Notes on Mysterium Tremendum: The Analysis of the Numinous and the Element of Fascination

The Numinous and Its Twofold Character: Mysterium Tremendum

We name the object of numinous consciousness as mysterium tremendum, then unpack the two components:
- mysterium (mystery) — an ideogram-like, analogical notion drawn from the natural sphere that denotes something alien and incomprehensible.
- tremendum (awe-full, frightening) — a synthetic attribute added to mysterium that signals an additional, non-empirical quality beyond mere mystery. Tremendum is not necessarily inherent in mysterium but adds a crucial dimension to how the numinous presents itself in religious experience.
The distinction: counting on an analogy-based explanation, tremendum is justified because it captures something not readily reducible to the substantive idea mysterium alone. Mystery and awe do not always align; sometimes awe dominates, sometimes mystery dominates, and in some forms they blur or interchange.
The interplay between mysterium and tremendum shapes the earliest religious consciousness: awe before the wholly other that transcends ordinary understanding, and which can be experienced as overwhelming, captivating, or both.
The reaction to mysterium tremendum can take the form of stupor (blank wonder, astonishment) or tremor (awe-struck recoil). These are not interchangeable but are related modalities of the same fundamental experience: contact with what lies beyond the canny, the familiar, and the natural order.
The wholly other is not necessarily named; it can be conceived as spirit, daemon, deva, or left unnamed. The essential feature is the sense of something radically different from the normal order of things.
Primitive religion exhibits the numinous as a stirring of feelings at the base level, where fear and wonder mark the encounter with the strange. Representations of spirits or souls (animism) are later rationalizations of this primary experience rather than its source; they often undermine the immediacy of the numinous by attempting to corona it with explanations.
The numinous experience does not originate from a simple projection of natural fear into spiritual terms; rather the encounter involves a transition where the natural stimulus (phenomena, astonishments, beings) awakens a non-rational response that becomes the basis of religious knowledge.
Theologica and philosophical attempts to “explain” the numinous by naturalistic terms (mythology, scholasticism) tend to flatten the mystery, reducing it to a system rather than preserving its irreducible quality.
The element of energy appears in non-rational forms of religious thought (e.g., Fichte’s Absolute as a world-stress, Schopenhauer’s Will) but these thinkers err in treating energy as a real attribute of the non-rational instead of as a symbolic indicator or ideogram for what lies beyond representation.
Goethe’s depictions emphasize the energy of the daemonic as a distinctive feature of the numinous: the same energy may appear as overwhelming power, as well as as a consuming, transformative force.
The overall methodological aim is to keep the non-rational content intact and reveal how it relates to rational concepts without reducing the former to the latter.

The Wholly Other and the Analysis of Mysterium Tremendum

The adjective tremendum is not merely analytic; it is a synthetic addition to mysterium, signaling a qualitative shift in the religious object. The two terms are interdependent: mysterium provides the sense of mystery, tremendum provides the felt awe and energy; together they illuminate the core religious reaction.
The “wholly other” (e.g., eanpov, alienum) is central to religious experience: what lies utterly beyond ordinary understanding cannot be grasped by ordinary cognitive categories, yet it arouses a powerful, compelling affect.
The lowest level of religious development begins with the stirrings of numinous feeling rather than concrete spirit-figures; the fear and awe derive from the encounter with the wholly other, not from a rationalized account of spirits.
Marking two moments in the numinous: stupor (dumb wonder) and tremor (shuddering awe). The two moments can merge, such that the line between them is porous; the same experience may be labeled differently depending on context and emphasis.
The distinction between mysterium and tremendum often runs parallel to, but is not identical with, the distinction between mystery and awe. Mystery alone can imply incomprehensibility, but tremendum adds the intensity and energy of the encounter.
The “ghost” fear (fear of ghosts) is a degraded offshoot of the numinous; the authentic daemonic dread is a more powerful and comprehensive experience of the wholly other, which raises questions about reality and our place in the cosmos.
The fear of ghosts is a caricature compared with the daemonic experience; the latter is a force that unsettles, attracts, and provokes a longing to comprehend or possess, often through ritual or transformative practices.
Mysticism intensifies the contrast between the numinous and ordinary experience by pushing the relationship to Being itself and ultimately to nothingness; the numinous becomes a positive force in these contexts, even as its conceptual expression remains negative or paradoxical.

From Mystery to Stupor: The Purely Natural and the Religious Sense

The natural sense of mysterium uses secret or hidden things as analogies to illustrate unknowable realities; religious mysterium, however, is defined as the wholly other beyond nature and ordinary cognition.
The transition from natural fear (daemonic dread) to religious awe is not simply a matter of increasing intensity; it requires a qualitative shift wherein the object of encounter is re-cast as the supramundane and transcendent that stands in contrast to all that exists in nature.
The wholly other is not reducible to imagined spirits or beings; it is a fundamental withdrawal from the normal order of things, creating a space of blank wonder that resists full conceptual capture.
The role of association between the numinous and the natural is crucial: extraordinary phenomena, astonishing events, or even the inanimate world may trigger the numinous when they point beyond ordinary causation or explanation.
The distinction between natural fear and daemonic dread is not merely a matter of degree; it is a matter of kind: the daemonic dread is the emergence of a response that is simultaneously terrifying and captivating, potentially leading to religious growth or mysticism.
The “mysterious” remains an ideogram, not a fully articulated concept; the experience requires living through it, not mastering it through rational analysis alone.
Animism’s supposed spirits are attempts to rationalize religious experience post hoc; genuine religious life requires preserving the non-rational core rather than replacing it with a system that explains away the mystery.

The Element of Energy and the Non-Rational Content

The two figures (Luther with omnipotentia Dei, and mystical energy) illustrate the same underlying phenomenon: a non-rational force driving religious life that cannot be fully captured by rational explanation.
The non-rational element is sometimes described as a burning, consuming energy—especially in voluntaristic mysticism where love is likened to a consuming fire that may scorch the devotee yet is sought after and transcended in visionary forms.
The risk of misapplication: natural attributes (power, majesty, energy) are sometimes wrongly pressed into non-rational reality as if they were literal properties. The danger is turning symbolic expressions of feeling into factual accounts that undergird a scientific worldview of religion.
The daemonic energy is real in the sense of its impact on religious life, even if its “physics” cannot be defined. Goethe’s daemonic energy is a prime example of this emphasis on dynamic force in the numinous.
The criticisms of myth and scholasticism as flatteners: myths idealize, then systematize; scholasticism rationalizes to an extent that reduces the numinous to a coherent theory rather than preserving its radical otherness.

The Element of Fascination: Attraction within the Numinous

The numinous contains not only awe and dread but also a powerful, irresistible attraction: a fascination that coexists with fear, producing a strange harmony of contrast.
The numinous is the source of a Dionysian element—a rapture, transport, and intoxication that accompanies the encounter with the sacred.
Rational schemata that parallel the non-rational content include Love, Mercy, Pity, and Comfort; these provide intelligible forms for aspects of religious experience, but they cannot exhaust or fully define the numinous.
The experience of grace, mercy, and salvation contains non-rational elements that transcend rational description; even when doctrinal statements attempt to capture them, the experiential content remains richer than the concepts used to describe it.
The tension between the ecstatic and the doctrinal is evident in Christian and other religious formations: the same beatific content can be approached through rational exhortation or through direct, overwhelming experience.
The positive content of the fascination is often difficult to express in ordinary language; it is a form of bliss that surpasses conceptual articulation and may even render images and words inadequate.
The concept of “grace” in mysticism signals a highest form of positive content that includes, but goes beyond, ordinary religious feeling. The ecstatic dimension of salvation is not reducible to mere comfort or trust; it contains a transformative force that can be described as overabounding.
The fascination also appears in eschatological hope and in “the life within the Spirit” as a culminating form of religious experience that integrates non-rational content with religious practice.

Practical Expressions and Practices: Magic, Shamanism, and the Vita Religiosa

The growth from daemonic dread to positive religious life proceeds through various mediating practices that aim to master or align with the numinous.
Two broad classes of practice:
- Magical identification: attempts to appropriate the numen through formula, ordination, adjuration, consecration, exorcism, and related acts; these often serve natural ends but are capable of leading to the life within the Spirit when they deepen and purify the experience.
- Shamanistic procedures: possession, indwelling, and self-imbuement with the numen in exaltation and ecstasy; these begin in magic and gradually mature toward higher mystical states.
The vita religiosa begins in these states of numinous possession but evolves toward purification and sublimation, culminating in the higher forms of mysticism where the numinous becomes an enduring, transformative reality rather than a tool or temporary ecstasy.
Across these forms, the non-rational element remains essential: the numinous experience is not merely a set of rational practices but a lived, direct encounter that can confer beatitude beyond what doctrine can describe.

Mysticism and the Beyond: The Transition to the supra-natural

In Mysticism, the numinous object is raised beyond ordinary nature to the supramundane and ultimately to the Beyond (e7TEKEL11a); this process intensifies the non-rational content and demands new forms of perception and worship.
Mystical consciousness moves beyond being the object of worship to becoming a state of being in which the distinction between the subject and object may blur, culminating in experiences that are described as nothingness or void by the mystics, yet are deeply affirmative and life-transforming.
The Beyond (e7TEKE11a) marks a peak where the non-rational side of religion is stressed to its furthest degree, revealing a радical ascent beyond the world’s order and into a higher reality.
The Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) and the western idea of nothingness are related insofar as they are attempts to express the ultimate ineffability of the numinous; both denote a negation that, paradoxically, yields a profound positive experiential content when encountered directly.
The terms supernatural and transcendent, though negative in their literal connotations (against nature or the cosmos), carry positive experiential meaning when linked to the totality of the numinous content; they are designations for a fundamentally unique reality whose character cannot be fully captured conceptually.

Language, Translation, and the Untranslatable: The Ungeheuer

A central linguistic challenge is the German term ungeheuer, which Germans translate as monstrous or enormous but whose primary sense in the context of the numinous is closer to the uncanny, dreadful, and awe-inspiring; Goethe’s usage of ungeheuer captures the spectrum from vastness to the uncanny.
The range of ungeheuer includes: the vast and immeasurable (the huge vault of the sky), the unearthly and the terrifying, and finally the numinous energy that both fascinates and overwhelms. The German term cannot be cleanly reduced to one English word.
Goethe’s lines illustrate the spectrum: “Das Ungeheuere” encompasses awe, dread, and the uncanny; in Faust, ungeheuer becomes a master term for the numinous under all its variations. The line from Faust’s chorus “Much there is that is weird; but nought is weirder than man” signals the depth of the numinous in human experience.
The translator’s dilemma underscores the broader methodological point: to understand the numinous we must experience it, not merely translate it; the word itself is a symbol that points beyond language to a direct, living encounter.
The juxtaposition of the terms mysterium, tremendum, and ungeheuer shows how language tries to bracket an experience that resists precise conceptual capture; the non-rational content remains primary even as linguistic tools attempt to describe, limit, and articulate it.

Illustrative Texts and Testimonies: The Voice of Witnesses

Early Christian voices emphasize that the experience of grace and the second birth is qualitatively different from ordinary happiness; it is described as ineffable, beyond natural expression, and often conveyed through metaphor, poetry, and lyric exaltation.
William James catalogued numerous conversions and experiences of the beatific, noting their intensely non-rational character while also acknowledging their genuine transformative power.
The testimonies of mystics such as St. Catherine of Genoa, Boehme, Edwards, and other Christian mystics illustrate the same pattern: a peak of divine encounter that surpasses language and logic, described through imagery of fire, flame, and overwhelming transport.
The Buddhist experience of Nirvana is likewise described as bliss and ultimate freedom, though its doctrinal framing differs; the key parallel is the sense of a transformative, overwhelming content that cannot be fully captured by conventional concepts.
Across cultures and religious traditions, the same core: a non-rational, yet intensely real, experience of the “overabounding” presence of the numinous, which both incapacitates and intensifies the seeker’s life.

Practical Synthesis: The Dual Nature of the Numinous in Religious History

The numinous exhibits two inseparable aspects: awe (daemonic dread) and attraction (fascination). The coexistence of these two poles is the most striking feature of religious life and its history from primitive religion through mysticism.
The daemonic dread compels reverence, expiation, and propitiation; the fascination invites intimate contact, love, and surrender to the numen. Together they explain why religious life can be at once terrifying and alluring, propulsive and tranquil.
The path from daemonic dread to the life within the Spirit marks the maturation of religious consciousness: a movement from fear and ritual to intimate, transformative contact with the numinous that culminates in deeper mysticism.
The “beyond” and the “nothing” tendencies in mysticism function as the ultimate intensification of the non-rational, sustaining the sense that religious experience is more than a system of beliefs; it is a transformative, existential encounter that cannot be fully captured by rational language.
The overall aim of the analysis is to preserve the non-rational core of the numinous while acknowledging its relationship to rational concepts, to avoid reducing the numinous to a mere object of thought or to a set of beliefs about spirits and beings.

Concluding Reflection: The Intellectual Challenge of the Numinous

The anthropology of religion must respect the non-rational core of the numinous, even if it cannot be fully rationalized. Attempts to render religion entirely within the bounds of reason fail to capture its essential power and mystery.
The unavoidable tension between the rational and non-rational aspects of religion is not a defect but a defining feature: it accounts for both the doctrinal expressions and the lived, ineffable experiences that believers report across traditions.
The experience of the numinous—mysterium tremendium—remains a central, irreducible facet of religion, guiding practices, inspiring poetry, and shaping cultures long after rational explanations have been proposed or debunked.

Note on Key Terms (Glossary for Quick Reference)

mysterium: mystery; the sense of something hidden, alien, and incomprehensible.
tremendum: awe-full, frightening; the energy and force that accompany the encounter with the wholly other.
mysterium tremendum: the combined, core numinous experience of mystery and awe in religious life.
stupor: a blank, astonished wonder in response to the wholly other.
daemonius/daemonic dread: the fear and awe produced by encountering the numinous perceived as a powerful, other-than-nature force.
fascinasion: the attraction, allure, and transport that accompany the numinous; the Dionysian dimension.
the Beyond/e7TEKEL11a: the supra-natural exceedance of the numinous toward a reality beyond being.
sunyata: emptiness; a Buddhist analogue for the ultimate negation that yields a profound experiential content in mysticism.
ungeheuer: German term (untranslatably broad) capturing the uncanny, the horrifying, the vast, and the numinous energy in its varied expressions.
vita religiosa: the religious life; the development of practices and states culminating in higher mysticism.
overabounding: the intensification of experiential content beyond ordinary limits, especially in mystical experiences.