 A prominent representative of the essentialist thinking about religious emotion of which Schleiermacher seems to be the originator is Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (published 1923). The feeling basic to religion is that of the numinous, of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (roughly, “the mysterious presence of the wholly other that inspires awe and devotion”). “There is no religion in which it does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name” (p. 6). This feeling is not in itself ethical; it is not, for example, the feeling of being in the presence of a moral judge or command-giver. Thus religion is not just a kind of ethics, as Kant tended to think. The numinous feeling is “a unique original feeling-response, which can be in itself ethically neutral and claims consideration in its own right” (ibid.). The feeling bears some resemblance to, but also differs from, a sense of dread, of horror, of the uncanny, the eerie, the weird; it also corresponds to a kind of “wrath” of the divine, a divine demeanor that has about it something incalculable and arbitrary, a kind of unpredictable majestic overpowering fearsomeness. However, one can have a feeling of the mysterium that is not fear-like; a feeling not of tremor, but of stupor. “Stupor is plainly a different thing from tremor; it signifies blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute” (p. 26).