Numinous Experience

‘HOLINESS’—‘the holy’—is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion… it contains a quite specific element or ‘moment’, which sets it apart from ‘the Rational’… and which remains inexpressible—an ἄρρητον or ineffabile—in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.

Otto establishes the numinous as an irreducible, non-rational category of religious valuation that defies conceptual expression, founding the very term that later depth psychology would inherit.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis

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for the patient ‘the approach to the numinous is the real therapy’ (1973a, p. 377) and that to assist with this, the therapist ‘must abandon all preconceived notions and, for better or worse, go with him in search of the religious and philosophical ideas’

Sedgwick foregrounds Jung’s pivotal claim that therapeutic action is inseparable from the patient’s encounter with numinous-archetypal experience, making the numinous a clinical imperative rather than a mere phenomenological category.

Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001thesis

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the religious ‘feeling’ properly involves a unique kind of apprehension, sui generis, not to be reduced to ordinary intellectual or rational ‘knowing’… and yet—and this is the paradox of the matter—itself a genuine ‘knowing’, the growing awareness of an object

Otto argues that numinous experience constitutes a paradoxical form of cognition — irreducible to rational knowing yet itself a real apprehension of an object — establishing the epistemological framework that Jung and subsequent depth psychologists would adopt.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis

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Jung (1940/1969) referred to spirituality, he uses the words ‘religion’ and the ‘numinous,’ clarifying the numinous as a ‘dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will … [causing] a peculiar alteration of consciousness’

Dennett transmits Jung’s own definition of the numinous as an autonomous dynamic agency that overtakes the will and transforms consciousness, distinguishing it from institutionalized religion while placing it at the center of spiritual experience.

Dennett, Stella, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025thesis

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Symbolic experiences are often stated by Jung to be numinous—that is, powerful, awesome, enriching, mysterious—but not capable of being described exactly… confrontations with works of art or natural phenomena can promote this type of experience.

Samuels synthesizes the Jungian understanding of the numinous as the qualitative charge of symbolic experience — powerful and mysterious yet radically resistant to exact description — and extends its scope beyond explicitly religious contexts to art and nature.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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some event or some mass hallucination whereby an archetypal content breaks into an individual life. That is always a numinous experience.

Von Franz identifies the numinous experience as the invariable accompaniment of any genuine archetypal invasion of individual consciousness, providing the psychogenetic origin of folklore and religious narrative.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis

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when ‘archetypal’ contents arise spontaneously in dreams, etc., numinous and healing effects emanate from them. These are primordial psychic experiences that very often reopen a patient’s access to religious truths that have been blocked.

Von Franz establishes the clinical equivalence of the numinous and the healing function, arguing that spontaneous archetypal eruption in dreams carries restorative effects precisely through its numinous character.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting

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The feeling of it [Professor Otto writes] may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul… It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy.

Campbell cites Otto’s phenomenological spectrum of numinous affect — from gentle tidal reverence to violent ecstatic eruption — in support of his argument that all authentic mythology and religion refer back to this primary experiential ground.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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both Otto’s ideas and James’s studies influenced the work of Jung, who integrated the concept of the numinous as a critical element in his own psychology and philosophy of religious experience, which emerged during this same alignment.

Tarnas traces the intellectual genealogy of the numinous — from James through Otto to Jung — situating its conceptual crystallization within a specific historical-astrological moment and demonstrating its interdisciplinary foundations.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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Jung provides, which all put the accent on experience rather than belief, ritual or organisation… The emphasis on direct religious experience is not only, as one might expect, a prioritising of the psychological dimension.

Papadopoulos contextualizes Jung’s privileging of direct numinous experience over doctrinal or ritual forms of religion, connecting it to the experiential emphasis of his Reformed Protestant heritage and his broader depth-psychological epistemology.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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that religious moment which would appear to have been in every case the first to be aroused in the human mind, viz. daemonic dread… it necessarily and naturally looks more like the opposite of religion than religion itself.

Otto traces the developmental emergence of numinous experience from its most primitive form — daemonic dread — arguing that the full range of religious feeling unfolds serially from this dark, terrifying origin.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

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IX. A Numinous Experience of John Ruskin . 221 X. The Expression of the Numinous in English 222 XI. The Mysterium Tremendum in Robertson and Watts

Otto’s table of contents reveals the systematic breadth of his phenomenological project, encompassing concrete instantiations of the numinous in individual experience, aesthetic expression, and liturgical tradition.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

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All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud… I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then.

James documents a paradigmatic case of sudden numinous irruption — its involuntary onset, its noetic authority, and its transformation of temporal consciousness — supplying the empirical ground that both Otto and Jung would theorize.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable.

Tarnas presents a first-person phenomenological account of numinous dissolution of ego-boundaries into cosmic unity, illustrating the experiential content that Otto, James, and Jung each theorized from their respective vantage points.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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a special feeling of sacredness, transcendence of time and space, experience of pure being (‘eternity now and infinity here’), and a richness of insights of cosmic relevance. This type of tension-free melted ecstasy can be referred to as ‘oceanic ecstasy.’

Grof maps transpersonal LSD states whose core attributes — sacredness, temporal transcendence, cosmic insight — are phenomenologically continuous with the numinous as defined by Otto, extending the concept into psychedelic research.

Grof, Stanislav, Varieties of Transpersonal Experiences: Observations from LSD Psychotherapy, 1972supporting

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an incredible amount of light and energy was enveloping me and streaming in subtle vibrations through my whole being… I became the entire universe; I was witnessing the spectacle of the macrocosm with countless pulsating and vibrating galaxies and was it at the same time.

Grof’s research subject reports a state of ego-dissolution into cosmic totality that exemplifies the fascinans pole of Otto’s mysterium tremendum, offering transpersonal clinical data for the phenomenology of numinous experience.

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting

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the fact is generally overlooked that Otto transposed a Roman term from the imagistic context of polytheism into a Judeo-Chr[istian context]

Hillman offers a critical historiographical note on Otto’s terminological move, suggesting that the concept of the numinous carries a suppressed polytheistic imagistic heritage that its monotheistic reframing conceals.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983aside

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To be rapt in worship is one thing; to be morally uplifted by the contemplation of a good deed is another; and it is not to their common features, but to those elements of emotional content peculiar to the first that we would

Otto insists on the irreducibility of the numinous to moral elevation or aesthetic pleasure, methodologically demanding attention to the distinctive phenomenological content of religious rapture rather than its generic emotional analogues.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917aside

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