“The Idea of the Holy” by Rudolf Otto – Chapter 15

Chapter 15 of “The Idea of the Holy” by Rudolf Otto is named ‘Its Earliest Manifestations’ Here is our summary.

CHAPTER 15

Its Earliest Manifestation
Pages 121 to 135

The previous discussions reveal the historical origin of religion. From there, many phenomena sprang forth, any of which have a numinous element at their epicenter. [Page 121]

Phenomenon 1. Magic

People have always had a natural magic. [Page 121]

People act a certain way in order to influence an outcome. This is seen from bowlers to rain-makers. But these are not magic in the proper sense. For it to be magic, there must be a supernatural aspect. [Page 122]

Magic is independent of a belief in spirits or souls. The quality of magic is through the daemonic, which is a unique element of feeling, the feeling of uncanniness. [Page 123]

Phenomenon 2. Worship of the Dead

The worship of the dead does not arise out of any theory of animism. Rather, dead people exercise a spell upon the living when they are felt as a thing of horror. We have a feeling of disgust to the decay of a corpse, and we feel startled fright to a dead body. [Page 123]

Culture teaches us to have a dread (or awe) in the presence of a corpse. From that springs the awe of the dead and then the worship of the dead. [Page 124]

Phenomenon 3. Souls and Spirits

The notions of souls and spirits have a simple origin. They stem from the qualitative element of feeling relative to them. Their essence is that they are a spectre. They arouse dread or awe. [Page 124]

Phenomenon 4. Power

We notice power in plants and stones and natural objects. We try to appropriate it by gaining possession of them. We eat the heart or liver of an animal or a man in order to make his power and strength ones own. [Page 125]

Phenomenon 5. Homage to natural objects

Primitive people regarded natural objects such as volcanoes and mountain peaks, moon and sun and clouds, as being alive or animate. That was not as a result of pantheism. Rather, we see in those objects an efficacy. An agency. [Page 125]

However, those objects only become divine when the category of the numinous is applied to them. [Page 126]

Phenomenon 6. Fairy-Tales

Fairy-stories and myths become wonderful when they are infused with the numinous. [Page 126]

Phenomenon 7. Daemons

The phenomenon above are the beginnings of the numinous consciousness. But with the arrival of the daemon, we have a really separate beginning. [Page 126]

In the earliest days, the daemon was shadowy and without an accompanying mythology. Nonetheless the daemons were considered mighty.

The daemons were the intuitions of persons of innate prophetic powers. Each daemon had a Seer. Without a Seer, there was no daemon. [Page 126]

Phenomenon 8. Clean vs. Unclean

The unclean is loathsome. It stirs feelings of disgust. The emotion of disgust exercises special power. Civilization then redirects that disgust to different objects. [Page 127]

There is a close connection between disgust and the feeling of horrible. The feeling of the numinously impure calls up easily, by association, the natural emotion of disgust. [Page 128]

Feelings of disgust can maintain themselves, long after the original numinous awe which they once evoked has died away. Certain social feelings of loathing, such as those of caste: they can be explained in this way. [Page 128]

Phenomenon 9. Parallels

The eight phenomena above may be termed pre-religion. They are made possible, and can only be explained, from a religious basic element. That is, from the feeling of the numinous. [Page 128]

The development of the pre-religious phenomena parallels the development of our other faculties, such as pleasure or pain, love or hate. [Page 129]

Phenomenon 10. The house of Elohim

The feeling of daemons is the purest case of the spontaneous stirring of numinous emotion. It has conspicuous significance for the evolution of religion. That is because our numinous experience does not get diverted to earthly things. Instead, the numinous experience must be explained. [Page 129]

The intensity of the internal emotion exceeds anything from the outside, such as time or place. Eerie shuddering and awe breaks out from depths of our soul, and external impressions cannot explain them. People say “How uncanny!” or “How strange this place is!” In Genesis 28:17, Jacob says “How dreadful is this place! This is the house of Elohim.” [Page 130]

In the first phrase, Jacob is expressing primal numinous awe: How dreadful is this place! It marks out a place as holy or sacred. They become spots of aweful veneration. [Page 131]

Then in the second phrase, Jacob interprets his experience: This is the house of Elohim. The numen become a nomen, or named power. [Page 131]

Such primeval experiences are portrayed in Genesis 28:17 (Jacob at Bethel), and in Exodus 3 (the burning bush). [Page 132]

The Sanskrit word asura is the aweful or dreadful, in the sense in which Jacob used the word, the eerie or uncanny. [Page 133]

Phenomenon 11. Felt Surmise

In ancient times, a numinous experience does not necessarily lead to primitive monotheism. Rather, higher religious experience are the outcome of a past growth of myth. Nonetheless, there is a universal experience. Ancestral peoples already have conceptions that predispose them to accept the alien message of foreign missionaries. [Page 134]

The religious ideals in our mind stem from our experiences. What the mind attests can also, under favourable circumstances, elicit from itself in premonitory stirring and felt surmise. [Page 135]

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