A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
numinous
Numinous describes the quality of a place or an experience that produces awe of a particular kind: a sense of something present and vastly larger than yourself, felt as both compelling and unsettling at once. It is the word people reach for standing in a slot canyon, an old forest, or a stone circle at dawn, and it names the feeling without requiring any explanation of what caused it.
Etymology
The word is built on the Latin numen, a divine presence or the power residing in a place, and Roman religion used it exactly that way, with a numen attached to a spring, a grove, or a boundary stone. Genius loci entry is the same idea from the other direction. The modern sense was given to the word by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in 1917.
Notes
Otto’s formulation is the useful part. He argued that the core religious experience is not a belief or a doctrine but a feeling, which he described in Latin as at once a mystery that makes you tremble and one that draws you in. That combination of dread and attraction is what separates the numinous from ordinary beauty, and it is why the word gets used about landscape as often as about anything else.