Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

The Meeting 37
“May I?” he asked, moving toward my bookshelf. He pulled out
Jung’s Psychology and Religion and leafed through it. “Ah, here
we are,” and he read:
We might say . . . that the term “religion” designates the attitude peculiar
to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of
the numinosum. 43
“Well now, we know all about that, don’t we?” he said.
I threw a finger at Arnold; he threw it right back.
At one point Brillig jumped up and motioned to Norman. Together
they pulled their largest case—virtually a trunk—into the
living room. Brillig opened it and unceremoniously dumped its
contents on the floor.
There emerged a most disparate collection of objects, constituting
a veritable encyclopedia of what passes for human knowledge:
cards or diagrams of plant cells, Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements,
a key-code to Chinese brush-strokes, the cross-section of a
snail, Lorentz’s transformation formulae; sheets of Mayan hieroglyphics,
economic and demographic statistics, musical scores, the
ground plan of the Great Pyramid; phonetic charts, genealogies,
road maps of major cities; small fossil remains, plant specimens in
amber, delicate watercolors of termites, axolotls, rare marsupials;
several pocket dictionaries, illustrated guides to Chartres Cathedral
and the Vatican, a Tarot deck, yarrow stalks for the I Ching, star
charts, labeled knots of rope; paint brushes and miniature palettes,
a joke book, postcards of fine art.
Everything, in short, bespeaking the mental agility of a twentieth-century
Leonardo.
Brillig eyed the pile with satisfaction.
“I don’t travel light,” he said.
The cornucopian display made me quite giddy. Rachel gave a
delighted cry and settled down for a closer look.
43 “Psychology and Religion,” CW 11, par. 9. The Latin numinosum refers to a
dynamic agency or effect independent of the conscious will. Its English derivatives
are “numinous” and “numinosity.” Needless to say, every complex carries with it a
degree of numinosity; otherwise it wouldn’t be a complex, it would be something
else. Exactly what else it might be is the subject of considerable disagreement,
even among Jungians.