was realised in the spiritual love of woman, pleasure
could not appear otherwise than degraded, sinful and diabolical. In this
respect, also, woman submitted without a murmur to the dictates of male
will.

Mary and the devil became more and more the real hostile powers of the
thirteenth century; the classical time of woman-worship was also the
climax of the fear of the devil and witchcraft. The Dominican monks
who, above all other orders, contributed to the spread of the cult of
Mary, proceeded, soon after the establishment of the Inquisition,
against the witches, the enemies of Mary. In the second half of the
thirteenth century the persecution of heresy gradually gave way to the
persecution of witchcraft.

I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position
is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good
and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous
and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the
demoniacally-sexual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic
consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. Many people of the present day
will not be able to understand this feeling, for it pre-supposes a
completely inharmonious emotional life.

The consciousness of the obscene is allied to the conception of the
demoniacal; it accompanies modern synthetic love as its temptation and
its shadow. In personal love sensuality and soul are no longer
independent, contrasted principles; personality, taking the spiritual as
its foundation, includes the sensuous. In this highest stage all
eroticism not hallowed by mutual affection is felt as unpardonable. The
purely sexual principle continues to exist, but whenever it appears in
its impersonal and brutal crudity as an element hostile to personality,
it creates the consciousness of the obscene. The obscene is, therefore,
the purely sexual, not in its naive normality, but as a force inimical
to a value, as a rule to the value of personality. The obscene expresses
scorn and hatred for personal love. It is the seduction of the primitive
which is no longer something _earlier_, but something baser (for every
age must gauge all things by its own standard). The aesthetic
principle--in this connection the sense of the beauty of the human
form--so powerful an element in naive sensuality as well as in every
other form of eroticism, is excluded, because in this particular
condition the beauty of the human body is