Definition of "numinous"

The fetish of Huitzilopochtli, bundled up and screened from profane eyes, now preceded the wandering group, carried on the back of his oracle-priest or sorcerer who alone was holy enough to handle safely the numinous object.

1972, Burr Cartwright Brundage, “The Mexica Gain a King”, in A Rain of Darts: The Mexica Aztecs (Texas Pan American Series), Austin, Tx., London: University of Texas Press, page 23

He held his own body in numinous esteem.

1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, page 40

The use of blood to instill numen into a thing is illustrated by the establishment and annual renewal of Terminus, the boundary marker […] The transfer of numinous power to persons has its example in the drinking of blood by seers in order to get oracular vision.

1981, C. Bennett Pascal, “October Horse”, in D[avid] R[oy] Shackleton Bailey, editor, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, volume 85, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, page 278

The Will of a King is very numinous; it hath a kind of vast universality in it, it is many times greater than the will of his whole Kingdom, stiffened with ill Counsel and ill Presidents: […]

1647, Theodore de la Guard , 1713 (1844 printing), page 44

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum.

1966, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 6, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York: Bantam Books, published 1976, page 136

[Justinian I] had the genius to realize the vast resources available to an east Roman emperor of the early sixth century — an almost numinous past history, a full treasury, an unrivalled supply of human talent in every field.

1971, Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (Library of European civilization), London: Thames and Hudson, page 154

Is death closer than they think? [Samuel Langhorne] Clemens sets the scene with a numinous description of the men waiting in the corncrib in the "veiled moonlight."

1996, Anne Bernays, “Introduction”, in Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], Merry Tales, New York, N.Y., Oxford: Oxford University Press, page xxxix

A post-scarcity communism that doesn't dispense with all thoughts of the divine and numinous can't be precluded.

2022, China Miéville, chapter 4, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto