The East was well used to ruler worship and the deification of living people long before the involvement of the Roman Empire in their government. Greece, particularly, was practiced in the art of ruler worship as it had, for several centuries, a series of rulers of different dynasties in quick succession. It was common practice as a legitimate way of showing gratitude and devotion towards a living benefactor to worship them as a god. The Roman inhabitants of Hellenistic Greece were quite used to being worshipped in this manner by their provincials however, their Roman ideals still rejected anyone who tried to put themselves forward. The urge to worship, to show their gratitude, to Augustus seems to have been the strongest ever shown towards a Roman official. It is understandable however, for he brought with him peace after several centuries of war throughout the Empire.
In Asia, a fellowship of Greek cities existed which were responsible for business such as sending ambassadors to the Roman Republic Senate. However, early in the reign of Augustus, this fellowship was strongly linked with the imperial cult for in 29 B.C. they requested permission from Augustus to build a temple in his honour. Nevertheless, either because he wished to avoid resentment, or because he genuine disliked the un-Roman practice, Augustus was very cautious in accepting these divine honors. When the Roman population of two provinces made the same request, Augustus refused them, telling them instead to worship Rome. This did not stop the spread of the imperial cult however, and soon the worship of Augustus was widely diffused in East. 
On the other hand, the establishment of the imperial cult in the West was pushed more by Augustus than it was by the native people of the provinces. Perhaps Augustus came to see the value of the imperial cult in stimulating loyalty to Rome and himself, for he promoted emperor worship in the western provinces where there had been no previous tradition. To promote his worship and divine right to rule, Augustus and his advisers developed a set of images that were capable of conveying the ideals of the renewed Roman Empire to the Western population. These images often showed his connection to the Roman gods through garlands, wreaths and sacrifices. In 12 B.C the sixty Western tribes of the Celtic gathered at Rhone and elected their first high priests of the imperial cult within their area. Gaius Julius Vercundaris Dubius was elected and eventually rewarded, by Augustus, with Roman citizenship. This was the highest honour a provincial elite could hold. The famous Roman poet Ovid wrote, “under the leadership of Augustus both east and west are Roman soil”.
Of the dozens of texts held sacred by the school of Judaic mysticism known as Kabbalah, perhaps the most important is the Sefer Hazohar, (literally the Book of Splendor. Indeed, students of this collection of several lengthy Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah — most commonly known in the West as the Holy Zohar – often assign it the same stature as Judaism’s two most holy books, the Torah and the Talmud.
Written in an arcane form of Aramaic, the Zohar purports to have been authored by second century rabbi and prominent critic of the Roman government in years following the destruction of the Second Temple, Shimon bar Yochai. Yochai claimed to have received the text from God himself, though most modern day scholars, however, attribute the work to Moses de Leon — a Spanish Kabbalist who lived some eleven hundred years later. Historians do concede, however, that, much like the books of the Bible, the disparate pieces of the Zohar were not all set down at one time. Rather, de Leon merely was the first to recorded several different tracts of the Oral Torah that passed been down from father to son, teacher to student over the course of many generations and that Yochai could have been an initial contributor.
The Kabbalah’s own inborn tradition details its spread. As the Jewish Diaspora spread throughout Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Temple and, later, the crumbling of the Roman Empire, adepts of the “secret chain of mysteries” that is the Kabbalah brought the sacred knowledge with them, but shared it only with a select few. It would have been in this fashion that the original text of the Zohar was secreted out of the Holy Land and into one of Spain’s many Jewish communities.
And there was good reason for Jewish scholars to keep to the Zohar away from public scrutiny. The book maintains that the Torah and, by extension, all of reality exists on two distinct levels: the exoteric and the esoteric. It further posits that there is no one true interpretation of the Old Testament and that every soul is given – and, more importantly, encouraged — to make its own unique reading of scripture.
This statement alone – which happens to share a fair amount of philosophical overlap with the similarly persecuted Gnostics — would have been viewed as heresy by the religions by Spain’s then Judeo-friendly Catholic Church and citizens.
Consider then the anti-Semitism that swelled throughout the country in the years after Leon’s death. In 1492, all Spanish Jews were forcibly expelled; those that chose to convert in order to remain found themselves facing integration the hands of the Inquisition. And so, formal Kabbalic study was largely eradicated from the Iberian Peninsula – but not before the Zohar had managed become a key text of yet another secretive, albeit quasi-secular, sect: the European alchemists.
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It was the Italians of the Renaissance that first referred to the art and architecture of the middle or medieval period as ‘gothic’ and it had little to do with the infamous Goths that sacked Rome in the 4th century. In fact, ‘gothic’ was meant as a derogatory term for the heavy, dark and ornate decoration and symbolism that covered the churches and paintings of the middle ages. Stone roofs, flying buttresses, highly vaulted ceilings and pointed arches marked this change in architectural taste that the Renaissance men felt moved the art of building in the wrong direction after the end of the Romanesque period.
The flying buttress was introduced during the period as a way of providing extra support to high church and castle walls that had in the past buckled under the weight of the stones used in their construction. By attaching pillars of stone to the outside of the building, the Gothic architect was able to transfer the weight of the interior wall by a connecting arch to the pillars and increase the amount of available height and light inside the building. This innovation paved the way for the medieval stained glass window.
Pointed arches were another change from the preceding Romanesque period that had favored the rounded arch. The pointed arch allowed for higher arches that supported more weight and therefore more decorative application. They worked well with the flying buttress and by extending the height and width of a building, adding to its grandeur and the amount of light within its walls.
The ribbed vault also allowed for greater experimentation and artistic expression in Gothic architecture. By connecting three separate arches and having them traverse each other rather than one single arch, the ribbed vault provided better distribution of weight during construction and can be compared with the use of steel in the modern skyscraper: essential and strengthening.
The Cathedral at Notre Dame remains one of the most famous examples of the Gothic style. Within the high and impressive walls of this medieval cathedral, Napoleon was crowned in 1804 showing that centuries after it was built in 1160s, Notre Dame was well regarded for its beauty and permanence among the French landscape. Highlighting all the innovations of the Gothic period from flying buttresses and stained glass windows to pointed arches and ribbed vaults, Notre Dame has both inspired architects and engineers as well as writers and composers.
