Tag: the numinous

2,434 words

The 2000 novel Under the Skin by Michel Faber tells the story of a female alien called Isserley. We meet her living on a remote Scottish farm from where she takes regular road trips looking for single men. The purpose of these trips transpires to be predatory; she is hunting humans to farm for her fellow alien beings.

Michel Faber has an interesting background. According to Wikipedia:  (more…)

1,409 words

Mircea Eliade et la Redécouverte du Sacré (YouTube, Romanian subtitles)

Mircea Eliade was a traditionalist Romanian novelist and philosopher. Following the disaster of the Second World War, he moved to Paris and Chicago, becoming a respected and influential historian of religions. He acquired something of the status of a guru, as poignantly told in the 1987 documentary Mircea Eliade et la Redécouverte du Sacré. (more…)

3,156 words

Joy Division left us with the most relentlessly depressing body of songs since Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. In some ways, though, this singularity of approach, this lack of light touches to add color to the palate, is responsible for making them enduringly fascinating. (more…)

6,156 words

Oswald Spengler’s radical contribution to the philosophy of history was to observe that different Cultures and Civilizations are discrete life forms and that they all have a certain life-expectancy. The linear progression of history, from the Stone Age to the prevailing Western liberalism, is a myth. There is no single line of history running through all of humanity. Instead, Cultures are born, they grow to maturity, they age, and they die. (more…)

2,512 words

Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, eds.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015

The term “folk horror” is a relatively recent invention that can be applied to a wide range of artistic creations, not all of them belonging to the horror genre. It was popularized by the 2010 BBC TV documentary A History of Horror where the term was used to describe three horror films: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man. (more…)

Carl Heinrich Bloch (1834-1890), Jesus Casting out the Money-Changers

4,036 words

Editor’s Note:

The following essay on the pervasive Jewish tendency to inject money and commerce into religion is excerpted from When Victims Rule, chapter 5, “Yicchus (Status),” formerly on the Jewish Tribal Review website. I have removed the in-text citations for easier reading and added the title.

So great is the Jewish “commercial spirit,” (more…)

2,293 words

Penda’s Fen was first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC’s long-running Play for Today series. Since then it has only been broadcast on TV once, in 1990 on Channel 4. It has never been released on video, DVD or BluRay but it has cropped up at various film festivals through the years. (more…)

1,703 words

In the summer of 1969 the members of Fairport Convention were gathered together at a country house in Farley Chamberlayne in picturesque Hampshire. There they were to record their most celebrated album, Liege & Lief, the definitive statement in English folk-rock. The country retreat setting was partly therapeutic as the band had earlier that year been involved in a tragic road accident whilst on their way back from a gig in Birmingham. The drummer, Martin Lamble, and guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Jeannie Taylor, were both killed. Clearly, the remaining members of Fairport were looking for a new musical direction as they sought to put the past behind them.  (more…)

3,213 words

Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Ball

The English sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is a practitioner of Land art, a practice that seeks to create art from natural materials and settings. Other practitioners of Land art include Richard Long, Robert Smithson, and David Nash. Whilst there is this common element of setting art in (or creating it from) the landscape, there is also a particularly striking quality to Andy Goldsworthy’s work that sets him apart from other Land artists. In short, this particular quality of his work might be termed sacred or numinous. For this reason he is both lauded as a contemporary shaman and derided as a twee pastoralist. Neither extremity really reveals much about Goldsworthy’s art.  (more…)

The Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire

2,486 words

Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, Equus, is arguably the most pagan work of art created in the 20th century. Ostensibly an extended dialogue between a mentally ill boy and his psychiatrist, Shaffer’s play goes far beyond the realms of psychoanalysis and begins to stir the surface of an incipient numinous awakening. (more…)

158 words

Here, half hidden in the meadow grass, stones
Still circle something that they’ve circled for
A thousand years or so. There’s no old bones
Here, no buried cache of golden crowns or
Ancient jewels—only these rocks, nothing more

Than them. Still, they hold something in their midst,
In the ground of the circle itself, clear
As the space and as unknown. What is it?  (more…)

4,193 words

The words “sublime” and “numinous” have shifted in meaning somewhat over recent years. The word “sublime,” I presume, would now generally be interpreted to mean something of particularly great beauty, or an action particularly well executed. It would not be limited to a narrow usage but could be applied to any thing or action of particular excellence, perhaps with a slightly pretentious connotation of elegance.  (more…)