Cg Temple Quotes

I once saw a striking contrast in the use made of material in Florence. I saw first in the Boboli gardens the two wonderful figures of the barbarians-you remember perhaps those antique stone statues. They are made of stone, consist of stone, represent the spirit of stone: you feel that stone has had the word! Then I went to the tombs of the Medici and saw what Michelangelo did to stone; there the stone has been brought to a super-life. It makes gestures which stone never would make; it is hysterical and exaggerated. The difference was amazing. Or go further to a man like Houdon and you see that the stone becomes absolutely acrobatic. There is the same difference between the Norman and Gothic styles. In the Gothic frame of mind stone behaves like a plant, not like a normal stone, while the Norman style is completely suggested by the stone. The stone speaks. Also an antique Egyptian temple is a most marvelous example of what stone can say; the Greek temple already plays tricks with stone, but the Egyptian temple is made of stone. It grows out of stone — the temple of Abu Simbel, for example, is amazing in that respect. Then in those cave temples in India one sees again the thing man brings into stone. He takes it into his hands and makes it jump, fills it with an uncanny sort of life which destroys the peculiar spirit of the stone. And in my opinion it is always to the detriment of art when matter has no say in the game of the artist. The quality of the matter is exceedingly important — it is all-important. For instance, I think it makes a tremendous difference whether one paints with chemical colors or with so-called natural colors. All that fuss medieval painters made about the preparation of their backgrounds or the making and mixing of their colors had a great advantage. No modern artist has ever brought out anything like the colors which those old masters produced. If one studies an old picture, one feels directly that the color speaks, the color has its own life, but with a modern artist it is most questionable whether the color has a life of its own. It is all made by man, made in Germany or anywhere else, and one feels it. So the projection into matter is not only a very important but an indispensable quality of art. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 948-949)

He who breaks the wall of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls.

Whoever is on the level of the personal unconscious has still a sort of luminosity on top from the sun, but down below it is all moonshine: treacherous, poisonous, evil, not to be trusted. And if you expose this thing on a higher level, you are not only exposed but a victim also. That is what Nietzsche does, not realizing at all. He is quite naive about it: to produce that chapter about the Pale Criminal is really a tremendous naivete. And probably you have noticed that it is profoundly disturbing because it is true, but it should not be told in the daylight, but only told in the night under the seal of secrecy. This idea was by no means strange to Nietzsche. In another place he speaks of the secret teaching in the temples, and how the initiants were put through many degrees in their initiation, harder and harder, always more cruel and more difficult, complete abnegation and mortification and God knows what; and then comes the last ceremony where the grand master himself receives the initiant who of course expects something extraordinary. But the grand master says, "Everything is allowed. Before, everything was forbidden but now everything is allowed." And that means complete licentiousness. This is of course a legend, but it has a kernel of truth: namely, it reverses the values of consciousness, exchanges the values of consciousness for their opposite, absolute shadow. Of course, for that to be said on the surface is criminal, but five hundred or a thousand meters down in the depths, it is a truth. But we cannot imagine what kind of truth it is because we don't know how things look at that depth; it is a truth of the darkness. There are really organized mysteries in which the ultimate teaching is of such a nature; therefore the principle of these mysteries — I am now quoting facts, this is not my imagination — is: Gloria dei est celare verbum, meaning, it is the glory of God to conceal the word. That is the motto of the highest degree of Knights Templars, a contradiction of the more Christian ideas in the lower stages. We say the glory of God is to preach the word; our mysteries are called sacramenta, which means the mysteries of the divine word, and to preach the word is our duty. Yet in the highest degree of initiation it is the glory of God to hide the word. And why? Because, bring it up and the people will be dumbfounded — and worse, they will be misled. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 482-483). Princeton University Press.