What is woman?

The central question for the man who probes his inner self is: What is woman? That non-being who, in this world of appearances, seems so radically different from him, yet upon encountering her reveals herself as the sought-after, the mission, the missing piece of the whole he lacks. She is the living paradox: a non-being that completes, an absence that fulfills, the void that engenders totality. While the man seeks her face and form with his eyes, the woman hears the mantra that names her, the invocation that calls her, the poem she inspires. My answer, forged over years of awe, love, and veneration she has kindled in me, is that the essence of the Feminine is distilled in the word "Mystery"—a term that encompasses her anatomy and her destiny. For the woman can never be confined, unless, as happens among non-Aryan peoples, she is enslaved, rigidified, and ultimately stoned, as if she were the cause of a broken dogma. Such is the fate in cultures that, fearing her power, punish her as a scapegoat for their shattered dogmas, as in the cruel tradition of stoning the adulteress. Woman is not an object to be captured, though she may transform into one to seduce and enchant; she is not, even if she ends up martyred. A transformative process, a dance, a poetic revelation unfolding through experience and interpretation cannot be seized; woman is not an unproblematic definition. Unlike man, she expresses what she is through what she holds within: a value and a function. She is the Foundational Cave, the Sacred Womb that consecrates life through secrecy and reserve. All that is foundational in woman is hidden: the matrix from which the unknown emerges, a Secret Initiation to which man, by destiny, is called to descend.

When Nietzsche declares that truth is a woman, he means that truth is revelation, not dogma, not something static to be fixed or absolute. And if woman is Mystery, she may also be that revelation we all await, unveiled before our eyes, dancing naked. When I beheld that dance, that proclaimed nakedness, I knew that woman is for me more than a muse: she is poetry itself, evocative and hallucinatory, visiting me as an invitation to dance. From this, I have concluded that the truest way to approach woman is not through dialogue, nor even through the act of love, but by dancing with her—not any dance, but above all a waltz, where all veneration is expressed in the endless turn, sustained by music and the bond of gazes. Is not the waltz yet another metaphor for the eternal return—that Nietzschean cycle of vital affirmation, where each moment repeats in its eternal fullness—and for the path of A-mor, that initiatory love of Meister Serrano that unites the masculine and feminine in a spiritual resurrection, transcending death through the spiral of desire and loyalty? In this, I see the ménades, those ecstatic daughters of Dionysus, whose frenzied dance in the wild mountains mirrors the woman’s Mystery: a sacred fury that shatters dogma, a loyalty to the divine that pulses with life, guiding man to the eternal instant of their shared spiral. In each turn of the waltz, man and woman repeat the eternal instant, affirming life as Zarathustra does with his joyous "yes" to the world’s cycle. We cannot possess woman, but we can bring her back with us. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, I would say that in my experience of the Beloved—for the Beloved has been for me an unfinished poem in the spiral of my life—she is that presence ever surpassing herself in a process of illumination, akin to the pursuit of truth, which is light and transparency... A Mystery.

Yet this Mystery is neither barren nor deceptive; its manifestation is transparent and nourishing. Woman embodies truth in its most Nietzschean sense: a vital force, radically honest and life-affirming, a truth revealed only when stripped of reason’s illusions. Man, acting in the outward and expansive, seeks the Nakedness of this arcana. His quest is an act of gnosis, unsatisfied with surfaces, demanding to pierce the veil to find the truth hidden at the cave’s depth. And she, in her sovereignty, chooses to reveal herself—not as a conquered object, but as a guide illuminating the descent with her own light. Thus, man is that which must penetrate to recover what is sought, hidden within her.

But this profound Mystery, capable of unleashing immense forces in man, rests upon a singular and dynamic quality: Loyalty. If woman is the incarnation of the Anima in the vision of Meister Serrano—the very Soul of man and his principle of connection to the inner world—then her truest possibility is fidelity, not as a moral constraint, but as an ontological emanation of the Mystery itself. This loyalty, far from rigidifying, is the vital pulse that allows the Mystery to transform eternally without chaotic dispersion, anchoring man’s expansive tendency in a unified truth. Thus, soul and life merge in a single, true pact: love to conquer death. A-mor.