“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Her relative, David told us now, had informed him that Mrs. Steffans had suffered bouts of deep depression while living in the hill house. After David left we began to wonder if either one of us had ever picked up on such psychic lows, so to speak, either before or after we’d moved into the place. Jane certainly hadn’t done so during her reading for Mrs. Steffans, and that made us speculate about when those depressive states had begun.

I was curious as to how often such a “negative psychology” operated—when, simply because of his or her own hang-ups, an individual [or more than one person] is attracted to a site where strongly negative events had taken place. Surely this happens just as often as it does with positive situations. Later this afternoon Jane said she didn’t think she’d ever tuned into Mrs. Steffans’s depressions in that manner: “If I thought I had, or still was,” she said, “I’d move out.” We’d have to. I have no feeling that I’d been affected, either. Still, we found it strange indeed—unreal, even—to consider that a person so intimately connected with a place we love had killed herself.³

When children draw objects they are successfully, then, turning the shapes of the exterior world into their personal mental experiences—possessing them mentally, so to speak, through physically rendering the forms. (Long pause.) The art of drawing or painting to one extent or another always involves those two processes. An astute understanding of inner energy and outer energy is required, and for great art an intensification and magnification of both elements.

In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. Let no one make God the Father look like a mere human, for example! He must be seen in heroic dimensions, while Christ could be shown in divine and human attributes also. The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. The paintings themselves seemed to make the heavenly horde come alive. If no one had seen Christ, there were pictures of him.

This was an entirely different kind of art than you have now. It was an attempt to objectify inner reality as it was perceived through a certain belief system. Whether the artist disagreed with certain issues or not, the belief system was there as an invisible framework. That intense focus that united belief systems, that tension between a sensed subjective world and the physical one, and the rarity of images to be found elsewhere, brought art into that great flowering.

(10:05.) Give us a moment…. Man always does best, or his best, when he sees himself in heroic terms. While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system (pause), for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. (Pause.) Man the sinner took over from man the child of God. As a result, one you see in art particularly, man became a heroic figure, then a natural one. (Pause.) The curiosity that had been directed toward divinity became directed toward nature. Man’s sense of inquiry led him, then, to begin to paint more natural portraits and images. He turned to landscapes also. This was an inevitable process. As it occurred, however, [man] began to make great distinctions between the world of the imagination and the world of nature, until finally he became convinced that the physical world was real and the imaginative world was not. So his paintings became more and more realistic.

Woodcuts and wood blocks were used for a variety of purposes by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, for example, and even by the Romans. Many of the early prints created in Europe illustrate religious subjects. One of the first dated European woodcuts, showing a religious figure, appeared in 1423; a book bearing woodcut illustrations was produced circa 1460; the first Roman book containing woodcuts was made in 1467. Bibles were illustrated with woodcuts in the late 15th century. The earliest known engravings, printed on paper, date from around 1450; pictorial engraving and etching were evidently developed in Germany in the early 1500s. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) experimented with his own method of copper engraving. But all of these efforts were beginnings: There couldn’t have been any mass circulation of printed material in those days.