n impure spirit. Perverted sensualists,
they believed their hearts to be filled with spiritual love. Contrary to
the striving of the greater number of the men, who raised their love
into heaven so as to keep it pure, and made it one with their religious
aspirations, all the figures and symbols of religion were used by these
women as an outlet and a foil to their sexuality. The loving soul
repairing to the nuptial chamber is the transparent veil of desire
half-concealed by religious conceptions. Women have described similar
situations in metaphors which--for sensuous passion--leave nothing to be
desired, even the famous love-potion of Tristan is not wanting.

The material is abundant, and I have repeatedly touched upon it in
previous chapters. At the period of great mystical enthusiasm (the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries) this morbid love of God was a sinister
attendant phenomenon of true mysticism. Whole convents were seized by
epidemics of hysteria, the women writhed in convulsions, flogged each
other, sang hymns day and night and had hallucinations--for all of which
the love of God, or the temptation of the devil, were made responsible.

Among the more notable of these pseudo-mystics are Christine Ebner (the
author of a book entitled, _On the Fullness of Mercy_), and Mary of
Oignies, a passionate worshipper of Christ who mutilated herself in her
ecstasies and who, on her deathbed, still sang: "How beautiful art Thou,
oh, my Lord God!"

A shining exception among the German nuns of that time was Mechthild of
Magdeburg, a woman of rare gifts. She was a genuine mystic, but she,
too, revelled in fervent, sensuous metaphors, and it would be an
interesting task to separate the two elements in her case; but, having
admitted her genuine mysticism in a previous chapter, I will here
restrict myself to a few quotations which show her from her other side.
Her _Dialogue between Love and the Soul_ abounds in passages like the
following: "Tell my beloved that his chamber is prepared, and that I am
sick with love of him." "The closer the embrace, the sweeter the
kisses." "Then He took the soul into His divine arms, and placing His
fatherly hand on her bosom, He gazed into her face and kissed her right
well." Mechthild, too, was ready to die with love.

Everyone of the most celebrated Brides of Christ belonged to the Latin
race; they were hysterics, and as such have long been claimed by the
psychopathist.

The love of Jesus prof