Numinous experiences are "objective" - yet also personal

From what I can gather (and assuming other people are telling the truth!) what elicits numinous experiences varies between persons - and in this sense the numinous is subjective. 

Yet for each person there seems to be an "objectivity" - in that particular places and people can sometimes be (more or less, at least for a while) relied upon to evoke the numinous in a repeatable fashion. 

(I am assuming - in all this - that one is, in the first place, open to the experience of the numinous - which, apparently, many people are not!)   

The numinous sensation of some kind of underlying spiritual, religious or divine quality; needs to be distinguished from liking, enjoying, and finding immediately beautiful. I think this must be because the numinous is something implied or behind the surface of things. 

Thus, the numinous feeling seems more associated with yearning than with gratification; it has elements of deep and lasting fascination; such that the numinous stays in the mind and recurs, and each recollection brings the feeling again. 

Furthermore, I have found that (assuming a receptive mood) the numinous is experienced first-time, rather than being a thing that develops with repetition.  

A recent example was driving along the B7009/ 709 beside Ettrick Water in the Scottish Borders (the same trip in which I visited Tam Lin's Well). 

This was only my second time along this road (and over thirty years apart) - and it was again the quietest, most traffic free, road I have ever encountered. 

I find the journey weaving beside the Ettrick Water extremely "numinous". The scenery is indeed somewhat conventionally-attractive, yet far from the most attractive, even in the immediate vicinity. 

Indeed, there aren't many pictures of Ettrickdale online, nor has anybody made a photographic book of the region. But for me this landscape is saturated with covert meaning and significance. I experienced a light magical "trance", while in the area. 

When we passed the watershed of the Ettrick and crossed west into Eskdale, the numinous sensation began to diminish. The scenery was at least as pretty, indeed conventionally better; and yet for me the underlying magical quality reduced.

I wonder if this has to do with a change of geography or geology; or some kind of memory or association... Who knows? But this is the way that such things seem to work. 

Another example is Oxford versus Cambridge. For me (at least until around the millennium, when it diminished quite sharply: a reduction in the spirit of the place) Oxford is a numinous place but Cambridge is not - indeed Cambridge is anti-numinous! (Despite Cambridge being prettier and much less traffic-ravaged.) 

There are historical reasons why this might be so (e.g. Royalist Oxford versus Roundhead Cambridge, Classical Oxford v Mathematical Cambridge), and again the geography is different - albeit in this case I find the west more numinous than the east. 

(Albeit rural East Anglia is numinous; as are Ely and Norwich.) 

But in the end, the numinous is a matter of experience - yet any explanation of the difference comes second and is not-necessarily convincing. Even locally, in my everyday life; I find some particular trees, buildings, streets... numinous; but most others not. But why this should be, I cannot even guess.   

I have found the same, throughout my life, with people. A few people had (when I met them) a numinous quality; while others seemed and remained stubbornly "unromantic"! 

This applied to both men and women, friends and acquaintances. And, like places, the numinous romantic quality could be lost, but was never gained after an initial absence.

And the numinous is attractive - but not necessarily conventionally beautiful or nice, or even necessarily likeable - while, conversely, a person could be attractive and likeable without having anything of the numinous about them.  

  

As I discussed earlier today - what this all means is a different matter from the fact of its reality. However it is, and always has been, important to me. I will go to efforts and inconvenience to experience the numinous, and will continue to puzzle over its implications - without ever getting anywhere in particular. 

I am convinced that something is going on in me, at some level, in these numinous experiences - and that it is of lasting importance...

And so long as I continue feel that, and am able to respond to places and people in this fashion - for so long will I continue to seek experience of the numinous.