#the numinous

[madewithonerib]

“Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon—are always blowing our whole structure away.”

#C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

[infjtarot]

The Numinous. Numinous Tarot

When The Numinous card comes up in a reading, it’s an indication that mysterious forces are at play. The Numinous is that feeling you get when staring up at the night sky, realizing in that moment just how vast and beautiful space is. You feel like you might just fall into the gorgeous starry void at any moment, which is exhilarating and a bit frightening. The Numinous is what you feel when you find a special moonlit grove, or an alleyway filled with colorful graffiti, when you gaze out from a high place, when a sunbeam cuts through fog in the early morning. It is the magic and mystery of the world that we connect to in brief but powerful moments throughout our lives. This card may be encouragement to go adventuring, to find yourself in one of these moments. It may suggest a need to sit with yourself and find your connection to the world at large. It can mean that some things are much, much bigger than you and it can feel wonderful to accept that when life gets strange. It may indicate that something you’re currently experiencing or asking about has origins in the mysterious and magical. Look out for the small and beautiful when The Numinous appears. Catch yourself in the between moments and between places, otherwise known as the liminal. Take a trip to the astral realm, if you can. There is a special energy there you’ll find nowhere else. KEY WORDS: Mystery, magic, Beauty (capital B), liminality

[alexandriteapothecary]

My friends love me!

[an-stoirm]

The Numinous Tarot 2nd Printing

Second print run of an intersectional, queer, feminist Tarot deck and guidebook with gender neutral language.

Ahhhh I’m so excited to get another one of these! I love my current deck, but it’s very beaten up since I use it so much... so... I need a backup, pristine copy haha.

So check it out if you love good queer decks!

[jrmilazzo]

The Soul: A Vintage Concept - Notes - e-flux

Oxana Timofeeva reflects on what the concept of “the soul” means in modern secular times.

Why write an essay on the soul today? Who would ever bother to read it? We live in a world of triumphant materialism, where old concepts like this don’t seem to refer to anything in reality, and are just left to gather dust in the archives. “Now comes mundus corpus,” as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it. Bodies move to the foreground—earthly, gendered, racialized, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, dead and undead, struggling, migrating, mutating, decomposing, on the verge of extinction. To be a body means to have a place, to move in space, to transform in time, to interact, to possess weight, and so on. As bodies, we know what is up and what is down, what is left and what is right, but also what is wrong and what is right, what is good and what is bad. We can figure out what is, what is not, and what ought to be. We do not need an immaterial soul to conceive the difference between pleasure and pain, production and destruction, growth and decay. Experiences of embodiment and finite existence in specific environments constitute our horizon of understanding the world and making sense of things.

[numinousnic]

i wanted to send anonymous love but you (wisely) jave anon off 😤 so i'm doing it un-anonymously. the feeling of getting little bunny kisses is what i'm sending specifically. Also! i'm curious to hear your thoughts on the silt verses from a religious studies major pov, if and when you have any.

There’s… just so much to think about when it comes to how The Silt Verses tackles religion: whether approaching it from a broader philosophical or religious studies perspective, or a more specific theological perspective. But what I kept coming back to again and again while listening was Rudolf Otto’s theory of the numinous. Which, as you can probably tell from my URL, is a theory I am very much into and haven’t gotten to lecture anyone about in a while, so this might get long! 

But briefly: the numinous is the non-rational, deeply-felt experience of a metaphysical object that transcends the self. Otto theorized this experience to be the essence of all religious feeling — and by extension, the origin point of all religions — and I certainly think that holds true for how practitioners of the outlawed faiths of The Silt Verses experience their gods.

[Spoilers through Chapter IV of The Silt Verses under the cut]

PART I: Who was Rudolf Otto?

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a German theologian best known for his 1917 book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy), in which he outlines his theory of the numinous. Tracing the history of religious theory can get tedious, so what’s important to know here is that Otto disagreed with the predominant approach to (the then-relatively new field of) religious studies at the time, which still very much followed in the rationalist, largely atheistic footsteps of the Enlightenment when it came to explaining and classifying religions. 

(Important note: while Otto was slightly more charitable toward non-Christian religious traditions than his contemporaries, he was still an evolutionist, and thus believed that (Lutheran Protestant) Christianity was the pinnacle of organized religion, with all other religions ranking below it by degrees. There’s just a lot of racism and Eurocentrism going around in this era of religious theory, and as critical of the Enlightenment’s ideals as he is, Otto is not immune to their influence!)

Otto’s two main objections to the rationalist approach to explaining religion are:

The true essence of any conception of God cannot be fully explained in rational terms — language just isn’t equipped to encompass and express that!

The nature of religious orthodoxy fails to give meaningful attention to any non-rational aspect of religion. Instead, it focuses on what can be given structure through doctrine and dogma so as to best convey moral teachings.

Otto thought that this rationalist approach left religion too “bloodless,” to borrow my professor’s phrasing (which seems very apt for a discussion of the numinous as presented in The Silt Verses!) While he acknowledged that rational structure was important for religions, Otto didn’t consider it the most important aspect of religion. Rather, Otto argued, the essence of religion was experiences that couldn’t be rationalized: what he called the numinous.

PART II: So what is the numinous?

As previously stated, Otto defined the numinous as the non-rational, deeply-felt experience of a metaphysical object that transcends the self. This experience also transcends human comprehension, in some ways. Otto considered the numinous experience to be sui generis — in a class by itself — as it cannot truly be explained or rationalized through language or scientific classification: only experienced for itself. Here, Otto was hearkening back to the principles of Romanticism, which championed subjective human feeling and non-rational experience as a way of gaining knowledge of one’s self, the world, and what might lie beyond the world. To the Romantics, aesthetic experience — particularly of the natural world — was critical to sparking those intense emotions and disclosing that higher knowledge.

So what goes into the numinous? First, there’s the numen (Otto’s titular heilige, or “holy”): the metaphysical, transcendent object that, when encountered by humans, sparks the numinous. Then, there’s a cluster of interlinked emotional states that characterize the experience of the numinous: creature-feeling, the mysterium tremendum (and the associated majestas), and fascinans.

Creature-feeling is a feeling of absolute dependence, of being overwhelmed and made insignificant by something utterly beyond human comprehension. For Otto, the numinous is not an experience of “createdness” — awareness of one’s creation by a divine being — but one of “creaturehood”: awareness of one’s smallness against something far mightier.

The mysterium tremendum encompasses both the idea of mysterium — what is beyond human comprehension, what is unknowable and wholly Other — and the feeling of tremendum: the dread at witnessing something both awesome and awful. The mysterium tremendum is particularly aroused by majestas: the absolute overpoweringness of the numen’s divine urgency and energy.

Finally, fascinans expresses the enthralling effect that the numen has on those who experience it, and the yearning they feel for it. Out of all the facets of the numinous, Otto considers fascinans to be the most vital for religious feeling.

PART III: How is Otto’s theory of the numinous applicable to The Silt Verses?

Honestly: how isn’t it applicable? The Silt Verses is a story about the struggle between legal, but sterile faiths backed by government and corporate interests and outlawed, so-called “false” faiths that nevertheless have lasting, frightening power of their own. In this story, where rationalist and subjective conceptions of religion writ large are pitted against each other, determining the reality and (in)authenticity of religious experience is — often quite literally! — a life-or-death endeavor. 

Obviously, The Silt Verses is also a horror podcast, so its depictions of religious experience lean hard on those aspects of the numinous that are more conducive to producing horror: creature-feeling and tremendum, most notably. Finch is utterly overwhelmed by the hunger of the Hollow as it consumes first his fields, then rabbits and drifters, and finally himself. For all their reverence for the Trawler-Man, Carpenter and Faulkner are nevertheless overcome with equal parts awe and dread when they find the fishing boat turned Saint, to say nothing of their barely-concealed terror upon encountering the Saint of the Waxen Scrivener (even though they consider it “false”). 

But fascinans remains strong — and it makes the horror all the greater.

CARPENTER:

But that moment… alone, in the grey dawn, before a pondful of dead fish, knowing that I was seen, and understanding that all things in this world were connected?

That was the first time in my life I knew what terror really was.

The first time I truly believed in you, my river.

— Chapter I: “Let Me First Speak of Revelations”

Which, for me, also raises some intriguing doubts about the authenticity of those faiths that are legal in the Peninsula. Many, if not all of these faiths, were purposefully created and widely disseminated by the government (the Cloak) or corporations (Sweet Jolly Crunchtooth), for reasons less to do with genuine religious expression and more to do with social and economic control. Though a majority of people may follow these gods, whether they truly believe in them is another matter. Though Hayward is fairly cynical about religion in general, his comment that “country people just take their gods too seriously” would seem to imply that some level of ironic detachment is the norm when worshiping more modern gods. These rationally-constructed faiths leave little, if any, room for the numinous.

In contrast, outlawed gods have old, strong ties to particular environments: either uniquely hallowed grounds, like Penda’s Slake for Charity’s hunter-/hunted-god, or more general areas of influence, like repositories of written knowledge for the Waxen Scrivener. This focus on the power of environments, especially natural ones, to reveal and impart divine knowledge is strongly reminiscent of the Romantic ideology that Otto was inspired by when creating his theory of the numinous. And the sublime emotion experienced by these gods’ worshipers in these places, when confronted by the object of their worship that they’ve sought, or summoned, or even created? 

FAULKNER:

(With quiet awe)

In the moonlight. In the reeds. I… can see it.

(Half-mad with terror and exultation)

CARPENTER, I CAN SEE IT!

TWIN MOUTHS AGAPE! TWIN MOUTHS AGAPE!

— Chapter I: “Let Me First Speak of Revelations”

That’s the numinous at work: an unspeakable experience of the unknowable, yet impending divine Other. It is awesome and awful — and despite its danger, and the sacrifices these outlawed gods demand of those devoted to them, the unique and utter sublimity of this experience is desired all the same.

[practical-magick]

NUMINOUS WEEKLY HOROSCOPES SEPTEMBER 17-23 2018 - the Numinous

Get this week’s astro symbol for your sign with Sandy Sitron’s Numinous Weekly Horoscopes for September 17th to 23rd 2018 …

[ecclecticwitchh]

reading material girl, mystical world by ruby warrington the founder of the numinous !! ✨🌙 fantastic read for any beginner in spirituality !