Eternal feminine

Common card · No. 306114

The eternal feminine (German: das Ewig-Weibliche), a concept first introduced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at the end of his play Faust (1832), is a transcendental ideality of the feminine or womanly abstracted from the attributes, traits and behaviors of a large number of women and female figures. In Faust, these include historical, fictional, and mythological women, goddesses, and even female personifications of abstract qualities such as wisdom. As an ideal, the eternal feminine has an ethical component, which means that not all women contribute to it. Those who, for example, spread malicious gossip about other women or even just conform slavishly to their society's conventions are by definition non-contributors. If there is no element, however slight, of transcendence, of moral beauty or worth, nothing that "draws us on high" (zieht uns hinan — the last line of Faust), there is no eternal feminine. Since the eternal feminine appears without explanation (though not without preparation...

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