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Quotation by Mircea Eliade:
the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery, the majesty that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power; he finds religious fear before the fascinating in which perfect fullness of being flowers. Otto characterizes all these experiences as numinous.
The numinous presents itself as something "wholly other," ... something basically and totally different. It is like nothing human or cosmic; confronted with it, man senses his profound nothingness, feels that he is only a creature, or, in the words in which Abraham addressed the Lord, " but dust and ashes."
The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from "natural" realities. ... all that goes beyond man's natural experience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience.
Mircea Eliade (more by this author)
Source: The Sacred and the Profane