Numinous

Numinous

By Miho Kataoka2007©

What brought me being into this Indian dance....It was the time when first I saw my teacher in Japan was practicing dance for her performance. After I leaned about a 2 month of this dance, at last I could see the whole picture of dance. I did not have any idea about this dance at that time and was gazing at her dance. Her strong step was as if penetrating the earth. Then all of sudden, intense emotion struck me. It was something scary and awful and horrible, just as the God is admonishing me. My intuition said “this is it!".　I ran into toilet and sobbed. Since then I get bitten by the bug of this fascinating dance and this dance became the center of my life. The dance was my sacred.

After many years, I came across the term “Numinous" of Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). He named “Numinous" to the experience which is "wholly other"- entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of awe and terror to the overwhelming power but fascinates. Then when you face to this experience, you feel yourself as worthless.

C.G.Jung developed his theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. He was the one who was struck by the universality of many stories and images in myth. And he thought if you touch to the ARCHTYPE which exist in the collective unconscious, you will experience this “Numinous". Jung says this ARCHTYPE is universal and immemorial conscious which transcend the individual, time and space.

If so, that dance which I saw in my teacher`s dance might be the archetype of goddess Dulga. Like this I turn my thought toward ancient memory.

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