Numinosum

Rudolf Otto’s coinage in Das Heilige (1917) names the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, an awe-inspiring power that is at once terrifying and entrancing, encountered as wholly other (Otto 1917). Otto presents the numinous as a primary immediate datum of consciousness — a feeling of objective presence that William James described and that Otto, against the empiricist constraint, names as a faculty of religious divination in the soul itself.

Jung adopts the term and makes it the cornerstone of his definition of religion. “The numinosum — whatever its cause may be — is an experience of the subject independent of his will … [it] is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness” (Jung 1958, par. 6). For Jung the cause of the numinous is psychologically agnostic — the phenomenon is the datum — but the autonomous arrival of the experience is what makes religion empirical rather than confessional.

Eliade extends Otto: “Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience … the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery, the majesty that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power” (Eliade 1957). The numinous is the affective core of every hierophany. Without it, religion collapses into ethics; with it, the soul stands in altered consciousness before what exceeds it.

Relationships

• religion
• religious-function-of-the-psyche
• self
• numinous-image
• eliade-sacred-and-profane

Primary sources

• otto-idea-of-the-holy (Otto 1917)
• jung-psychology-religion-west (Jung 1958)
• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)