The feeling of it 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, continuing, as it were, thril-lingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ' profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience. 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. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speech less humility of the creature in the presence of-whom or what ? In the presence of that which is a Myttery inexpressible and above all creatures. It is again evident at once that here too our attempted formulation by means of a concept is once more a merely negative one.
— Rudolf Otto
Otto is describing the full range of the numinous — from tranquil tide to grisly horror — and what strikes me is how honestly he refuses to clean it up. The eruptions and convulsions and intoxicated frenzy are not failures of the religious experience; they are the experience. The creature before the mysterium tremendum does not arrive composed, does not leave improved. It arrives swept, and the being-swept is the point.
What is worth sitting with is the final move: he calls the formulation "merely negative." Not apologetically — he means it structurally. The numinous cannot be captured by what it is because it announces itself precisely as that which exceeds what concepts can hold. Every positive description — *worship*, *ecstasy*, *humility* — is already a contraction of what the encounter does to the soul. This is not mystical hand-waving. It is a precise claim about the limits of rational-theological language, and the limit is constitutive: remove it, and you lose the thing itself.
The soul that has met the numinous in its wild forms knows something that the vocabulary of transcendence, ascent, and the higher self cannot accommodate. Otto's creature is not elevated; it is undone. The shuddering stays on the skin long after the theology tries to organize it into devotion.
Rudolf Otto·The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational·1917