Ourea, or the numinous presence of Allt-fawr

 

Capel y Gorlan, Cwmorthin

Numinous this, numinous that, all I know is that sometimes we are forced out of our skin. A moment in time that is different, where we are knocked sideways whether we would or not. 

That is what happened to me in Cwmorthin, near Capel y Gorlan (chapel in the sheep fold). It is a stiff walk up into the mouth of Cwmorthin, and then along the cwm to the tumbled down remains of the chapel. A  remote place in a deserted valley where the stillness soaked through the skin along with the damp. A silence so deep that even the grazing of the odd sheep on the far hillside could be felt; and then a sense of presence overwhelming. Something ancient. Something that had taken form both of itself and of the communion offered in the chapel, and, who knows, of older offering long before time was counted. Allt-fawr – its name a tribute to its size – a presence by it sheer wall of endless hill stretching up beyond the cloud, and wrapping the valley in its curve to the exclusion of all else. No wonder the Greeks thought such mountains to be gods, 'ourea', their brooding presence being so tangible. 

I sensed a fluidity over time in the presence. The last imprint on it being the close harmony hymns of the slate miners sung on their one day off. Their one day not under the ground. Miners who had hollowed out that vast hill. A slate mine 1500 feet from the top level down 25 floors of stale caverns to its lowest. 50 miles of tunnels and tramways all inside Allt-fawr, the mountain. A mine as big as the vastness of its name. The scars of the mining now fading as the mountain reclaimed them, wreathing them in rain soaked moss, lichen, bracken and grass. The soft tread of sheep being all that disturbed them now, and the chapel itself fallen to ruin. 

But still the presence persists, tentatively described by a word from a tongue alien to those Welsh hills – god? – and that from one who is no theist; hills that were used to hearing the word "Duw" sung with confidence in their embracing fold. 

The theologian Rudolf Otto was in want of a term to describe what he felt was special about religious experience, so he created 'numinous' from the Latin numen, meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring."  Jung found Otto's term of great value, because he knew how such moments shone in the minds of his patients – they were touch-stones of religious experience; the access points where the safety and supposed sufficiency of the rational ran out and exposure to the spiritual happened. Once exposed the doorway was open to growth by incorporating the spiritual, the numinous, the religious, into the life of his patients, releasing them from their psychological malaise. They were suffering because they were shut off from deeper communion with life, often by their overdeveloped rationality, and their rejection of the mystical, the numinous, the religious.

In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: "It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character" (Jung 1973, 1: 377). If one holds the classical Jungian view that the only genuine cure for neurosis is to grow out of it through pursuing individuation, then treatment based on this model would seem necessarily to include "the approach to the numinous," as Jung states so firmly in this letter.   [ Jung - Martin letter 1946 "On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation" Murray Stein, Ph.D.]

P W Martin was one of the main members of the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group to which Irene Pickard belonged. Her archive included papers by Martin. He was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the group, often travelled to Zürich to see Jung during the 1930s, and maintained contact with him after the war, gaining Jung's support over the establishment of the centre at Oxted.

Spiritual experiences, religious experiences, are not rational. They are something else; divine intoxication; divine madness; opening of the being; being touched; stopping the world: they are a door into another way of relating to the world; to another dimension of being. They have the authenticity of the moment of transport; they need no validation because in that moment they simply are.

Jung was a complete relativist at this point. He did not believe that only one source of the holy could have a healing influence. He did not subscribe to the view, for instance, that only Jesus can give us the salvation we need. Jung believed that the numinous could derive from countless sources, and religious traditions, from mythologies, cosmologies, esoteric systems, and arts and science. Moreover, he believed that the numinous is present, at least potentially, in common experience, and can be felt and made known through meaningful coincidence, synchronicity and an ‘inner’ relationship with the facts of the world. He did not believe that institutions of faith or creedal doctrines could regulate the spiritual experience, but that such experience occurs spontaneously, as we enlarge life with depth and commitment.   [David  Tacey: How to Read Jung: Granta Books, London, 2006]

Nor did Jung think that belief, whether inherited, inculcated or otherwise acquired, was any form of substitute for honestly accepted experience, of openness to the numinous:

When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.    [ Jung in answer to Philp’s question #3: Is the God-archetype All?: H L Philp: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958]