The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY

For the practice of such rites, designed to impress not the elect, but the multitude, the great temples of Egypt were constructed. Everything about them was calculated to induce a deep seriousness of mind, and to inspire feelings of awe, dread, and even terror, so as to test the candidate’s fortitude of soul to the utmost.

The avenue of approach to an Egyptian temple was flanked on either side, sometimes for a mile or more, with great stone sphinxes—that emblem of man’s dual nature, the god emerging from the beast. The entrance was through a single high doorway between two towering pylons, presenting a vast surface sculptured and painted over with many strange and enigmatic figures and flanked by aspiring obelisks and seated colossi with faces austere and calm. The large court thus entered was surrounded by high walls and colonnades, but was open to the sky. Opposite the first doorway was another, admitting to a somewhat smaller enclosure, a forest of enormous carved and painted columns supporting a roof through the apertures of which sunshine gleamed, or dim light filtered down. Beyond this, in turn, were other courts and apartments culminating in some inmost sacred sanctuary.

Not alone in their temples, but in their tombs and pyramids, and all the sculptured monuments of the Egyptians, there is the same insistence upon the sublimity, mystery, and awfulness of life, which they seem to have felt so profoundly. But more than this, the buildings of Egypt give utterance also to the agony and toil of the thousands of slaves and captives who hewed the stones out of the heart of the rock, dragged them long distances, and placed them one upon another, so that these buildings oppress while they inspire.

In Egyptian architecture is symbolized the condition of the human soul awakened from its long sleep in nature, and become conscious at once of its divine source and of the leaden burden of its fleshly envelope. In the architecture of Greece the note of dread and mystery yields to one of pure joyousness and freedom.