Rudolf Otto pages on this site: When you see the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans in discussions of Rudolf Otto, you are not looking at a direct quotation from The Idea of the Holy, at least not from the English translation. This tag appears in about half the discussions I checked in books to hand, e.g. Ninian Smart: Dimensions of the Sacred (1996), (not in fact a book about the sacred). You have to think that Smart [1] and the others were all working from some secondary source and not directly from Otto at all. On the other hand, e.g. Joseph Campbell has the authentic mysterium tremendum in Oriental Mythology (1962), as does Roy A. Rappaport in Ritual & Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999). In The Sacred & the Profane and in Myths, Dreams & Mysteries (both 1957), Mircea Eliade adds his own coinage, mysterium fascinans, to Otto's mysterium tremendum. In view of this, it seems likely that it was Eliade who coined the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans in some other of his many works. If you have a reference, please let me know and I shall insert it here, acknowledging your help if you want that. Like Misquoting HamletSince I put the above online a couple of years ago, nobody has suggested a possible source for the pseudo-tag. It can be seen as a kind of virus, rather like a computer virus, spread by a lack of rigour among academics. Certainly, any authority that uses it seems dubious. You have to think that any academic who doesn't check the validity of quotations is going to be unreliable on sources generally, that no reference can be taken at face value. Thouless in Straight and Crooked Thinking warned against making a sweeping judgement on the basis of a minor lapse. But we are looking at more than that, we are looking at a phenomenon. In the context of discussions of religious experience, it's somewhat like half of the world's English literature scholars misquoting the start of Hamlet's soliloquy. We must suppose that similar examples of error propagation, of passing bad currency, are to be found in other academic fields. On 18-07-03, a Yahoo UK search for the phrase brought up 7 sites; a world search suggested 327 sites. The UK sites were in fact mainly religious and devotional. One had a bishop referring to a theologian as if quoting Otto. One was offline, removing the phrase, we may hope. Another appeared to have the phrase on a school exam question, presumably for a Religious Studies A Level course: so they're teaching it in school. Some checking of overseas sites failed to produce a page reference for the alleged quotation. But this is not surprising. The whole thing is so incredible that I've checked Otto's book yet again, so as to make sure I'm not getting egg on my face: I still haven't spotted the tag in there. NOTES1 Ninian Smart: the source of the Rudolf Otto virus?May 2007: It looks as though not Eliade, but the late world religionist, Ninian Smart, may be the source of the Rudolf Otto virus. I have just happened across this, referring to Otto, in a book by him first published in 1964: He analyzed the numinous experience in terms of the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans: what is apprehended is a mystery which is awe-inspiring and fascinating. [Philosophers and Religious Truth, 2nd edn 1969, p 110] This reads as though Smart is offering the phrase as a genuine quotation from Otto. Smart is in error. Otto did not analyse the experience of the numinous This is the earliest instance of the phoney tag I have come across. Smart apparently made no relevant changes to his book between the 1964 1st edition and the 1969 2nd edition, so this instance of mysterium tremendum et fascinans must date from 1964.
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