Page 34 - Ruminations

32. Mysteria and the movies

Thanks to the unwitting efforts of Rudolf Otto and William James
in the early twentieth century, the origin, function and exploitation of
the human capacity for irrational belief and behavior are much clearer.
By initiating analysis and categorization of what they thought were real
experiences of the supernatural, they opened the door to
understanding such phenomena in a wider context. James called them
mystical; Otto used the term “numinous”. The American covered a lot
of territory, but the German’s idea of the numinous is more useful.
What enters the stream of consciousness for analysis is of either
known or unknown origin. The former is provided by memory and
sensory perception; the latter remains mysterious, leading to irrational
explanation and emotional reaction. Beyond the modern
understanding of the sporadic outbursts or chronic sublimations of
repressed unconscious knowledge, pre-human biology provides
another source: the survival value of what is popularly known as the
sixth sense. Other animals do not interpret the reasons for their
responses to subtle stimuli—they have neither the time nor the
capacity for that reflection.
But we humans believe that the entirety of incoming information
about the physical world is provided by what can be consciously
experienced. The older processing of subliminal stimuli by the brain,
when it obtrudes into awareness, can therefore produce the idea of an
invisible external presence. That presence corresponds to Otto’s
numinous entities; it is easily misinterpreted as manifestation of
transcendent spiritual beings and thus manipulable socially.
Otto discerned two types of these mysteria: tremendum (frightening,
negative) and fascinans (attractive, positive). These two numinous
obtrusions are easily appropriated by religion; whence they may be
embedded in a child’s early development of consciousness while it is
vulnerable to impositions of belief. The media-invoked state of
consciousness called “suspension of disbelief” is an ancient method of
confirming and reinforcing the experience of the numinous. It is a way
of bypassing normal sensory validation and tapping into responses to
a mysterium: terror, awe and wonder, leading to catharsis. Supernatural
horror movies combine tremendum and fascinans into box-office
dynamite. Disbelief is easy to suspend in this context: it’s had the
stuffing scared out of it.