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).
Regarding “Puzzle beig over me”, Vervaeke emphasises that puzzles are not mysteries. I think he is also getting to something extra with the numinous. It is weird to me as understanding Din, Nayru and Fafore as part of the triforce or the feud between Chattur’gha, Ulyaoth and Xel’lotath, yeah it might be interesting and there might not be a lot of head way, but it doesn’t at face value seem to have the personal bespokedness than the trinity approach despite on theme level being essentially the same or aspects of the same meme-complex. If I don’t ever discover what Twin Peaks was about sure it is is mystery but not a world-view affecting one. There seems to be some attempt at some sort of distinction which trinity has but triforce has not, but it doesn’t really materialise at the same level as the other concepts do.
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).
Regarding “Puzzle beig over me”, Vervaeke emphasises that puzzles are not mysteries. I think he is also getting to something extra with the numinous. It is weird to me as understanding Din, Nayru and Fafore as part of the triforce or the feud between Chattur’gha, Ulyaoth and Xel’lotath, yeah it might be interesting and there might not be a lot of head way, but it doesn’t at face value seem to have the personal bespokedness than the trinity approach despite on theme level being essentially the same or aspects of the same meme-complex. If I don’t ever discover what Twin Peaks was about sure it is is mystery but not a world-view affecting one. There seems to be some attempt at some sort of distinction which trinity has but triforce has not, but it doesn’t really materialise at the same level as the other concepts do.