Rudolf Otto

Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience. Gifted with great psychological subtlety, and thoroughly prepared by his twofold training as theologian and historian of religions, he succeeded in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience.

Eliade identifies Otto's methodological innovation — the phenomenological analysis of religious affect rather than theological doctrine — as the point of departure for the modern science of religion.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil. Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefiihl verteuere, Ergriffen fiihlt er tief das Ungeheuere.

The prefatory epigraph to Das Heilige — Goethe's lines on shuddering as humanity's highest faculty — announces Otto's central thesis that dread before the immeasurable is the experiential core of the holy.

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

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Breslau, 1922). See also the English translation, The Idea of the Holy,

Walter F. Otto cites Das Heilige as the theoretical authority for his analysis of Dionysus as a terrifying, double-natured deity whose madness constitutes a form of the numinous.

Otto, Walter F, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965thesis

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

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

Hillman delivers a critical genealogical aside, arguing that Otto's concept of the numinous obscures its Roman polytheistic origins by reinscribing it within a monotheistic framework.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

numinosity, 5, 7, 12, 15, 30n, 31, 39, 43, 59–60, 64, 81

Neumann's index entry for Rudolf Otto, appearing alongside the dense thematic cluster of numinosity, signals his systematic appropriation of Otto's category in the analysis of the Great Mother archetype.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

Otto, Rudolf, 104

Jung's index reference to Otto in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche places Das Heilige in the company of texts informing his account of the psyche's religious and autonomous dimensions.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

OTTO, RUDOLF. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John W. Harvey. London, 1923.

Neumann's formal bibliography citation confirms The Idea of the Holy as a primary theoretical source for his account of mythic consciousness and the evolution of the ego.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →

mass meeting, and numinous experience, 294

Jung's index collocates numinous experience with mass meetings, suggesting his deployment of Otto's category to diagnose the dangerous collective affect mobilised by totalitarian politics.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964aside

Expand passageDig deeper with Sebastian →