Thursday, August 28, 2025

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Nature is imbued with numen (spirit). Rudolf Otto, the German phenomenologist of religions, qualified the numinous (spiritual) as being mysterium, fascinans et tremendum. In other words: mysterious, awe-inspiring, and filled with terror.

He used the Latin phrase, Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans to describe the dual nature of the experience of the Holy or the Sacred. It encompasses both a terrifying and awe-inspiring aspect (tremendum) and a fascinating/alluring aspect (fascinans). He argued that this profound emotional experience was at the heart of the world religions. I have experienced this in nature which I regard as Sacred. I would like to share with you two such experiences, the first being fascinating and the second terror inspiring.

#1 Awe Inspiring and Alluring
Our stay at Denali National Park in Alaska remained covered with mist and clouds. The guide had promised an unforgettable view of the Denali (The High One) Mountain peak but the weather was beyond his control. Disappointed, and on our way to the airport, the driver took a detour and stopped the bus in a random parking lot. Our tour guide asked us to follow him to the base of a low hill. We ascended, chatting and laughing, until we arrived at the top.

Behold, Mount Denali! . . . 

My feet firm on the ground, I heard the sounds of silence. Snow-covered peaks touched the sky, enthralling, summoning. Below, the tundra valley was ornamented with pastures of varied greens and blues. A menagerie of wildlife, no larger than moving dots, caressed by soft sunlight and a mild breeze, grazed the gentle grassy slopes. Time slowed . . . Surroundings turned luminous . . . I got drunk by the rugged beauty and utter silence. This is how the earth must have looked at its birth.

My breath synchronized with the heaving soil, a living cell in the body of the universe. Each and every microscopic speck in this vast universe matters. I matter. Am I not made from the same stuff as the mountains, the glaciers, the fiords, the rivers, and the trees? They all live in me as much as I live in them. Enveloped by the rapture I heard a voice as if from the distance, “We don’t want to miss our flight.” And I was back into this world.

#2 Terrifying
Until February 2020, my numinous experiences had been awe-inspiring and filled with deep mystery… but never terrifying. I connected terror with nature’s wrath in the form of storms, cyclones, hurricanes, fires, famine, and such. Not until we sailed through the bayous (bai-ooz) and marshlands in Slidell, Louisiana, did I experience Otto’s tremendum.

The sky was overcast on the morning of our tour on the Pearl River. We stepped into the boat ignoring the ominous dark clouds. As soon as we sat on the bench the big raindrops pitter-pattered on the canvas roof. The guide described how the marshland would look if it was a sunny day. Gray days, he claimed discouraged the appearance of pelicans, egrets, blue herons, woodpeckers, otters and racoons; on such a miserable, dark and cold day bayous hid fish, shrimp, poisonous snakes, crocodiles, and black bear.

Heavy fog rose from the murky water. Drizzle turned to rain and thundershowers, drenching the stately bald cypress and tupelo trees where Spanish moss hung from their branches. Shades of green slowly turned gray. The knowledgeable guide pointed to floating moss and duckweed, wiregrass, and water celery, and the water-covered islets.

In the moving boat, sitting or standing still was not possible. Shivering under my raincoat, the landscape that intrigued thirty minutes earlier suddenly terrified me. The atmosphere was dangerous, even deadly. Black bears, snakes, and alligators lurked in my mind. What if the boat toppled over? Which animal would gobble me from the bottom of this muddy swamp? Cold, wet, and terrified, I was in no emotional mood to realize that the experience I was having had an element of the spiritual. That occurred to me later in the hotel.