numinous

Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

You can't expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn't experienced it himself. Those who haven't only know reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they never will believe you. This is the great division of the world and always has been. When reason and revelation run together, why, then you have something great, a great age.

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names _ Mars of the fields and the war; Vesta the fire; Ceres the grain; Mother Tellus the earth; the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the stormcloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren__ people. They don__ love and hate, they aren__ for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.

The human species _ mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn__ trust anyone who hadn__ had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn__ just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can__ last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share.