numinous

adj

1. Of or relating to a numen (divinity); indicating the presence of a divinity.

   “His interest in numinous objects led him on a quest for the Holy Grail.”

   “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.”

   “He held his own body in numinous esteem.”

   “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.”

2. Evoking a sense of the mystical, sublime, or transcendent; awe-inspiring.

   “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: […]”

   “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.”

   “[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.”

   “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."”

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