Here the natural vocation of woman and the fantastic mission laid
upon her by man were united in a paradoxical higher intuition, and it
is superfluous to point out that the most irreligious minds of the
Renascence, as well as those of all later eras, have to this day
worshipped this ideal, and never wearied of representing it under new
forms.
But the worship of the Virginal Mother contains another element, an
element of which man in his contact with woman is deeply conscious: the
element of mystery. To a man a young girl, untouched by the faintest
breath of sensuality, has a quality of strangeness and mysteriousness
(this is probably a result of European sentiment), and at all times the
woman who has become a mother has been regarded with a slight feeling of
superstitious awe. In the Virginal Mother these two vaguely reverential
feelings are blended; she is a strange and awe-inspiring being, and man,
divining a mystery, bows down before her.
Otto Weininger was the first to give us a psychology of the cult of the
Madonna, and he did it in a manner which proved his entire comprehension
of this peculiar sentimental disposition.
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