Notre Dame – On the Buried Existential Stood the Opulence
There is a cult of the physical, the gross. Of a world that is on the surface. And, not existential.
Pursuing the truth is existential in its core. If one is content with the surface, but feigns love for divinity by any means, then one is in the entertainment business and has nothing to do with spiritual path.
With truth, there can be and should be no compromise. For, Truth is not an interpretation or an opinion or a spin. It is at the core of this whole existence. When nothing was. It was. When nothing observable will be, by whosoever is the observer, it will still be.
The commitment to that primordial and existential core of this entire existence – and non-existence – is what can only be regarded as the Truth. No time, no opinion, no observer can falsify or challenge it. It was, is and will always be, no matter the observations.
And, that has been the most defining difference between the Eastern and the Western mind. The former could stay with the ambiguity of the unseen and still go for the existential. The latter created make believes. Physical and on the surface was a good enough way to entertain one’s mind into believing that truth, some truth, had been touched.
This difference is at the heart of what Notre Dame was and is.
The pagans had an elaborate but a deep way of approaching the Truth. In the hands of the uninitiated, those ways perhaps got reduced to rituals. But the underlying work at the energy level was done in an attempt to cut through the physical to the existential. The place where a pagan temple stood once and was destroyed to make way for the physical opulence was on the Ley line connecting Glastonbury, Stonehenge, and the Pyramids of Egypt. Regarding the ley lines, GH Piper had said in 1882:
“A line drawn from the Skirrid-fawr mountain northwards to Arthur’s Stone would pass over the camp and southern most point of Hatterall Hill, Oldcastle, Longtown Castle, and Urishay and Snodhill castles.” (source: Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, 1881–82)
William Henry Black had written to British Archaeological Association in September 1870 in an account titled Boundaries and Landmarks –
“Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe”. (source: Pennick, Nigel; Devereux, Paul (1989). Lines on the landscape: leys and other linear enigmas.)
What began as Chartres Cathedral ultimately became Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres.
This sacred place of Druids, who revered the energy of its geometric placement and the powers of the waters beneath, was reduced to a physical spectacle as the terrible and damning force of Christianity unleashed a genocide of gigantic proportions on the spiritual seekers of Europe – the Celtics and their Druids as well as others derided as “pagans”.
In an act of wanton destruction of the living and the breathing, 52 acres of trees (comprising 5000 oak trees) that were cut down in the 12th century to build the roof of the cathedral, where each beam is a single individual tree. In fact, such was the rampant use of trees that the roof was called a “forest”.
The Goddesses of the spiritual seekers of the past and their altars where they consecrated the place were re-purposed in grand albeit spiritually destructive way to make way for an opulent Notre Dame. (Michelin Green Guide Paris By Michelin)
The sacred areas where consecration activities would have gone on – just simply became “altars” to the new Christians. The significance, the work and the energy was set aside as the Cult of the Physical – Christianity – took shape.
Where every part of creation was revered and every component of existence used in the pursuit of spiritual seeking, the newly religious caricatured it all to some kind of a cult. For, where they were standing – a physical only understanding of the existence – everything which did not serve the physical seemed weird and amiss.
A fetish and mindset that they brought to India as well.
You see even the best of researchers of the terrible deeds of genocide and destruction by the Christians of that era and life that existed prior cannot fully comprehend the significance of what was happening. So deep was the fundamental destruction of spiritual infrastructure and environment. The lies constructed to hoist Jesus as the center of the Universe stood on the death of fundamental spiritual Truth. (passage below from “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World”}
One doesn’t know who Jesus really was or how he really lived, but if he was indeed a spiritually attained being, then he has not only been caricatured but used as a weapon to kill the very basis of what possibly could have made him worthy of respect. From that standpoint – if Christianity and Christ had to be established, then Jesus had to be butchered, desecrated and mauled. Christianity was in its very inception, you see, the desecration of the existential. There was no place for spiritual doors or windows. No wonder the broken artifacts of the Druids lie abandoned in the basement of Notre Dame as the world exults and cries about the destruction of the structure that was created from cutting down of a living forest into dead one.
Dead and stuffed heads of those who once lived can only entertain those who have lost all touch with the world the way it is. A roof made from 52 acres of living organisms and a structure of opulence on a destroyed place of consecration can only look phenomenal to those who have no place for seeking.
In that, nothing of existential significance was lost in the fire that engulfed the Notre Dame. What was really important stood already dead. What perished was trivial and insignificant and created to perish with time. And that which will be always there, still resides in the womb of the stone and wooden structures broken down to create the opulence and the majesty, in the basement and the earth beneath.