The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE

This law finds exemplification in the history of architecture in the orderly flow of the building impulse from one nation and one country to a different nation and a different country: its new vehicle of manifestation. It also appears in the continuity and increasing complexity of the development of that impulse; each "incarnation" summarizes all those which have gone before and adds some new factor peculiar to itself alone; each is a growth, a life, with periods corresponding to childhood, youth, maturity, and decadence.

For the sake of clearness and brevity, the consideration of only one of several architectural evolutions will be attempted: that which, arising in the north of Africa, spread to southern Europe, thence to the northwest of Europe and to England—the architecture, in short, of what is popularly known as the civilized world. This architecture, anterior to the Christian era, may be broadly divided into three great periods, during which it was successively practiced by three peoples: the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Then intervened the Dark Ages, and a new art arose, the Gothic, which was a flowering out in stone of the spirit of Christianity. This was in turn succeeded by the Renaissance, the impulse of which remains today unexhausted.

The power and wisdom of ancient Egypt was vested in its priesthood, which was composed of individuals exceptionally qualified by birth and training for their high office, tried by the severest ordeals and bound by the most solemn oaths. These men were the architects of ancient Egypt; theirs were the minds which directed the hands that built those time-defying monuments. The rites which the priests practiced centered about what are known as the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries. These consisted of representations, by means of symbol and allegory, of those great truths concerning man’s nature, origin, and destiny, of which the priests—in reality a brotherhood of initiates—were the custodians.