love-death as a necessity of their inmost being,
resemble the great ecstatic whom earthly life can no longer satisfy,
because he is conscious of a force compelling him to enter into a higher
cosmic existence. His inmost experience is the annihilation of the
individual soul in God; he aspires to a direct pouring of the soul into
the divine love. Those who die in love are directly seeking complete
unity with each other, and only indirectly, through this unity, the
divined annihilation in metaphysical being. The love-death is the
erotic, bi-human form of mystic ecstasy, and could not be evolved until
the highest form of love had been developed.

Metaphysical eroticism is a product of the spirit of Europe, for it is
linked to personality whose will is the immortalisation of love.
Orientalism neither comprehends nor appreciates this emotion, for it
lacks the foundation of the culture of personality. The Semite, the
Indian and the Japanese experience only the rapture of the senses; and
gratification, restlessly revolving round itself between enjoyment and
exhaustion, is condemned to eternal sterility. All religio-sexual orgies
of which history tells us are so many attempts of sensuality to possess
itself of a higher intuition--vain attempts, because casual intercourse
and the annihilation of the individual can never produce new values.
According to Hegel the immanent sense of everything that happens in the
world is the destiny of the individual to grow from slavery into
freedom; but is it not rather the meaning of increased culture that man
should realise himself as an individual (which is by no means a
contradiction to the first proposition)? Metaphysical eroticism is the
completion of personality in love. Simultaneously with the birth of
personality originated the deification of woman; the destruction of the
most highly evolved personality, the last painful consequence of its
blessed-unblessed nature, gives birth to the conception of the
love-death. Like antique torch-bearing genii the two metaphysical forms
of love stand at the head and the feet of self-conscious man. Here and
there erotic emotion, transcending all limitations, becomes the pathway
leading to the ultimate secrets of life: deification creates a
supernatural female being as the erotic representative of everything
divine. This is a productive act, erotic, artistic and religious at the
same time. It produces out of its own fulness new forces for the service
of