Episode 34: Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol

Last time we were continuing our exploration of sacredness. I talked about that, in contrast to but also in concert with Geertz's notion of sacredness as 'homing us against horror', we have the proposal from Otto that sacredness puts us into contact with the numinous, which basically exposes us to what is horrifying (at least, the limits of us), because it has an aspect of awe, with a little bit more, which is to remind us. Humiliation, in the original sense of the word: to keep us humble, to give us humility, to remember that as we are feeling that sense of expansiveness with awe that we are precisely ultimately limited creatures. 

So I propose to you that these two opponent aspects of sacredness can be seen very readily within the light of the machinery of relevance realization, where the worldview attunement is a form of meta-meaning and therefore meta-assimilation (ultimately compression, integration, things fitting together). We get an opposite which is the meta-accommodation afforded by confronting the numinous in awe and, potentially, horror. We talked about how horror is about exactly the confrontation with that which demands from us unanswerable, unachievable accommodation.

So I propose to you that what sacredness is is to play with (seriously play with!) the machinery of relevance realization as found within the primordial aspects of religio, and that doing this would be deeply advantageous to us because it is so foundational to our agency, to the world as an arena for our action, to our capacities for self-transcendence, and so forth. But caught up with that, when I invoked music as an example of this, was the idea that we often do this serious play by engaging in symbolic behavior. So I'm putting 'the symbol' here as something that has the capacity to function both ways: it can bring us into meta-accommodation but of course it can also bring meta-assimilation. It can bridge between these two and it can go in both directions.