Following Rudolf Otto, I shall assume the root of mythology as well as of religion to be an apprehension of the numinous. This mental state [he writes] is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined. There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it. He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reach the point at which "the numinous" in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness. We can cooperate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate. Then we must add: "This X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and opposite to that other. Cannot you now realize for yourself what it is?" In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes "of the spirit" must be awakened.
— Joseph Campbell
Otto's argument, which Campbell inherits and extends, is that the numinous cannot be transmitted — only evoked, awakened, coaxed into life by a kind of circling approach, pointing at resemblances and contrasts until something stirs from within. This is a precise description of what depth work actually does, and worth taking seriously as such. You cannot teach someone what the unconscious is by defining it; you can only arrange conditions under which they recognize it. The method is inherently analogical and inherently indirect.
But notice the closing move: "everything that comes 'of the spirit' must be awakened." There it is — the pneumatic preference embedded in the epistemology. Otto's irreducibility of the numinous is real, and the pedagogical point is genuinely sound, but the frame quietly elevates spirit above whatever the numinous might cost. Awakening sounds clean, ascending, purifying. It does not name the terror Otto elsewhere describes — the tremendum, the creaturely annihilation. The soul's encounter with what is genuinely other is not only awakening; it is also dissolution, humiliation, the ego's recognition of its own porousness. Campbell will spend the rest of the volume tracing mythologies that knew this intimately. The word "awakening" is the part that flatters.
Joseph Campbell·Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II·1962