--- slug: von-franz-numinous-a77f27a9 title: "von Franz on Numinous" author: "Marie-Louise von Franz" work: "Psychotherapy" section: "" year: "1993" tradition: jungian-core themes: - numinous fragment: | The concrete acting out of compelling archetypal contents is the greatest danger accompanying numinous experience. In cases like this one, the demonic aspect of the numinous has triumphed. The chance of finding new meaning and effecting a cure are lost. Possession always also means fanaticism. One has and represents the only truth and feels justified in beating down everything else. Only understanding the psychological meaning can protect us from this danger. Theologians representing a religiously "militant" position regard this as an inappropriate relativization of the truth of their faith. However, this is not the case. When a primal religious experience has taken place, for the one who has had it, it is absolute. However, if at the same time he understands this experience as a personal discovery of meaning, he will admit that God, or the numinosum, might also reveal itself in a thousand other forms, for ultimately it is something unfathomable that only reveals itself through the filter of the human psyche, where it speaks to us in terms of images and mythical forms. lead_in: "" reflection: | Possession does not announce itself as possession. That is what makes von Franz's warning so difficult to hear — the fanatic is not experiencing delusion; he is experiencing the real thing. The numinous landed. The experience was genuine. The question is what happened next, in the moment the soul had to decide what to do with an absolute that had just detonated inside it. The logic underneath that decision is worth tracing. When something that large arrives — a vision, a conversion, a certainty of calling — it arrives as relief. The suffering that preceded it suddenly coheres into meaning, and the soul, exhausted from carrying what had no name, feels the weight lift. The temptation is not to fabricate importance; the temptation is to protect the relief. Absolutism is protective structure. If I hold this truth without remainder, the wound that opened me to it cannot reopen. That is the logic von Franz is diagnosing — not wickedness, but a very human refusal to let the encounter stay porous. What she offers instead is not a diminishment of the experience but a different relationship to it: the numinous as personal discovery of meaning, which is absolute for the one who received it and therefore, by that same logic, not the last word on an unfathomable that could have spoken otherwise. The encounter remains total. Only the enclosure breaks. reflection_v0_3: | The sentence worth pressing on is the one theologians object to — that understanding experience psychologically constitutes a "relativization of the truth." Von Franz's reply is surgical: she distinguishes between the absoluteness of an experience for the one who has it, and the claim that this experience exhausts what the numinous can do or be. These are not the same thing, and conflating them is precisely the mechanism of possession. Jung made a similar move when he insisted that psychological truth and metaphysical truth occupy different registers — neither cancels the other. What von Franz adds is the ethical edge: without that distinction, the one who has been genuinely seized by the sacred becomes the one most capable of violence done in its name. Fanaticism is not the absence of real experience; it may be the sign that a real experience was never metabolized into meaning. The filter of the human psyche is not an obstacle to revelation — it is the only thing that keeps revelation from becoming a weapon. parent_id: vonFranz_Psychotherapy__par0069 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-17 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Franz writes: > The concrete acting out of compelling archetypal contents is the greatest danger accompanying numinous experience. In cases like this one, the demonic aspect of the numinous has triumphed. The chance of finding new meaning and effecting a cure are lost. Possession always also means fanaticism. One has and represents the only truth and feels justified in beating down everything else. Only understanding the psychological meaning can protect us from this danger. Theologians representing a religiously "militant" position regard this as an inappropriate relativization of the truth of their faith. However, this is not the case. When a primal religious experience has taken place, for the one who has had it, it is absolute. However, if at the same time he understands this experience as a personal discovery of meaning, he will admit that God, or the numinosum, might also reveal itself in a thousand other forms, for ultimately it is something unfathomable that only reveals itself through the filter of the human psyche, where it speaks to us in terms of images and mythical forms. — Marie-Louise von Franz Possession does not announce itself as possession. That is what makes von Franz's warning so difficult to hear — the fanatic is not experiencing delusion; he is experiencing the real thing. The numinous landed. The experience was genuine. The question is what happened next, in the moment the soul had to decide what to do with an absolute that had just detonated inside it. The logic underneath that decision is worth tracing. When something that large arrives — a vision, a conversion, a certainty of calling — it arrives as relief. The suffering that preceded it suddenly coheres into meaning, and the soul, exhausted from carrying what had no name, feels the weight lift. The temptation is not to fabricate importance; the temptation is to protect the relief. Absolutism is protective structure. If I hold this truth without remainder, the wound that opened me to it cannot reopen. That is the logic von Franz is diagnosing — not wickedness, but a very human refusal to let the encounter stay porous. What she offers instead is not a diminishment of the experience but a different relationship to it: the numinous as personal discovery of meaning, which is absolute for the one who received it and therefore, by that same logic, not the last word on an unfathomable that could have spoken otherwise. The encounter remains total. Only the enclosure breaks. --- Marie-Louise von Franz · *Psychotherapy* · 1993