The numinous can be decoupled from religion and experienced as alien tranquillity

Evidence

Otto’s word for religious experience is the numinous. But perhaps we can rescue the numinous from the religious. Otto delineates many variants of the numinous; the most familiar to us now would be ‘spasms and convulsions’ leading to ‘the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy’. But far more uncanny in the ultra-agitated, present is that mode of the numinous which ‘come(s) sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.’ Foxx’s instrumental music – on Tiny Colour Movies and on the three Cathedral Oceans CDs, and with Harold Budd on the Transluscence and Drift Music LPs – has been eerily successful in rendering this alien tranquillity. On Transluscence in particular, where Budd’s limpid piano chords hang like dust subtly diffusing in sunlight, you can feel your nervous system slowing to a reptile placidity. This is not an inner but Outer calm; not a discovery of a cheap New Age ‘real’ self, but a positive alienation, in which the cold pastoral freezing into a tableau is experienced as a release from identity. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 359

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Otto’s numinous and re-reads its gentle-tide mode as distinct from the familiar ecstatic frenzy, applied to Foxx’s music.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘inner calm’ to ‘Outer calm’ — calm as positive alienation and release from identity rather than self-discovery — quietly reverses a therapeutic assumption that runs throughout the book.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern culture suppresses the angelic and numinous more than the demonic — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 358; Foxx read Renaissance painting as a Gnostic encounter with light rather than Christian suffering — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 357; Rapture imagery has been secularly reworked as alien evacuation — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 1045 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Total silence can overwhelm the mind as an alien, unbearable presence #exemplifies (0.85) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 222
• Preserving religious feeling requires abandoning religious forms #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 865