people-from-france

"I think the people who claim that Di Mambro was a conman are right. I think that the people who claimed that Di Mambro was convinced about his spiritual message are right too. Di Mambro was just a kind of complex personality, actually a kind of schizophrenic and disturbed personality. The major, the terrible consequence of it, is that it is a total loss of reality and the dream world he elaborated was shared with several people, who more and more entered into his delusions."

"Space is curved, time comes to an end... Our cycle is over, these images tell all. [...] The good-hearted man can live in this precise second... a sublime event: the passage of the cycle of Adamic man towards a new cycle of evolution, programmed on another earth, an earth prepared to receive the stored vibrations enriched by the authentic servants of the Rosy Cross."

"But interestingly, for the members of the group, the real charismatic personality was Jo DiMambro. Now when I look at the video recordings of Jo DiMambro's lectures, it is just disastrous. He wasn't an eloquent speaker. But when I spoke with former members, and I told them that, they were just incredulous. Jo DiMambro, they would say, he was brilliant, he was extraordinary, and so on, because those people invested him with the qualities of a cosmic master."

"We don't know when they might close the trap on us… a few days? A few weeks? We are being followed and spied upon in our every move. All the cars are equipped with tracing and listening devices. All of their most sophisticated techniques are being used on us. While in our house, beware of surveillance cameras, lasers and infra-red. Our file is the hottest on the planet, the most important of the last ten years, if not the century. However that may be, as it turns out, the concentration of hate against us will give us enough energy to leave."

"In 1984 I met him, he was maybe one of the last conscious persons on earth. He moved with the forces, it was that simple. I don't like to use the word 'power'."

"[Di Mambro] could have reached the end of his rope. He could be at the end in terms of health. He could be at the end in financial terms. He could be harassed by people who want money. He could be at the end on the level of the sect— there was a loss of members, loss of support, abandonment by his close relatives."

"Akhnaton, of course, was Di Mambro. Di Mambro was Akhnaton, Moses, Cagliostro, Osiris. He used to say, "You understand, in all my incarnations I always had to fight, because my spiritual development was always so far in advance of the time when I was living.""

"Do you realize that we are the only people on the planet to see these things?"

"There are people who claim that I have taken from you everything. What I have taken I haven't taken for me, since I leave everything behind. But I will leave nothing behind, I will leave ashes, I will leave nothing to the bastards who have betrayed us. The harm they have done to the Rosy Cross, that I cannot forgive. What they have done to me doesn't matter, but the harm they have done to the Rosy Cross I won't forgive. I cannot."

"Joseph courant à perdre haleine à mes côtés, avant qu'un obus nous fracasse, c'est le souvenir le plus fort qu'il me reste de lui. Un garçon qui a peur."

"[Di Mambro] explained to us that one day we'd all be called to a meeting at which a transit would be accomplished. It had to do with a mission, with a departure towards Jupiter.... He said to his listeners that they had to be on call twenty-four hours a day so as not to miss the departure and that once the order was given, we would have to move quickly."

"Di Mambro: People have beaten us to the punch, you know."

"We are rejected by the whole world. First by the people, the people can no longer withstand us. And our Earth, fortunately she rejects us. How would we leave [otherwise]? We also reject this planet. We wait for the day we can leave... life for me is intolerable, intolerable, I can't go on. So think about the dynamic that will get us to go elsewhere."

"DiMambro had created a kind of virtual reality around himself. He only saw people who accepted everything he demanded. He didn't very much like people contradicting him. He was also trying to cultivate relationships with some other occult orders around the world. He was developing a fantasy world, and suddenly people in the core group put that into question --suggesting that actually this world he had created around himself doesn't exist."

"Kind hearts are more than coronets, ⁠ And simple faith than Norman blood."

"“Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.”“And swine is good Saxon,” said the Jester; “but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?”“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”“It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.”“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; “there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.”"

"They have been written of enough to-day, but who has seen them from close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all Europe, that they first provided settled financial systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all other Christians were like wood or like lead.We know that they were a flash. They were not formed or definable at all before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing but genius.We know that they were the spear-head, as it were, of the Gallic spirit: the vanguard of that one of the Gallic expansions which we associate with the opening of the Middle Ages and with the crusades. ... We know all this and write about it; nevertheless, we do not make enough of the Normans in England.Here and there a man who really knows his subject and who disdains the market of the school books, puts as it should be put their conquest of this island and their bringing into our blood whatever is still strongest in it. Many (descended from their leaders) have remarked their magical ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, their hand in Palestine. As for the Normans in Normandy, of their exchequer there, of what Rouen was—all that has never been properly written down at all. Their great adventure here in England has been most written of by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has brought them back out of their graves. The character of what they did has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper hypocritical quarrel about religion.Yet it is in England that the Norman can be studied as he can be studied nowhere else. He did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest. He was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the rest of the French. He was segregated here; he can be studied in isolation; for though so many that crossed the sea on that September night with William, the big leader of them, held no Norman tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing was Norman: the regularity, the suddenness, the achievement, and, when the short fighting was over, the creation of a new society. It was the Norman who began everything over again—the first fresh influence since Rome.The riot of building has not been seized. The island was conquered in 1070. It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes, and a slow manner; their houses were of wood : sometimes they built (but how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone. There was no height, there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence. The Norman Government was established. At once rapidity, energy, the clear object of a united and organised power followed. And see what followed in architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what a little stretch of time—less than the time that separates us to-day from the year of Disraeli's death or the occupation of Egypt.The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down the wooden shed at Bury St. Edmunds, 'unworthy,' they said, 'of a great saint,' and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Alban's; in 1079 Winchester. Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by 1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch, tall Durham. ... And this is but a short and random list of some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood. Hundreds of castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.Were they not indeed a people? ...One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil preceding the Faith: Would that they had been born in a time when they could have known it! But the East was not yet open. The mind of Europe had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round shaft of the pillar—more like a drum than like a column. They could build, as it were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated for six hundred years. They were capable, even in the north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty."

"What was my surprise to see him get out of his carriage, sheathed to the hips in thick boots, and his chest trapped in a suroît that sailors don on stormy days. From his chin hung a long pocket of oilcloth tied with cords to his large felt hat."

"In front of this outfit I no longer keep my seriousness. I burst out laughing."

"This cosmic character of Salvatore Garau's figurative world, this emotionalized universalism links his aesthetics with the tradition of romanticism, especially of romantic landscape painting, in which imposing natural phenomena are interpreted as a metaphor for the cosmos and the metaphysical hierarchy of existence."

"Salvatore Garau, triumph of immediacy, aesthetic enjoyment, power of color, free spontaneity, a call to something gigantic, powerful, improbable, to something absent but substantial; this is what manifests itself in the new, small, enigmatic sheets that Salvatore Garau dedicated to Richard Wagner. The movement of the stripes of color - pulsating, restless, unpredictable, paths of unstoppable energies and tensions - suggest wind and flames, bodies that contort and interpenetrate, full of power and sensual force [...] seductive and disturbing are not however dedicated only to Richard Wagner [...] features that are not secondary to understand his poetics, in which an obsessive monochromatism, made up of shades of red, seems to evoke the spirit of the mythical struggles of the heroes of Wagner."

"In the works of Salvatore Garau, spaces of structures that shake with movements reminiscent of strong winds, earthquakes, or architectural formations, and that, in maintaining clarity and geometric objectivity, relate to the play of emotions in a frenzy that can be disturbing, unconscious, and irrational."

"Peace! Following my long-term service, it became clear to me that peace is to be built in peaceful times, rather than in the times of war."

"Urban spoke with fervour and with all the art of a great orator. The response was immediate and tremendous. Cries of 'Deus le volt!'—'God wills it!'—interrupted the speech. Scarcely had the Pope ended his words before the Bishop of Le Puy rose from his seat and, kneeling before the throne, begged permission to join in the holy expedition. Hundreds crowded up to follow his example. Then the Cardinal Gregory fell on his knees and loudly repeated the Confiteor; and all the vast audience echoed it after him. When the prayer was over Urban rose once more and pronounced the absolution and bade his hearers go home."

"The church shall be catholic, chaste and free: catholic in faith and the communion of saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from all secular power."

"Altars are profaned and broken, Christians tortured, women violated. ... Who will avenge these wrongs? On you, rests this duty, on you. ... That which above all other thoughts should stir you most is the Holy Sepulchre of the Savior and the Holy Places, ravaged and profaned by an impure race. Valiant soldiers, descendants of those who never know defeat, make your way to the Holy Sepulchre and tear the Holy Land from the grasp of this abominable nation."

"...the most telling aspect of the First Crusade was that this mighty wave of military enthusiasm owed nothing whatever to any king or emperor. The Pope had summoned the chivalry of Europe round the banner of the cross and St Peter, to overwhelming effect. No secular ruler could have done as much, and there could be no more eloquent demonstration of the centrality of the reformed papacy in the religious imagination of medieval Europe."

"It was at Clermont where, before a Council of several hundred prelates and thousands of clergy and laymen, he delivered a plea for united Christendom, a holy unity which would liberate the precious Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, a Christendom which would defeat and throw off the shameful yoke of oppression. He spoke well, his theme was magnificent, and the moment was propitious. ... His audience wept and groaned in sympathy and with the vast sorrow and deep anger a mighty enthusiasm was born. ... "Who will avenge these wrongs?" cried the Pope with all the power of a flaming conscience. "On you rests this duty...on you!" "God wills it!" shouted his audience in wild excitement. "God wills it." The First Crusade was born."

"Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi, perhaps, than with Pope Urban."

"I'd rather skate naked than wear fur."

"I don’t know if race made it more difficult, but definitely it made me stronger, knowing that I [had] no excuse [for] making mistakes or being kind of so-so, because maybe I [wouldn’t] be accepted as a white person [would’ve been]. But if [I was] better, they had no choice but to accept it and say, ‘She did so well.’"

"Has anyone ever known a school to organize a field trip to a slaughterhouse? Never. Why? Where does this sense of shame come from that obliges us to keep silent in front of our children about the fate that we impose on animals? Throat-cutting, electrocution, and evisceration—are these scenes that would be obscene in the eyes of innocents? The answer is yes."

"Man is neither carnivorous nor herbivorous. He has neither the teeth of the cud-chewers, nor their four stomachs, nor their intestines. If we consider these organs in man, we must conclude him to be by nature and origin frugivorous, as is the ape."

"Thus men continue to accuse themselves of being unjust, violent, cruel, and treacherous to one another, but they do not accuse themselves of cutting the throats of other animals and of feeding upon their mangled limbs, which, nevertheless, is the single cause of that injustice, of that violence, of that cruelty, and of that treachery. … Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one's fellow without being so towards other existences."

"It is a specious but very false reason to allege that, since man has acquired this taste, he ought to be permitted to indulge it — in the first place because Nature has not given him cooked flesh, and because several ages must have rolled away before fire was used. … Nature, then, could have given man only raw or living flesh, and we know that it is repugnant to him over the whole extent of the earth."

"A tiger is a powerful, graceful animal simply by doing what a tiger does. This practical, real world approach is what we have lost, and what natural movement can restore."

""How would you train a panther to be fit? Not on a treadmill."

"It was all practical stuff. Why? Because that's the way you train soldiers: practical stuff. Soldiers don't freaking need to do a flag, you don't need to do handstands. You need to run and sprint and vault over obstacles. They need to balance on stuff, and they need to climb to crawl to lift and carry, throw and catch. They need to do all these things. They need to fight, to swim."

"We're all zoo humans to some extent, even me."

"Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake. That's how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff-- you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you're screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise."

"You never see your dog running nonstop around and around in a circle for an hour. If he did, you'd think there was something wrong with him. Instead, he'll chase something, roll around, sprint, rest, mix things up. Animal play has a purpose, and it's not hard to surmise that human play should as well."

"You need to have a mind-body-nature connection."

"Adaptability is the holy grail of MovNat. This is what we have done throughout human history. But we have lost touch with the world that created us."

"Do we function in sets of ten in the wilderness? How do we know how long we will have to do something?"

"Le Corre taught us to expend as little energy as possible while completing a challenge. That meant learning how to move efficiently."

"We run as Erwan instructed. Or at least try. We're supposed to run elegantly, like an animal. Keep the muscles relaxed, lean forward, and let gravity pull you ahead. Don't stomp-- take short steps and land lightly on your toes. Don't pump your arms, just let them dangle naturally by your side."

"Everybody says, 'I'm in shape, or I'm out of shape,' " he tells his students..."Everybody's in shape. You've been shaped," he says, curving his back to model the slumpy posture of the average office worker. "That's your shape."

"If you want to become a force of nature, you need to interact with the forces of nature."

"You can never master the context where you physically and mentally operate; you can only learn to master how you will operate through it."

"No jump is good if the landing is bad."