Within the depth-psychology corpus, awe occupies a liminal position between the physiological and the transcendent, attracting sustained attention from evolutionary psychologists, neurobiologists, and clinicians alike. Keltner and Haidt’s foundational formulation — that awe lies ‘in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear’ — anchors the most influential treatments, which converge on awe as a self-diminishing, other-enlarging emotion elicited by vastness in nature, art, moral beauty, and collective effervescence. Polyvagal theorists, particularly Dana and Porges, situate awe within the autonomic architecture of immobilization without fear, arguing that the dorsal vagal capacity for stillness, held within ventral vagal safety, is the somatic substrate of awe. A parallel literature treats aesthetic chills — piloerection, shivers, goosebumps — as the primary measurable index of awe’s peak intensity, with Schoeller, Jain, Bannister, and Williams each probing the phenomenological, neurochemical, and personality correlates of this somatic marker. Key tensions include whether chills are a unitary phenomenon or a heterogeneous family of responses (warm, cold, and moving varieties); whether awe is primarily a reward-circuit event mediated by dopaminergic prediction-error signaling or a social-bonding emotion rooted in separation-vocalization neurobiology; and how stable individual differences — especially openness to experience — modulate awe proneness. The prosocial consequences of awe, including the ‘small self’ effect and heightened altruism, add a moral-psychological dimension that distinguishes awe from adjacent states such as elevation, admiration, and the sublime.