Please read carefully the following three passages. Reflect on Otto’s and Eliade’s theories of the nature of religion and determine whether the feelings of mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans are experienced by the Moses, Arjuna, Mole, and Rat. What, if anything, would make these scenes hierophanies? In which experience do you discern a ganz Andere? What is numinous about these experiences? Do you note an axis mundi established in any of these experiences? The sacralization of the cosmos? Thresholds? What rituals are at play and what are their functions? Would chaos threaten in the absence of these experiences? In light of the fact that the subjects are from different traditions (let’s give Mole and Rat the benefit of real existence for the sake of comparison), what insights can be drawn from these passages through comparative analysis about existence and religious experience? Passage A N/um is put into the body through the backbone. It boils in my belly and boils up to my head like beer. When the women start singing and I start dancing, at first I feel quite all right. Then, in the middle, the medicine begins to rise form my stomach. After that I see all the people like very small birds, the whole place will be spinning around, and that is why we run around. The trees will be circling also. You feel your blood become very hot, just like blood boiling on a fire, and then you start healing. Ju/’Hoan Trance Dancer Passage B Meanwhile Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. Leading the flock across the desert, he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There an angel of the Lord appeared to him in fire flaming out of a bush. As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed. So Moses decided, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.” When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.” God said, “Come no nearer!” Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father,” he continued, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. But the Lord said, “I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard the cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore, I have come down to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and lead them out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey…” (Exodus 3:1-8) Passage C Krishna, the great lord of discipline, revealed to Arjuna the true majesty of his form. It was a multiform, wondrous vision, with countless mouths and eyes and celestial ornaments, brandishing many divine weapons. Everywhere was boundless divinity containing all astonishing things, wearing divine .

1. Please read carefully the following three passages. Reflect on
Otto’s and Eliade’s theories of the nature of religion and
determine whether the feelings of mysterium tremendum and
mysterium fascinans are experienced by the Moses, Arjuna,
Mole, and Rat. What, if anything, would make these scenes
hierophanies? In which experience do you discern a ganz
Andere? What is numinous about these experiences? Do you
note an axis mundi established in any of these experiences? The
sacralization of the cosmos? Thresholds? What rituals are at
play and what are their functions? Would chaos threaten in the
absence of these experiences? In light of the fact that the
subjects are from different traditions (let’s give Mole and Rat
the benefit of real existence for the sake of comparison), what
insights can be drawn from these passages through comparative
analysis about existence and religious experience?
Passage A
N/um is put into the body through the backbone. It boils in my
belly and boils up to my head like beer. When the women start
singing and I start dancing, at first I feel quite all right. Then,
in the middle, the medicine begins to rise form my stomach.
After that I see all the people like very small birds, the whole
place will be spinning around, and that is why we run around.
The trees will be circling also. You feel your blood become
very hot, just like blood boiling on a fire, and then you start
healing.
Ju/’Hoan Trance Dancer
Passage B
Meanwhile Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law
Jethro, the priest of Midian. Leading the flock across the
desert, he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There an angel
of the Lord appeared to him in fire flaming out of a bush. As he

2. looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire,
was not consumed. So Moses decided, “I must go over to look
at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.”
When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely,
God called out to him from the bush, “Moses! Moses!” He
answered, “Here I am.” God said, “Come no nearer!” Remove
the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy
ground. I am the God of your father,” he continued, “the God
of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” Moses hid
his face, for he was afraid to look at God. But the Lord said, “I
have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have
heard the cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know
well what they are suffering. Therefore, I have come down to
rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and lead them out
of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with
milk and honey…” (Exodus 3:1-8)
Passage C
Krishna, the great lord of discipline, revealed to Arjuna the true
majesty of his form. It was a multiform, wondrous vision, with
countless mouths and eyes and celestial ornaments, brandishing
many divine weapons. Everywhere was boundless divinity
containing all astonishing things, wearing divine garlands and
garments, anointed with divine perfume. If the light of a
thousand suns were to rise in the sky at once, it would be like
the light of that great spirit. Arjuna saw all the universe in its
many ways and parts, standing as one in the body of the god of
the gods. Then, filled with amazement, his hair bristling on his
flesh, Arjuna bowed his head to the god, joined his hands in
homage and spoke: “…Seeing the many mouths and eyes of
your great form, its many arms thighs, feet, bellies, and fangs,
the worlds tremble and so do I. Vishnu, seeing you brush the
clouds with the flames of countless colors, your mouths agape,
your huge eyes blazing, my inner self quakes and I find no
resolve or tranquility. Seeing the fangs protruding from your

3. mouths like the fires of time, I lose my bearing and I find no
refuge; be gracious, Lord of Gods, shelter the Universe … Tell
me – who are you in the terrible form? Homage to you, Best of
Gods! Be gracious! I want to know you as you are in your
beginning. I do not comprehend the course of your ways.”
(Bhagavad Gita 10:8-31)
Passage D
“This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played
to me,” whispered Rat as if in a trance. “Here in this holy
place, surely we shall find Him.” … Then suddenly the Mole
felt a great Awe fall upon him, an Awe that turned his muscles
into water. He felt wonderfully at peace and happy. “Rat,” he
found the breath to whisper, shaking, “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable
love. “Afraid! Of Him? Oh never, never! And yet – and yet –
Oh, Mole, I am afraid!” Then the two animals, crouching to the
earth, bowed their heads and did worship.
(Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows)
Some Definitions and/or Assessments of Religion
Tylor:
“…belief in spiritual beings.”
Durkheim: … “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative
to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden –
beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral
community called a Church all those who adhere to them.”
Spiro: “An institution consisting of culturally patterned
interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.”
Robertson: “…pertains to a distinction between the empirical
and a super-empirical transcendent reality… action shaped by
an acknowledgement of the empirical/super-empirical

4. distinction.”
Horton: “An extension of the field of people’s social
relationships beyond the confines of a purely human society…
one in which human beings involved see themselves in a
dependent position vis-à-vis their non-human alters…”
Yinger: “Religion is a system of beliefs ad practices by means
of which a group of people struggle with the ultimate problem
of human life.”
James: Religion “is but giving your little private convulsive self
a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. . . . (Relgion) is
“the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
Müller: “an effort to conceive the inconceivable and to express
the inexpressible, an aspiration toward the infinite.”
Maritneau: “Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is,
in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding
moral relations with mankind.”
Schleiermacher: “the essence of religion consists in the feeling
of absolute dependence.”
Otto: “Religion is that which grows out of, and gives expression
to, experience of the holy in its various aspects.”
Whitehead: “Religion is what an individual does with his
solitariness.”
Dewey: “The religious is any activity pursued on behalf of an
ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal
loss because of its general and enduring value.”

5. Tillich: “Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate
concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as
preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question
of the meaning of life.”
Freud: “Religion is “the universal obsessional neurosis of
humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out
of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father.”
Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… a
protest against real suffering… it is the opium of the people…
the illusory sun which revolves around man for as long as he
does not evolve around himself.”
Geertz: “Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2)
establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and
motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions
with such an aura of factuality tat the moods and motivations
seem uniquely realistic.”
Livingston: “Religion is that system of activities and beliefs
directed toward that which is perceived to be of sacred value
and transforming power.”
Swidler: “…an explanation of the meaning of life and how to
live accordingly.”
Feuerbach: “Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions
and emotions appear to us as separate existences, being out of
ourselves.”
Hick: “Religion constitutes our varied human response to
transcendent Reality.”
Hobbes: “To say that [God] hath spoken to [someone] in a
dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to

6. him!”
Wilson: “Religions are analogous to superorganisms. They have
a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they
reproduce, and, in the fullness of time, most die. In each of
these phases religions reflect the human organisms that nourish
them. They express the primary rule of human existence, that
whatever is necessary to sustain life is ultimately biological.”
Réveille: “Religion is the determination of human life by the
sense of a bond joining the human mind with the mysterious
mind whose domination of the world and of itself it recognizes,
and with which it takes pleasure in feeling joined.”
Mueller:
“… an effort to conceive the inconceivable and to express the
inexpressible, an aspiration toward the infinite.”
Spencer:
“. . . the belief in the omnipresence of something that goes
beyond the intellect.”
Tweed:“Religions are confluences of organic cultural flows that
intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and
suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries”
Stark and Finke: “Religion is concerned with the supernatural;
everything else is secondary . . . . Religion consists of very
general explanations of existence, including terms of exchange
with a god or gods.”
J.Z. Smith: Religion is “a system of beliefs and practices that
are relative to superhuman beings.”
D. Barrett: “A social construct encompassing beliefs and
practices which enable people, individually and collectively, to
make some sense of the Great Questions of life and death.”

7. Nelkin: “a belief system that includes the idea of the existence
of 'an eternal principle ... that has created the world, that
governs it, that controls its destinies or that intervenes in the
natural course of its history”
Kant: is (subjectively regarded) the recognition of all duties as
divine commands . . . The one true religion comprises nothing
but laws, that is, those practical principles of whose
unconditioned necessity we can become aware, and which we
therefore recognize as revealed through pure reason (not
empirically). I take the following proposition to be a principle
requiring no proof: Whatever, over and above good life-
conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to
God is mere religious illusion and pseudo-service of God.
Mudimbe: “Let us accept that any religion, its rituals and
theatricality as perceptual phenomena. . . . It would include
naturalism, that is, an explicit will to integrate one spiritually in
the cosmic order; fetishism, or the desire to transcend and
manipulate the culturally and conventionally separated orders of
the sacred and the profane; and finally, a cult of ancestors, or a
cult of sanctified models offered to a community as concrete
and living examples of ‘political’ perfection.”
Bible: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the
Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress,
and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
Berger: “Religion has played a strategic part in the human
enterprise of world-building . . . Religion implies that human
order is projected into the totality of being. Put differently,
religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire
universe as being humanly significant.”
To be continued…