Femininity

 

Woman manifests beauty as such, so much so that there is no beauty superior to hers, when contingency has not separated her from her prototype; thus one may discern in beauty as such features of femininity, of passive perfection, of virginal purity, of maternal generosity; of goodness and love. [The Play of Masks, p. 45, Note 2]

Beauty has something pacifying and dilating in it, something consoling and liberating, because it communicates a substance of truth, of evidence and of certitude, and it does so in a concrete and existential mode; thus it is like a mirror of our transpersonal and eternally blissful essence. [The Play of Masks, p. 46]Christian theology, by concerning itself with sin and seeing a seductress in Eve in particular and in woman in general, has been led to evaluate the feminine sex with a maximum of pessimism. According to some, it is man alone and not woman who was made in the image of God, whereas the Bible affirms, not only that God created man in His image, but also that "male and female created He them", which has been misinterpreted with much ingenuity.... A first proof -- if proof be needed -- that woman is divine image like man, is that in fact she is a human being like him; she is not vir or anër, but like him she is homo or anthropos; her form is human and consequently divine. Another proof -- but a glance ought to suffice -- resides in the fact that, in relation to man and on the erotic plane, woman assumes an almost divine function -- similar to the one which man assumes in relation to woman -- which would be impossible if she did not incarnate, not the quality of absoluteness, to be sure, but the complementary quality of infinitude; the Infinite being in a certain fashion the shakti of the Absolute.[Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p.135-136].[In Hindu shaktism] ... femininity is what surpasses the formal, the finite, the outward; it is synonymous with indetermination, illimitation, mystery, and thus evokes the "Spirit which giveth life" in relation to the "letter which killeth." That is to say that femininity in the superior sense comprises a liquefying, interiorizing, liberating power: it liberates from sterile hardnesses, from the dispersing outwardness of limiting and compressing forms. On the one hand, one can oppose feminine sentimentality to masculine rationality -- on the whole and without forgetting the relativity of things -- but on the other hand, one also opposes to the reasoning of men the intuition of women; now it is this gift of intuition, in superior women above all, that explains and justifies in large part the mystical promotion of the feminine element; it is consequently in this sense that Haqiqah, esoteric Knowledge, may appear as feminine. [Roots of the Human Condition, p. 40-41]

XIX
If we speak of beauty, this includes beautiful women —
For it is interiorizing to behold them:
To see Pure Beauty in femininity as such,
In a noble and loving way —
As if the soul were already in the meadows of Heaven.