Spirit world as the beyond from an anthropological perspective: Making sense "reasonably" of afterlife ontologies

Abstract

In his masterpiece, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto defined the notion of the numinous as a consciousness that awakes in the believer, invoking a profound feeling of existence; furthermore, it represents the ?irrational? component of religion, it is something ?felt as objective and outside the self?. Additionally, the numinous is compounded by the so-called mysterium tremendum. While mysterium distinctly refers to the unknown, occult, esoteric and other aspects of the religious experience, the numinous evokes mental states stimulated by the individual?s encounter with the holy. The latter, in Otto?s view, represents a challenge to the knowledge of something envisioned as divine, which cannot be expected to be purely attained by the mere intervention of common reason. In this regard, the important assertion made by this author is that religion is not only a rational enterprise − as proposed by theological thinking, for example − but involves irrational components as well, which occur in the personal experience with the numinous. Because of its relation to the worshiper?s mental realm, a corollary of such a perspective is that this experience is not only religious but also epistemological. Consequently, this concept will constitute the focus of the remainder of this article.