The double movement of being drawn toward something vast and holy while simultaneously feeling one's own smallness in its presence.
If your experience contained something that could only be called both terrifying and magnetic at once, if you were drawn toward something and yet felt your smallness in its presence as almost unbearable, you are describing one of the most ancient and most consistently reported features of religious experience. The archive records this double movement in forty-two percent of accounts: a pull that was simultaneous with a kind of dread, neither one cancelling the other.
Rudolf Otto gave this the name mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery that causes trembling and that fascinates, simultaneously. He was describing something he found in accounts of religious experience across cultures and centuries: an encounter with the vast and holy that was not simply frightening (since people were not destroyed by it, and many describe a willingness to return) and not simply wonderful (since the element of awe at one's own smallness was undeniable). Hardy's respondents, writing in mid-to-late twentieth-century Britain, described exactly this structure without any knowledge of Otto's vocabulary.
What many people discover afterward is that this quality does not fit easily into either the category of 'good' or 'bad' experiences. It was not comfortable; it was not ordinary; it was not something that can be easily folded into daily life. But it was also not something that most people who experienced it wished had not happened. The double register of the experience, drawn toward what overwhelmed them, is precisely what the archive records as characteristic of this quality.
Fear-awe is the quality Rudolf Otto described as the mysterium tremendum, the trembling before mystery. It is not the fear of danger, nor the awe of the aesthetically sublime, though it may overlap with both. What characterizes this quality in the archive accounts is a specific combination: the sense of encountering something of immense power or magnitude that is at the same time radically other, not reducible to any familiar category, and whose attention is experienced as both gift and ordeal. The 'fear' component is not dread in the ordinary sense, very few respondents describe wanting to escape, but something closer to the physiological response of reverence: the body registering magnitude that the mind cannot fully absorb.
Otto's framework, developed in 'The Idea of the Holy' (1917), provides the most precise vocabulary for what these accounts describe: the numinous experience combines attraction and repulsion, fascination and terror, into a state that ordinary emotional categories cannot contain. In the archive, this shows up most clearly in accounts involving the sudden presence of something perceived as divine, encounters in which the respondent feels simultaneously seen and overwhelmed, chosen and undone. The aftermath of fear-awe experiences often involves a period of integration: respondents describe needing to recover, to return slowly to ordinary life, in ways that differ from the more immediately consoling experiences of peace or joy.
The language of fear-awe in the archive is distinctive for its somatic specificity: respondents describe physical responses, trembling, falling, being unable to stand, covering their face, in a way that other qualities rarely produce. The biblical resonances are often explicit or near-explicit: accounts that mention falling prostrate, hearing one's name called, or feeling 'the fear of God' draw on a long scriptural tradition while insisting on the immediacy of the experience. A secondary signature is the paradox formulation: 'It was terrifying, and I wanted nothing more than to stay there.' The combination of wanted and unwanted in a single moment is a defining feature of these accounts.
Fear-awe appears in 41.6% of accounts, less common than the broadly positive qualities (joy, peace, love) but present in more than two in five experiences. Its frequency in a collection dominated by positive outcomes suggests that the experience of divine encounter is not always comfortable, even when ultimately transformative. Fear-awe tends to co-occur with divine-encounter and divine-presence accounts more than with nature mysticism or meditation-triggered experiences, which tend to produce more peaceable phenomenologies. The relatively high rate of faith-deepened and faith-transformed effects in fear-awe accounts points to the power of the encounter model: being undone by something greater appears to be as generative as being comforted by it.
This is not ordinary fear.
Ordinary fear is triggered by threat and oriented toward escape. The awe described in these accounts is not a response to threat, the vast or holy presence encountered was not experienced as dangerous in the way that danger is experienced. Many respondents note the paradox explicitly: the physical sensations were those of fear (trembling, racing heart, a desire to flee) but the psychological context was entirely different. The 'danger' was of a different order, and most respondents describe choosing, in some sense, to remain.
This is not anxiety.
Anxiety is self-referential: it concerns the vulnerable self and its uncertain future. The fear-awe in these accounts is other-referential: it is a response to the vastness or holiness of something outside the self. Several respondents who describe themselves as prone to anxiety distinguish sharply between their ordinary anxious states and this experience. The direction of attention in anxiety is inward; in awe, it is outward, and the self becomes interesting only insofar as it provides a scale of comparison.
This is not distress.
Distress involves suffering; this does not, or not in the ordinary sense. The trembling, the sense of smallness, the overwhelming quality of the encounter, none of these were, in most accounts, unwanted. Many people describe it as among the most significant experiences of their lives and would not wish it away. The discomfort was real but was held within something larger that made it not a problem to be solved but a quality of the encounter to be endured and, eventually, valued.
Is the fear element a problem, should I be concerned about what I encountered?
Hardy's archive does not support the interpretation that the fear-awe quality signals a negative or harmful encounter. Virtually no respondents describe lasting distress attributable to the quality of awe itself, and many describe it as among the most significant and valued experiences of their lives. The fear, in retrospect, appears to have been a response to scale and holiness rather than to threat. Most people who describe it count themselves as grateful for it, even those who were frightened at the time.
Why do fear and attraction coexist in this way?
Otto's analysis, and the archive's data, suggest that this double movement is characteristic of the encounter with something genuinely 'other', something that exceeds the categories through which we ordinarily process experience. The attraction is a response to the holiness or power of what is encountered; the fear is a response to the incommensurability between that thing and the ordinary self. Both responses are authentic and simultaneous precisely because the encounter is not ordinary.
Is this quality more common in particular circumstances?
In Hardy's archive, fear-awe appears across a wide range of triggers, in nature, during prayer, in crisis, during sleep-states. It is somewhat more common in accounts that also involve a sense of presence or of a divine encounter, which is consistent with Otto's framework. It is less common in accounts where the experience is primarily one of unity or dissolution of boundaries. But it is not confined to any particular setting or circumstance.
What happened to the fear over time?
The most common pattern in the archive is that the acute physical component of fear faded while what remained was awe and reverence, a lasting sense of having been in the presence of something immeasurably larger than the ordinary self. For most respondents, looking back, the fear had transformed into gratitude. Some describe the awe as a permanent reorientation in how they understood their relationship to existence.