What is "numinous"

Usage examples of "numinous".

Senate of Rome found themselves with nothing more to give that day, and dragged their leaden feet home to live again in dreams that one magical moment when they actually saw the vision of faceless Quirinus rear up to throw his numinous toga over them as a father over his truehearted and unfailingly loyal sons.

As time wore on through the years of the Republic, and it became the mark of culture to subscribe to things Greek, many of the original numinous gods acquired a name, a sex, and even occasionally a face, but to call Roman religion a hybrid bastardization of the Greeks is to underestimate Rome grievously.

Rome, when all the gods were numinous, and it remained very much a fact until Christianization of the Emperors and their courts undermined the old religion of the Roman State.

It was probably that numinous element in the religion which riddled even the most brilliant and iconoclastic Romans with superstitions.

A second figure began to emerge from the numinous ruins of the first, began to assume effective form, develop in the crisp light as a set of movements, lines and features, a contour, a living person whose distinctive physical traits seemed more and more familiar as I watched them come into existence, a little amazed.

Segnbora was just a young woman sitting against a wall, not a numinous shadow-wrapt figure gazing at him through darkness and silence.

These days it was a sign of culture and sophistication to show Bellona as an armed goddess, Ceres as a beautiful matron carrying a sheaf of wheat, Mercury with winged hat and winged sandals, because a Hellenized society was superior, because a Hellenized society despised more numinous gods as primitive, unintellectual, incapable of behavior as complex as human behavior.

As she saw herself and Jondalar on the rocky beach of the remote valley, aberrant currents of light and motion, forming out of a numinous thickening of the air and disappearing into emptiness, surrounded them, joining them.

In the three-score Years of Elua, the Companions dispersed, placing their numinous stamp on the land and its people.

The idea of the MegaMall was so numinous, so difficult to pin down, that it was easy to forget that in the final analysis, it really was under the control of a relatively small number of Dominant Shareholders, whose names were not generally known.

The most impressively numinous temples are caverns of twilight, in which a few tapers give life to the transporting, other-worldly treasures on the altar.

And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the beholder out of the Old World of his everyday experience, far away, towards the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.

He uttered an oxymoronic imprecation to an excremental divinity, the flashlight making his white breath numinous.

Feynman and Drexler and Merkle, Chen and Singh and Finkle-McGraw reposed on a numinous buckyball, some of them reading books and some pointing toward the work-in-progress in a manner that implied constructive criticism.

Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play.