Numinous

This is a quote from Carl Sagan's Contact in which a character summarizes what Rudolph Otto said in The Idea of the Holy:

"He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.
"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but, if I read this right, not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment.'"