How many times have we been enraptured by the unfathomable beauty of a work of art, the magnificence of a painting or the ethereal plasticity of a sculpture? And how many times in our lives have we paused to observe a fascinating gaze that has stirred something deep within us? I vividly remember the unmistakable sounds of the railway station. The night, its scents, the atmosphere marked by the ineffable feeling of nostalgic melancholy. Between faces, all of which were different and all the same (or who knows, perhaps only in my memory), the railway tracks receded indefinitely, like incorruptible sentinels guarding the human soul towards the infinity. How to describe the elusive feeling of vertigo, the controlled emptiness that one feels when walking along the aisles of a majestic cathedral? There is no doubt we are occasionally pervaded by an indefinite sense of mystery.
It is so unintelligible that it is itself an enigma. It digs into and overwhelms the human soul, driving it to a dimension beyond itself. The philosopher and writer Herman Hesse wrote that “walking outside, at night, under the silent sky, along a rivulet that runs quietly, it is always something full of mistery, and moves the abyss of the soul”.
About the sense of mystery
The sense of mystery is a spark that suddenly ignites before the unfathomability, it lights a revealing fire. Looking at the prospectus of a Gothic building or contemplating the sunset, we feel naked. We are suddenly imperfect before the infinity. It is the platonic Myth of the Cave1. The story of the men who have always lived imprisoned in a cave, forced to observe a mild fire at the edge of the cavern. Unaware of the existence of the sun, they lived convinced that the shadows were the only reality of existence. But those were just a mocking illusion, a mere apparent truth.
Faced with the revelation of the mystery, man realises that his own existence is unfinished. Something is hidden beyond the dimension of shadows in which he had so far seen the world projected. This sudden sense of incompleteness forces him to search outside himself for the lost harmony. Mystery pervades the soul of the writer, the artist, the navigator, even the scientist… Through them the unknown manifests itself in the creation of art and science, or during a journey, generating more mystery.
The spirit of discovery
The physicist Albert Einstein wrote that: “The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is at the root of all true science”. Similarly Thomas Mann stated that “The mystery gives fire and tension to every word we speak”. Even Francis Bacon said: “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery”. It generates, it creates; it “is”, as the founding essence of human nature. Mystery accompanies the spirit of discovery. This was what Aristotle and his Peripatetic school, whose members carried out passionate scientific and philosophical investigations about the world, thought. Always dynamically in movement, they put the question above the answer, the enigma before any possible and apparent truth.
The uncertain dimension of existence
Indeed, the existential dimension of the human being evokes the metaphor of a dark and lightless room, in which he is without knowing why. Like those fish that were swimming and suddenly wondered “but what is water?”2, man lives without knowing or being able to define what life is. He is hovering on the edge of existence, balancing a present between the opposing forces of a memory, that is never the same (where do I come from?), and a future full of uncertainty (where am I going?).
The anthropologist Ernesto de Martino well explained the existential frame of the human being. He wrote: “One exists, one feels oneself to be a person, to the extent that, in the critical moment in which one is called upon to be, the retrospective memories of effective behaviour to modify reality and the prospective and creative consciousness of what one needs to do, here and now, to be able to produce the new value, are at our disposal. In this dialectic between retrospective memory and prospective momentum presence is part of it”3.
Therefore the past is a mystery, as memory exists to the extent that it is evoked in the present. The future is also a mystery: an enigma made of choices and perspectives (telos), of events beyond the human will. Among these two opposite poles there is the human moment (who am I?). But it is still the greatest unknown of all, since it is constantly escapes.
The Origins of Humanity
This uncertain dimension of existence has affected the human being since the primordial times. Being immersed in the wilderness, he had to cope with the cruel laws of survival. Until a few tens of thousands of years ago, the human being was not unlike his closest evolutionary relatives, the anthropomorphic monkeys. He was part of a zoe life, as the ancient Greeks used to define it. It is a perspective indicating the mere fact of being alive, common to all creatures. Moreover, the early man (then as today) was characterized by a basic imperfection, which placed him at a dramatic evolutionary disadvantage4. He has no fur, no claws, no wings, or anything else could save him from the natural selection. However, around 40,000 years ago a surprising turning point occurred.
The tragic nature of existence, the basic imperfection pushed the human being to look for new forms of essence that could give him a frame of meaning in the world. He ascended himself to the bios dimension, the form that expressed the life of an individual or a group for the Greeks. The full expression of bios life is culture, in all its manifestations, as the anthropologist Geertz defined it: “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” for imposing an order to the universe, which otherwise would appear as a huge chaos5.
The importance of the symbols
By this signification of life, Palaeolithic humans began to face the fear of adaptation to the hostile environment of primordial times, to the world, to life in general. From that moment on, nature began to be overwritten through a system of codified and recognisable symbols. The human being moves away from its merely biological essence, he differentiated himself from animals: 40,000 years ago the human being becomes fully human.
Therefore, the conception of the symbol, in its cultural meaning and belonging to a group or ethnic group, assumes a fundamental importance nowadays. Symbol is the primordial response that the human being provides to the bewilderment of existence, to the manifestation of the unfathomable sense of mystery. Since the ancient times, the symbol has assumed a strong apotropaic meaning aimed at ideally protecting existence. Symbolic knowledge is thus configured as a specific cognitive project that integrates with rational knowledge. As such, culture is considered as a second nature. It constructs frames of meaning, which make us part of the world.
The sense of mystery through signs and rituals
Bearing these considerations in mind, it is obvious that the primordial, magical-animistic7 forms of religion were totemic and symbolic. They were expressed by a codified system of signs and rituals. The celebrations of cults, propitiatory ceremonies or rites of passage, were intended to guarantee a sort of psychological security to those who took part in them, through perfectly structured, reiterated acts and gestures with metaphysical efficacy. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in this regard that “By transforming all the physiological acts into ceremonies, the archaic man strives to pass over, to project himself beyond time, into eternity”8.
It is no coincidence that the current term mystery derives from the Greek “mysterion”. It was an ancient and secret rite, reserved for a few initiates into the cult. From an etymological point of view, it is representative that the opposite term of symbol (from the Greek σύνβάλλω – synbállō, “to put together”) is devil (διαβάλλω – diabállō, “the one who divides”). Symbol and devil are the opposite poles of the ancients’ ritual manifestations. Primordial religions took as their starting point the mystery of existence. Through complex systems of cultural superstructures, such as rituals and symbolisms, they aimed to exorcise the unknown, the enigmatic meaning of life.
Historical and cultural roots
Since then, the human condition has not changed a lot. Despite the enormous cognitive development of our species over millennia, we are still those fishes wondering about water. Or those humans locked in a cave. The sense of mystery continues to fascinate and frighten us at the same time. We are still hovering over this elusive moment, which is now there, and now no longer. Our only hope to fully understand who we are is to look to the past, to the historical and cultural roots that determine us today, as well as to the future, a metaphor for a long and fascinating journey with no return.
Samuele Corrente Naso
Aphorisms about the sense of mistery
“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”. [Robert Lee Frost]
“The charm of the unknown dominates everything.” [Homer, Odyssey]
“..for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence…“. [Joseph Conrad]
“The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery”. [Albert Schweitzer]
“Art is a symbol because man is a symbol“. [Oscar Wilde]
“Only one journey is possible: the journey within. We don’t learn a whole lot from dashing about on the surface of the Earth. Neither do I believe that one travels so as to eventually return. Man can never reach back to the point of origin, because he has changed in the process. And of course we cannot escape from ourselves; what we are we carry with us. We carry with us the dwelling place of our soul, like the turtle carries its shell. A journey through all the countries of the world would be a mere symbolic journey. Whatever place one arrives at, it is still one’s own soul that one is searching for“. [Andrei Tarkovsky]
“Into the most secrets depths of the soul the symbol strikes its root; language skims over the surface of the understanding like a soft breeze”. [Johan Jacob Bachofen]
Notes
- Platone, libro settimo de La Repubblica, 514 b – 520 a. ↩︎
- D. Foster Wallace, Questa è l’acqua, a cura di Luca Briasco, traduzione di Giovanna Granato, Einaudi, 2009. ↩︎
- Preface by C. Cases in E. De Martino, Il mondo magico, Boringhieri, 1973. ↩︎
- A. Gehlen, L’uomo. La sua natura e il suo posto nel mondo, Mimesis, Milano 2010;H. Plessner, I gradi dell’organico, Bollati Boringhieri, 2019. ↩︎
- C. Geertz, Interpretazione di culture, Il Mulino, 2019. ↩︎
- Figura di Dagmar Hollmann, licenza. CC-BY-SA-4.0. ↩︎
- J. Frazer, Il Ramo d’Oro, Bollati Boringhieri, 2012. ↩︎
- M. Eliade, Dizionario dei riti, Jaca Book, 2023. ↩︎
