The word “numinous” may well have appeared, unbidden, in theologian Rudolf Otto’s mind during a sky-splitting lightning storm. How else to describe what we feel in the presence of such power?
Lightning is composed primarily of plasma, one of the four states of matter, the others being solid, liquid, and gas. Plasma is what occurs when gas is heated to the point of ionization and becomes both capable of conducting electricity and strongly responsive to electromagnetic fields. It is the most prevalent form of ordinary matter in the universe. Terrestrially, we find it in other strange phenomena besides lightning: St. Elmo’s Fire, the aurora borealis, the polar wind. It accounts for certain kind of comet’s tails, the great fountains of light that spew from stars, and the medium of intergalactic space.
Here on earth, lightning strikes most often near the small village of Kifuka in the mountains of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo—158 strikes per square kilometer per year. No doubt its inhabitants, under constant threat of extinction at the hands of plasma run amok, understand through personal experience what Otto meant by the word “numinous”: the uncanny feeling that one is in the unpredictable presence of a deity.