The central thesis of my book “Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy’”concerns that of “the curse position’’. The curse position is driven by developmental trauma and unconscious phantasies which combine with an uncanny repetition of personal misfortune. Whilst writing the book it became increasingly clear to me that although this position is a powerless place to inhabit, its connection to magical consciousness can be harnessed as a means of agency, connection to the Self, and creativity. In this article, I explore one particularly significant representative of magical consciousness: the numinous. I argue that a greater understanding of the complexity and richness of the numinous can foster a more harmonious relationship with one’s archaic unconscious. In doing so, one has the opportunity to discover broader, and more hopeful vistas beyond the ominous and threatening nature of the curse position, which is ultimately a position of helplessness.
The Ominous
In “Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy” I write that “in the curse position, past events become future omens’”. In this bleak scenario, the experience of present time is replaced by a recurring, shapeshifting, omen of unheimlich foreboding to which one is resigned. The omen exists purely as a reminder of one’s helplessness and an accursed fate which repeatedly sabotages one’s fortunes. Importantly, the cursing object is perceived to reside outside the self, is sometimes experienced as a supernatural entity, or manifests in a fear of someone with supernatural powers who threatens to place a curse upon the individual. This sense of misfortune is tied to the uncanny, and as we will see, the numinous. Although I argue in the book that this positioning of an exogenous aggressor can be a way of defending oneself against unwanted feelings and phantasies connected with the original trauma, here my focus is on Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous and the ways in which his ‘The Idea of the Holy’, written in 1923, can enable those who feel afflicted by the curse position to move beyond a preoccupation with an ominous outsideness which is emotionally debilitating, to an increased sense of perspective and empathy in which the independence of the other is not (necessarily) perceived as a threat.
The Numinous
“The numinous’’ Otto writes, is “felt as objective, and outside the self” (Otto, 1923, p.11). I have italicised the word here to emphasise that although there is a shared sense of ‘outsideness’ between the ominous and the numinous, there is however a clear difference in terms of the very subjective feeling of the ominous, and the objective nature of its counterpart.
In the curse position the individual is fixated upon the omen as a singularly threatening ‘thing’ which has become divorced from its signifying chain as a result of the trauma that has taken place. The missing signifiers of ‘divine oracles’ and ‘epiphanies’(Uždavinys, 2008,p. 66), combined with the subjective fixation of the curse position, deny the individual important connections to the divine (spiritual, religious, and mystical experience) which can offer meaning, perspective and vitality to one’s life. In the curse position, one’s intuitive capacity (inner Oracle if you will) is instead purely mobilised against the self as a persecutory other, rather than as a bearer of helpful counsel (perspective, empathy for self and other, unthreatening outsideness).
Interestingly, it is the formation of the adjective of the ominous which became the semantic stimulus for Otto’s coining of the term.
“Omen has given us ominous, and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word 'numinous'. I shall speak then of a unique 'numinous' category of value and of a definitely 'numinous' state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state 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”.
Otto, 1923, p.7
The ineffable nature of the numinous is an aspect of what Otto calls “the holy”, which is essentially a religious experience which, again, cannot be clearly defined, and in Otto’s writing he is unequivocal in his belief that attempting to do so only becomes a rather crass attempt to domesticate the sacred (Kingsley, 2003, p.9).
Indeed, as Otto postulates, in religious terms the holy has too often become bound up with the myopic rationalism that leads to moral value judgements of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’. The numinous therefore stands for the “non-rational”, affective elements at the heart of religious experience which encapsulate the feeling states of the ineffable and the uncanny, and which evade commonsensical meaning, symbols of consensual reality, and discursive reasoning.
“Its nature is such that it grips or stirs the human mind with this and that determinate affective state”.
Otto, 1923, p.12
Jung also recognises the affective nature of the numinous, as well as the outsideness of the object, but, like Kingsley, also warns of its risk of domestication, or as one might otherwise put it, the objectification of the object.
“The numinosity of the object makes it difficult to handle intellectually, since our affectivity is always involved. One always participates for and against, and "absolute objectivity" is more rarely achieved here than anywhere else. If one has positive religious convictions, i.e., if one believes, then doubt is felt as very disagreeable and also one fears it. For this reason, one prefers not to analyse the object of belief. If one has no religious beliefs, then one does not like to admit the feeling of deficit, but prates loudly about one's liberal-mindedness and pats oneself on the back for the noble frankness of one's agnosticism. From this standpoint, it is hardly possible to admit the numinosity of the religious object, and yet its very numinosity is just as great a hindrance to critical thinking, because the unpleasant possibility might then arise that one's faith in enlightenment or agnosticism would be shaken”.
Jung, 2002, pp. 116-117
As Otto, Jung, and others emphasise, an experience of the numinous is very much based on its affectivity, though these sui-generis affects are by their very nature impossible to convey, and leave the beholder of the numinous awestruck, confused, and even terrified. However, it is important to underscore that again, the ‘feeling’ elements which evade rational understanding cannot be perceived through the prism of “goodness” or “badness”; they simply are as they are, and cannot be critically thought about in moral terms. One should also not forget that the numinous - as determined by Otto - is strictly part of a religious experience of the ineffable. However, this is not to say that a great deal can be learned from the depth and nuance of Otto’s ideas as “The Idea of the Holy” also presents a refreshingly open and anti-authoritarian approach to religion. A harsh conscience driven by an unrelenting and unforgiving morality is often at the heart of psychopathology, and this conscience is experienced as a punishing internal object: in Judeo- Christian terms terms as the ‘wrath of God.’ Yet the ‘wrath’ of the numinous in the numinous is entirely different:
"Wrath' here is the 'ideogram' of a unique emotional moment in religious experience, a moment whose singularly daunting and awe-inspiring character must be gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy, in a word, only those aspects of God which turn towards the world of men.”
Otto, 1923, p.9
The absolute otherness and overpowering nature of the numinous deity is therefore nothing to do with the punishing (ominous) morality of conscience/ superego. We cannot master the numinous wrath of God, any more than we can suddenly become masters of our own unconscious. One may argue that each of these perspectives are only epistemological metaphors, but even if that is all they are, they can help us to accept the limitations of our ego-based experiences.
Otto subdivides the numinous into three categories of religious experience: the mysterious, the tremendum, and the fascinans, all of which can be experienced together or independently.
The mysterium
The mysterium is “wholly other” and falls quite outside the limits of the “canny”, and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment’ (Otto, 1923, p.26), hence here we have a clear indicator of the aforementioned relationship between the numinous and the uncanny and the way in which the potentially healing aspects of numinous mystery can be bound up with the unheimlich affects of traumatic experience. The mysterium also evokes the “stupor” of “astonishment”; an “amazement absolute” (ibid).
The tremendum
The tremendum is a pivotal aspect of the numinous and is associated with an “inward shuddering” as the individual faces the terrific fear of a wrathful deity which “has something spectral in it” (Otto, 1923, p.14). The spectral wrath of the deity evades cannot be symbolized, so it is only artists, musicians, and writers such as Algernon Blackwood, whose genius can offer us a treasured glimpse into the numinous unseen:
“Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had “strayed,” as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.”
Blackwood, 1907, p.113
This ‘ancestral sense of terror’ relates to the daimonic aspect of the archaic unconscious which acts independently of one’s will through these mysterious “dwellers in some outer space” (indicating outsideness again) and whose dreadful affects can threaten the stability of the ego, from fear to panic, or what Otto calls ‘the horror of Pan’.
“Religious dread' (or' awe') would perhaps be a better designation. Its antecedent stage is 'daemonic dread' (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off-shoot, the 'dread of ghosts.' It first begins to stir in the feeling of 'something uncanny,' 'eerie or 'weird'. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history. 'Daemons' and 'gods' alike spring from this root, and all the products of 'mythological apperception' or 'fantasy' are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or magic or folk psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature-primary, unique, underivable from anything else-to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution”.
Otto, 1923, pp. 14-15
Otto was a theologian, and one of his times: on a first reading of this passage, he appears to classify animistic and magical ontologies within a framework of evolutionary progression, rather than within an interdependent tapestry of broader, heterodox spiritual experience associated with the magical and occultural revivals of today. Nonetheless, perhaps what is most important about this passage, is Otto’s fervent emphasis on the daimonic nature of the “uncanny”, “eerie”, and “weird” as the seeds of religious experience, and he therefore treats these strange and unruly affects with great reverence. Here for Otto then, it is Pan, as the god of panic and terror who becomes the atavistic symbol of the daimonic tremendum, the “intrusive familiar” par excellence (Staley, 2011). The daimon is thus a familiar spirit with its own agency, an unruly trickster guide which represents intuition and noesis (intellectual intuition); the daimon is therefore helpful or destructive, depending on one’s relationship to it.
“The Greek words daimon and daimonion express a determining power which comes upon man from outside, like providence or fate, though the ethical decision is left to man. He must know, however, what he is deciding about and what he is doing. Then, if he obeys he is following not just his own opinion, and if he rejects he is destroying not just his own invention”.
Jung, 1979, p. 27
As Jung indicates, as the daimon is part of the unconscious, it exists outside of the subject’s free will and therefore cannot be controlled – as the Faustian myth warns - an idea on which psychoanalysis is predicated. In order to make decisions based on one’s daimonicexperience, one also requires dianoia (discursive reason) to subjectively interpret - to the best of one’s ability – what is communicated noeticallythrough the experience of the uncanny, synchronicity, or precognitive experience (See Uždavinys, 2008). For Otto, daimonic dread is therefore the affective dawn of the numinous: the daimon makes the anagogic journey from the unconscious to the conscious realms, from the material to the supernatural, from daimonic dread to the mysterium tremendum of the numinous. The daimon resides at the very seat of the archaic unconscious and therefore becomes a font of fear, awe and dread, but also of fascination, and mystery.
The fascinans
“The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The 'mystery' is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen”.
(Otto, 1923, p.31)
Thus, we see here in this beautifully poetical passage that the fascinans is a source of attraction that one turns towards, contrasting with the recoil from the tremendum; the daunting dread of Pan combines with the ‘dizzy intoxication’ of Dionysus to complete the mysterium tremendum.
“Both gods are associated with irrational states of mind, Dionysus with drunkenness and Pan with sudden and overwhelming fear. They possess an ‘otherness’ distinct among the gods of ancient Greece”.
Robichaud, 2021, p.19
Despite their qualitative differences, these gods share the ‘irrationality’ and the ‘otherness’ of the numinous; both stubbornly refuse to fall into line with the rest of the Olympian pantheon; they are outsider gods. Through his purported father Hermes, Pan is also connected with the mercurial, and one may say it is also this which gives him his daimonicquality and the shape shifting powers of transformation; from Pan to Dionysus, from dread to fascination, mystery and wonder. This unification of the deities comes to represent a departure from the narrow, fixed position of the subjective preoccupation with the putative curse of the omen towards a greater understanding of the ominous (daemonic dread, daunting) as part of the tremendum and a divine experience of the numinous. An appreciation of the numinous in all its aspects therefore helps us see the woods for the trees; woods and forests of course are often the setting for the numinous encounter, and are therefore to be encouraged, where encounters with what Otto calls “completer experience” can be found:
“It may well be possible, it is even probable, that in the first stage of its development the religious consciousness started with only one of its poles-the 'daunting' aspect of the numen -and so at first took shape only as 'daemonic dread.' But if this did not point to something beyond itself, if it were not but one 'moment' of a completer experience, pressing up gradually into consciousness, then no transition would be possible to the feelings of positive self-surrender to the numen”.
Otto, 1923, p.32
The connection with the numinous then becomes a means of noesis and an opportunity to reunite with those aforementioned aspects of the divine Self (oracular, epiphanic, divinatory, weird). It is clear that one cannot experience weird and wonderful synchronicities or creative epiphanies of fascinans without engaging with the mysterium tremendum. Indeed, it is through engagement with the numinous that enables one not only to gain a greater sense of perspective through its objective nature, but also as a means of encountering mystery.
“Man is so made that all his true delight arises from the contemplation of mystery, and save by his own frantic and invincible folly, mystery is never taken from him; it rises within his soul, a well of joy unending”.
Arthur Machen
REFERENCES
Blackwood, A. (1907). The willows. In Machin, J. (Ed.), British weird: Selected short fiction 1893-1937 (pp. 123-156). London: Handheld Press.
Jung, C. G. (1979). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Princeton. Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (2002). Answer to Job (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Routledge
Kingsley, P., (2003). Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
Otto, R. (1923). The idea of the holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational. Oxford University Press
Robichaud, P. (2021). Pan: The great god's modern return. Reaktion Books.
Staley, M. (2011). The Resurgence of Cosmic Identity. In A. O. Spare, The Book of Pleasure (Self Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. London: Jerusalem Press.
Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic retreats: Pathological organizations in psychotic, neurotic, and borderline patients. Routledge.
Uzdavinys, A., (2008). Philosophy as a Rite of rebirth: From ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism. New York: Prometheus Trust.