The Persistence of the numinous
On the bluff in Long Beach, facing the Pacific across busy Ocean Boulevard, there’s a well-kept shrine to the Virgin Mary.
A rainbow of flowers blooms at her feet, replenished every day by admirers. Next to the shrine there’s a red-tiled monastery – but it’s Buddhist, not Roman Catholic. For forty years, a group of Carmelite nuns made their home here, devoted to a life of solitude and contemplation, but eventually the boulevard became too busy and too noisy for them to continue. So they sold their convent to the Sagely order of Buddhist monks and retreated to a quieter place. Only one requirement was asked of the monks, that they not remove the shrine of the Virgin Mary. “We are delighted to keep her,” said the monks when the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas bought the convent. “After all, we know Mary as Guanji Bodhisattva.” The name is more familiar to us as Kwan Yin, goddess of mercy and compassion.
The story doesn’t stop there. This particular image of Mary is Maria Stella Maris, or Mary Star of the Sea, patron of all who venture upon the wide waters. The symbol that marks her in this aspect is a shell; thus the statue is backed by a large, open clam shell. But wait a minute, wasn’t there a Greek goddess who rose from the sea on a shell? Of course: Aphrodite, goddess of love. So our shrine recognizes three sacred females, not one: Aphrodite, Kwan Yin and Mary. The plethora of identities for the shrine doesn’t seem to bother the faithful who stop by. And even non-religious passers-by often express their fondness for the site, although they might have trouble explaining why.
I have a feeling Carl Gustav Jung would’ve understood. The Swiss psychologist might have commented that worship of the Great Mother appears to be alive and well in Long Beach today. At any rate, the shrine seems to be a good example of the persistence of the numinous in our secular society. The hallmark of numinosity, as Jung explained it, is that its effect can’t be completely understood by intellect alone. It’s that wholly other moment when we experience something we can’t quite put into words. We end up using terms like “transcendant” or “holy,” though the effect is not limited to the religious experience. Even the agnostic Carl Sagan tried to capture the effects of the numinous in space. At its most intense, numinous experience seems to induce the perception of an archetype from the collective unconscious: in the case of our shrine, the female form of the deity. Such archetypes inspire a kind of mystical awe, even though as rational 21st century citizens of the world we may not acknowledge the experience.
Could a similar response, perhaps as old as humanity, be happening in books and movies whose appeal seems out of proportion to the brilliance of the plot or the beauty of the writing? Is it possible that in the modern world we still need this experience and will take it wherever we find it? In The Writers Journey
Perhaps this might explain the success of books like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game
Shakespeare understood this. That’s why it’s not important that his plots and characters were recognizably borrowed from other sources. His genius was to endow them with a touch of the numinous. Try putting the plot of any of the plays into a paragraph or two and you’ll find the difference between the story and the effect the play has on the audience. Maybe this explains why Prospero’s speech near the end of The Tempest
We might come back to the shrine of the Virgin we began with by noting that when Campbell lists his major “hallmarks” of the Hero figure, he begins with the circumstance of the Hero’s birth: always in obscurity, and often reputed to be the offspring of a deity and a royal virgin. So we stand on the bluffs before this shrine of Mary, Kwan Yin or Aphrodite, and experience the tingle of the ineffable. The symbol inspires in us the intense feeling that we know something that our rational minds insist we don’t know and maybe doesn’t even exist, and we sense that we would be poorer without it.
This is the effect of the numinous.
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at
writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds.
To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
