Numen

Article summary

Numen (plural numina) is a Latin term for "divinity", "divine presence", or "divine will". The Latin authors defined it as follows: Cicero writes of a "divine mind" ( ), a god "whose numen everything obeys", and a "divine power" ( ) "which pervades the lives of men". It causes the motions and cries of birds during augury. In Virgil's recounting of the blinding of the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, from the Odyssey, in his Aeneid, he has Odysseus and his men first "ask for the assistance of the great numina" ( ). Reviewing public opinion of Augustus on the day of his funeral, the historian Tacitus reports that some thought "no honor was left to the gods" when he "established the cult of himself" ( ) "with temples and the effigies of numina" ( ). Pliny the Younger in a letter to Paternus raves about the "power", the "dignity", and "the majesty"; in short, the "numen of history". Lucretius uses the expression , or "bidding of the mind", where "bidding" is numen, not, however, the divine numen, unless the mind is to be considered divine, but as simply human will. Since the early 20th century, numen has sometimes been compared with mana and treated as a remnant of a pre-animistic phase; that is, a belief system inherited from an earlier time. However, these ideas are now largely rejected within the scholarly literature.…

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