You feel dizzy; a hint of vertigo. A part of you would like (will you dare to admit it?) to hug the oak. Another part of you is uneasy. This oak is a very old, very powerful living being. Much older and much more powerful than you. You are new and vulnerable and small and also, to tell the truth, a bit useless – the oak produces oxygen, something precious for the rest of the planet, while… what is it that you do for a living again?
Suddenly the woods seem very vast indeed, and empty of human presence.
You are afraid, a little bit. Why? It is a bright sunny day, and this isn’t exactly an impenetrable fairy-tale forest. There is nothing to be afraid of. You shake your head and decide to move on, and you are so ashamed of this strange, childish moment that you never mention it to anybody. Maybe, in time, you forget about it altogether; or you don’t think about it, which is the same.
This is a small experience of the holy, or the sacred. It is fuelled by a sense of wonder and generates one in turn. You can be the staunchest atheist and still go through an experience like this. It has nothing to do with what you think and everything to do with what you feel. Organized religions come later, as a response to that feeling, like a poem can be a response to falling in love, but organized religions are not the feeling itself.
Otto used the beautiful word numinous to describe the particular sense of wonder you feel when you are in the presence of something sacred. And, in turn, something is ‘sacred’ because it evokes that feeling. In the same way as you call a person your beloved because he makes you feel love, you also say that a place is sacred because it makes you feel the numinous.
Otto was convinced that the ‘numinous’ had to do with the supernatural – namely, with his god. Whether we agree with him or not, does not matter. To us, the feeling is vastly more important than its source. It is our privilege to interpret the feeling as supernatural, or psychological, or in-between, and to change our mind as we change in time. What is definitely real is the feeling itself, and so are its benefits. The numinous is one of the forms our sense of wonder takes.
Numinous. Try saying it aloud, feel the word roll off your tongue. It is one of those words that sound what they mean. The numinous is like that, something that can be evoked and never taught. The word comes from the Latin numen, meaning ‘divine will’ or ‘divine presence’. If you want to ‘help another to an understanding of it’, says Otto, all you can do is bring that friend to a point where ‘the numinous in him perforce begins to stir’.5 The potential for that feeling is always within you, but it must be ‘awakened’ rather than explained. To communicate the numinous, you will have to make people feel it, or remember about it. Reason is not the right tool for the task. It does not take a scholar, it takes a magician.
The numinous is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery both frightening and attractive. You hanker after it and you are afraid of it. That curious thing you saw at dusk when you were nine, that thing that could have been an animal or a plant or something else entirely, that thing you wanted to touch, and at the same time recoil from, and you were never quite able to describe; you dismiss it now, you say it was nothing. But it didn’t feel like nothing back then.
One of the reasons that children have such a sharp sense of wonder is that they haven’t yet mastered language, and they are not under the illusion that language can master everything under the sky. There are a lot of things they can’t express and it is quite natural for them to believe that some things cannot be expressed at all. Both ingredients of the numinous – fear and longing – are much stronger with them. They don’t know who and what they are yet, they don’t have a stable place in the world, and thus their world is a numinous network of fear and longing, always reverberating. An object of wonder.
But the truth is, even when we grow to adulthood we don’t know who and what we are either. We just pretend we do. We don’t know whether the face we show to our best friends and partner(s) is our real face, we don’t know whether we have a real face at all. We know even less about ourselves than we do about the rest of the world, and if we suffer from ‘impostor syndrome’ it is because we are indeed, in many ways, impostors. We don’t know how to go through life. We just wing it.
This thought is so anxiety-provoking that we end up buying wholesale certainties and off-the-peg identities. I am a respectable professional with a wild streak! I am a patriot! I am committed to social justice! I am a writer of books! I am this and I am that, and my truths are better than yours. We need to say this out loud and say it often, we need to scream it when we are drunk and to bang on about it on Twitter, because we know it is not true. All those certainties are not exactly lies, and not even masks – but clothes that we wear. They protect us, they warm us, they can be comfortable, useful and even beautiful; but beneath them, we are naked, and raw. We need to rediscover that rawness.
The same goes for the external world. We dress the world with those same clothes, and the world as well is still raw beneath them. An oak is an alien being, a living entity with its own agenda, which communicates with its environment, which is massively stronger and more resilient than any of us, which has the potential to outlive you, me, and a good number of our reincarnations (if reincarnation turned out to be a reality). When you feel this for a moment, you are peeking behind the veil with which you initially covered the oak. When you feel the strangeness of this, viscerally, rather than just understanding it intellectually, then you feel the oak’s numinous presence. It is a feeling both frightening and alluring, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and it is attractive because it is frightening, and it is frightening because it is attractive. When you look down a wild cliff, and for a moment you think, what would it feel like to jump. This is the numinous.
This is what Christina is faithful to.
*
‘I can’t define it,’ she said, ‘or explain it, but I can expand on it. The mystery is like… a black hole that is full, a plenary void, a night in a bedroom that is completely dark and closed and intimate and feels wonderful and scary all at once. It feels as close as… as a mother’s breast in the dark, and also terrifying, like looking up at the night sky and thinking you could just fall off the Earth and fall into space. For ever.’
I wanted to go deeper. Religions sometimes have a tendency to first hint at things that are impossible to define, and then define exactly what those things are and what they are not; the ‘true’ mysteries and the ‘phoney’ ones. Otto wrote a 230-page book about the numinous, which is not a small number of pages to devote to a topic that in theory can’t be spoken about.
When I mentioned this, Christina laughed again. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Wicca is less about what you believe than what you do. It does have a theology of a sort, to quote an old friend, and that theology is painted in broad brushstrokes, and the broad brushstrokes are broadly drawn, so that the details are not artificially fitted in.’
‘You lost me there,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Ok, let me put it this way: Wiccans believe that human beings have a sense of the sacred. We don’t really have much of a “we believe in”, but we do believe that. We believe that our conscious part is a small part of ourselves. It is an important part, but there is another one, which is a vast terrain we touch upon in dreams, a terrain of untapped creativity, of a body that knows. We also believe that the female principle, which we call the goddess, is hugely neglected. If somebody would really press me, I would say we believe in magic, in the goddess, and in ritual as a tool to connect with those realms.’