The holy

In this chapter, I examine the work of two poets who, on Heidegger’s interpretation, use particular colors to characterize Being and the related concept of the Holy. Although separated by two and a half millennia, Heidegger finds that the victory odes of the Ancient Greek lyricist Pindar and the melancholic poetry of the twentieth-century Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl were both written under a sort of “holy compulsion.” Through them, Being spoke itself— synesthetically—in colors: gold in the case of Pindar, blue (along with gold) in the case of Trakl. I first try to listen for this voice in Heidegger’s extensive excursus on Pindar’s 5th Isthmian in the undelivered lecture course Der Spruch des Anaximander (§1). Then, I will show how many of the motifs Heidegger identifies, including their timbre or ‘color,’ are reprised in his discussion of Trakl in the first two chapters of On the Way to Language (§2). While it might seem that, at the ontological level, golden shining is proper exclusively to the ancients and bluish twilight to the post-Hölderlinian moderns, I argue that, in his respective analyses, Heidegger is drawing out different aspects of Being and the Holy that belong to all epochs, even if they cannot always be seen as such, and even if different gods show up in them. I conclude with some reflections on what might be called, following Goethe, a Heideggerian Farbenlehre or ‘color theory’ (§3).

In this paper, Gafni compares Kabbalistic and other wisdom traditions with regard to sex and Eros. He concludes that contrary to classical religion and much of psychology, Hebrew tantra insists that sex is integrally related to love and eros.

It was first published in the SpandaJournal.

What follows is an attempt to see Otto the phenomenologist within wider developments in the field, and to take account of some recent criticisms. Everything that is said falls under the general headingof 'introduction to the study of religion'(or 'meta-religionswissenschaft') Within this wide field, we shall be specifically concerned with the possibility of a systematic phenomenology of religion, and with that phenomenology of religion which takes its starting point from Otto's awareness of the numinous in its non-rational and rational forms and manifestations. In addition to this central insight of Otto's and deriving to a large extent from it, are the morphological categories which can be traced back further than Otto to Chantepie de la Saussaye (1869-1937). These categories form part of classical phenomenology of religion down to Friedrich Heiler (1892-1967). We shall come back to these categories after looking at Otto's numinous as the starting point for a global phenomenology.