The Idea of the Holy

This book is a skeleton key for understanding the fundamental relationship between religion, horror, and the supernatural. Otto was a German theologian and scholar of religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in this, his most famous book, he set out to interrogate the nature of holiness, understood not primarily as supernatural moral goodness but as the feeling of numinous dread that accompanies the supernatural, and that “first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny, ‘ ‘eerie,’ or ‘weird.’” He explicitly states that it was this emotion in the mind of early humans that… show more.