True womanliness reveals itself in the slighter importance of sexual desire, which must, of necessity, vanish before the eternal emotion of a mother's care and concern.

This feminine reserve has not the slightest thing to do with what we call morals. It belongs to nature, which has made man and woman so mutually dependent that each must constantly seek the other's company, and yet each is separated from the other by a rift which stems from the primal depths of all that lives. A man, to the degree that he is definitely male, that is to say, created for the passion of reproduction - in the corporeal or spiritual sense - can forget only too quickly not only the marvelous vision which transports him but the fruit of his love as well. Yet archetypal femininity is such that all beauty, sweetness, and charm must combine their rays into the sun of motherliness that warms and nurtures the most delicate life for all eternity. Mothers and nurses - they are the same here. In sorrow and in pain is revealed the eternal abundance of their existence, of which Goethe once said, "Without being mothers, they must prepare themselves eternally to play the role of nurse."

This archetypal world of the feminine knows nothing of the laws and regulations which govern human society, and no breath of the spirit which streams forth from the goddess of marriage, Hera, has touched it. It is a world which conforms completely to nature. To burst the bonds of marital duty and domestic custom in order to follow the torch of the god over the mountain tops and fill the forests with wild shrieks of exultation - this is the purpose for which Dionysus stirs up the women. They are to become like the feminine spirits of a nature which is distant from man - like the nymphs who have nurtured him and who riot and rage with him.

In the most lovable of his creatures - in woman, to whom the secrets of life are intrusted - there are revealed at the same time not only the splendor and the goodness of Being but also its terror and destruction. In her madness the mother-nurse becomes a bloodthirsty beast of prey and tears into pieces the young life which she loves most dearly.

The dark side, which all of the forms of Dionysus suddenly turn toward us, demonstrates that they do not originate in the superficial play of existence but in its depths. Dionysus, himself, who raises life into the heights of ecstasy, is the suffering god. The raptures which he brings rise from the innermost stirrings of that which lives. But wherever these depths are agitated, there, along with rapture and birth, rise up also horror and ruin.