Numinous

There are times when I confuse myself.

My love and admiration for heavy draught horses is a very good example. For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by these gentle giants. Whenever I pick up a book on horse breeds, I almost automatically turn the pages to the heavy horses - Shires, Clydesdales, Percherons, Brabants and Suffolk Punches. Friesians are usually classified as a light horse, but somehow their general appearance and height let me regard them as a lighter version of a draught horse.

So I love these horses. But somehow I am a little bit afraid of them as well. How is it possible to control that strength, guide that weight?

Weibert: Photographs by Gary Loney

In all fairness, the main reason for my fear is the amount of actual contact I have had with horses in general. It is almost none. My love has been a book love, my fear grew out of very limited real life exposure. That applies to horses in general, but even more so in the case of the heavy draughts. Their numbers plummeted gradually after the dawn of motorised transport. Today they are really a very rare sight.

        

For years now Matilda has been scouting with me for heavy horse studs in South Africa. Here and there we’ve picked up a trail, but because of all our other commitments we haven’t followed it up. But it remained very high on the wish list.

Then on Monday, Matilda arranged the treat of my life on my birthday. She took me to The Mooikloof Friesian stud, owned by Esmé Venter, just outside Pretoria. What an experience! Esmé went to so much trouble in sharing her lovely horses with us. It was absolute bliss.

The star of the morning was her stallion Weibert. Standing 17,2 hands high, and weighing about 800 kg he is truly a sight to behold. With the gentlest nature you can imagine. 

Photographs by Matilda Clifford and Esmé Venter

In a sense the experience left me speechless. As if talking about it will somehow diminish it. My words cannot do it justice. So, it is not to words as such that I have turned to these past days. It is to the whole concept of the numinous.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous) gives a very good summary:

"Numinous is an English adjective, taken from the Latin Numen, and used by some to describe the power or presence of a divinity. The word was popularised in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige (1917; translated into English as The Idea of the Holy, 1923). According to Otto, the numinous experience has in addition to the tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling, a quality of fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy and/or the transcendent."

C.S. Lewis picks up on this theme in the introductory to his book The Problem of Pain. As an illustration he takes the scene from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole discover Pan playing his pipes on an island in the river. 

          'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

          'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never,             never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Contradiction, numinous.. Whatever you call it, I’ve experienced the Other on Monday. He came in black.

George