An Influential but Contested Category

Otto's concept of the numinous became one of the most widely cited categories in twentieth century comparative religion, taken up and extended by influential later scholars including Mircea Eliade, whose own account of the sacred as a distinct category of experience opposed to the profane drew heavily on Otto's framework while developing it in a different direction. The category has also drawn sustained methodological criticism, chiefly on the grounds that Otto derived his supposedly universal category primarily from Christian, and particularly Lutheran pietist, religious experience, then applied it comparatively to other traditions, a pattern critics of the comparative religion field associated with Otto and Eliade have argued risks projecting a historically and culturally specific, broadly Romantic European category of experience onto traditions that may organize religious feeling quite differently.

Scholars working in this critical vein do not necessarily deny that experiences resembling Otto's description occur across traditions, but argue the numinous should be treated as one documented and influential analytical framework for describing such experiences rather than as a neutral, culture free category discovered rather than constructed. This atlas records the numinous as Otto's specific and highly influential proposal, with its contested comparative reach noted rather than assumed.