Episode 34: Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol
Last time we were continuing our exploration of sacredness. I talked about that, in contrast to but also in concert with Geertz’s notion of sacredness as ‘homing us against horror’, we have the proposal from Otto that sacredness puts us into contact with the numinous, which basically exposes us to what is horrifying (at least, the limits of us), because it has an aspect of awe, with a little bit more, which is to remind us. Humiliation, in the original sense of the word: to keep us humble, to give us humility, to remember that as we are feeling that sense of expansiveness with awe that we are precisely ultimately limited creatures.
So I propose to you that these two opponent aspects of sacredness can be seen very readily within the light of the machinery of relevance realization, where the worldview attunement is a form of meta-meaning and therefore meta-assimilation (ultimately compression, integration, things fitting together). We get an opposite which is the meta-accommodation afforded by confronting the numinous in awe and, potentially, horror. We talked about how horror is about exactly the confrontation with that which demands from us unanswerable, unachievable accommodation.
So I propose to you that what sacredness is is to play with (seriously play with!) the machinery of relevance realization as found within the primordial aspects of religio, and that doing this would be deeply advantageous to us because it is so foundational to our agency, to the world as an arena for our action, to our capacities for self-transcendence, and so forth. But caught up with that, when I invoked music as an example of this, was the idea that we often do this serious play by engaging in symbolic behavior. So I’m putting ‘the symbol’ here as something that has the capacity to function both ways: it can bring us into meta-accommodation but of course it can also bring meta-assimilation. It can bridge between these two and it can go in both directions.
So his core take on sacredness/horror/the numinous, as I understand it, is this:
Humans are limited and finite in a world that is much bigger than they are (both physically and conceptually).
An important part of existing in the world is ‘having a grip on things’; I’m imagining, like, a climber on a cliff or a remora stuck onto a shark; it’s not that you hold the world in your hands (as a thing smaller than you), but that you have control over your position, both resisting unwanted changes and making desired changes (at least in a limited way).
“The numinous” is that which is outside your ability to contain / understand, and is mostly on a dimension of ‘power / glory’ instead of morality. [More ‘Lovecraftian elder gods’ or ‘forces of history that can’t be stopped’ or so on.]
He’s pretty clear on what he means by ‘horror’. It’s “losing your grip on reality”, and so more associated with madness/insanity than fear. [He distinguishes it from ‘horror films’, which he thinks are mostly about the fear of predation, and ‘terror’, which he sees as too linked to ‘terrorism’; I observe that it reminds me a lot of ‘body horror’, which is about losing your grip on yourself, in some ways.]
I don’t quite get what he’s saying about sacredness. I think it’s something like: there’s a way in which the numinous is intrinsically horrifying because it involves something that you can’t really come to grips with (you can’t handle the cliff-as-a-whole even tho you can handle the cliff-as-many-handholds), but whether you experience this as ‘horror’ is mostly about whether or not you’re overwhelmed. In horror, you have the experience of scrambling for purchase and not finding anything and this is overwhelming. Sacredness then is more like the ‘good sort’ of seeing beyond yourself, in a way where you at least have a handle on not having a handle on it (or something?).
Like, I’m thinking of Augustine’s conception of the trinity, where he spent a long time trying to figure out this puzzle and then went “oh, this puzzle is beyond me”, in a way that was… reassuring to him, somehow? “I will sooner draw all the water from the sea and empty it into this hole than you will succeed in penetrating the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your limited understanding.” Vervaeke uses someone else’s phrase, of “homing against horror”, and the way that’s landing here is something like “having accepted that this is too big to contain” instead of “being freaked out about this being too big to contain.”
I think the overall move is something like: even if you grow as much as possible, there will still be things bigger than you; you need some way to handle that. But also there are things that are ‘just within your reach’; the way you grow is by hanging out around them, doing serious play with them, and so on; so you need something that helps you come to grips with your limited size in a way that puts you in positions to grow bigger (instead of giving up on growth as ‘impossible’ because you can never be infinitely large).