A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna
Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all.
He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.

She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he
not know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what
was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience,
claiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own
again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering. By her very
suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her
everlasting prisoner.

And Ursula, Ursula was the same--or the inverse. She too was the awful,
arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest
depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable
overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it
herself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before
a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she
could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of
perfect possession.

It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man
must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex
was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a
woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.

And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken
fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of
one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being,
of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us
of the mixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of
this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the
man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear
and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense
surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two
stars.

In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The
process of singling into individuality resulted into the great
polarisation of sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the
other. But the separation was imperfect even them. And so our
world-cycle passes. There is now to come the new day, when we are
beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure man, the
woman pure woman, they are pe