[rafael]

Hi Stephen and Craig! This is Rafael, a campbellite originally from Brazil, now into adventure in Norway. I just would like to say something about numinous. Craig took me to James Joyce’s Dedalus revisiting the definition of beauty from the classics in The Portrait. As Joe loved to talk about, Joyce said that for something to be beautiful, it has to have 3 things: integritas, consonantia and gravitas. Craig’s definition of numinous matches my understanding of gravitas. In Portuguese, I always translated gravitas as “radiação” (radiance, in the radioactive sense). In this sense, and in my experience, when presented to an experience-rendering image, I sense something as beautiful when it contaminates me with the numinosity of its artistic manifestation.

Bliss you,

Rafael