Awe

What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy. Exceptional physical beauty, from faces to landscapes, has long been a fascination of the arts and sciences, and moves us to feelings of infatuation, affection, and, on occasion, desire. Exceptional virtue, character, and ability—moral beauty—operate according to a different aesthetic, one marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action, and moves us to awe. One kind of moral beauty is the courage that others show when encountering suffering, as in this story from the United Kingdom:

The way my daughter dealt with the stillbirth of her son. I was with her at the hospital when he was delivered and her strength in dealing with this left me in awe. My little girl grew up overnight and exhibited awesome strength and bravery during this difficult time.

The courage required in combat is another time-honored source of awe. This is a stirring theme found in Greek and Roman myths, gripping scenes in films like Saving Private Ryan, and war stories veterans tell, as in this story from South Africa:

I was in the Angolan war. One of our soldiers got shot. An officer risked his life and fears to drag the soldier to safety. In the process the officer was wounded but continued saving the soldier’s life. I came out of hiding and secured the area for enough time in order for the officer to drag the soldier to safety.

Horrific acts also occasioned awe, but much less commonly, and most typically in epiphanies found in art, as in this example from Sweden:

The first time I saw Schindler’s List back in 2011. The music and the performance of the main actor were insanely powerful. And the grim truth of human nature. All I wanted to do, and all I did the next few hours, was cry.

Human atrocities captivate our imagination, but are more aptly deemed the provenance of horror, a different state than awe. And art, we shall see, so often provides a space in our imagination for contemplating human horrors, giving rise to aesthetic experiences of awe.

A second wonder of life is collective effervescence, a term introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his analysis of the emotional core of religion. His phrase speaks to the qualities of such experiences: we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic “we.” Across the twenty-six cultures, people told stories of collective effervescence at weddings, christenings, quinceañeras, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, sports celebrations, funerals, family reunions, and political rallies, as in this one from Russia:

At the parade of victory, the city and entire country were with me. There was a procession called “Immortal Regiment” with portraits of soldier participants of the war. I felt pride for my country and people.

A third wonder of life should not surprise. It is nature. Often what inspired natural awe was a cataclysmic event—earthquakes, thunderstorms, lightning, wildfires, gale-force winds, and tsunamis, or for one participant from China, watching a flood rip through her village. Many mentioned night skies, whose patterns of stars and illumination were an inspiration of Greek, Roman, and Mesoamerican imaginings of the gods. Many worry today about how the dimming of the night sky in this era of light pollution is harming our capacity to wonder. Experiences in mountains, looking at canyons, walking among large trees, running through vast sand dunes, and first encounters with the ocean brought people awe, as in this example from Mexico:

The first time I saw the ocean. I was still only a child, listening to the waves and wind, feeling the breeze.

Common to experiences of natural awe is the sense that plants and animals are conscious and aware, an idea found in many Indigenous traditions and attracting scientific attention today. In this story of wild awe translated from Russian, notice how the participant remarks upon the awareness of trees, which seem to be looking at something alongside them:

Five years ago, collecting mushrooms in the forest, I bumped into an uncommon hole in the ground. Around it all the trees stood in a circle as if gazing into the hole.

Music offered up a fourth wonder of life, transporting people to new dimensions of symbolic meaning in experiences at concerts, listening quietly to a piece of music, chanting in a religious ceremony, or simply singing with others. In this story from Switzerland, the individual feels connected to something larger than the self, a defining theme of awe: