been told?
Alma Rumball died in 1980 – and the answers died with her. Was Alma connected in some way to the spiritual world? Or caught in the grip of madness?