Numinous Screen of Myth

The "Numinous Screen of Myth" names the structural function that the whole apparatus of archaic mythology, ritual, and the divine performs with respect to the irreducibly unknowable force Boothby identifies with Lacan's Real. The concept is introduced in the context of archaic Greek ontology, where a "primacy of appearances" holds — surfaces are legible, the phenomenal world is genuinely meaningful — yet behind those surfaces persists a radically alien, non-symbolisable force. Myth and the gods do not resolve this mystery or domesticate it into manageable knowledge; on the contrary, they furnish a screen — a structured, narratively organised surface — behind which the mystery is actively preserved. In this way the numinous screen of myth is not an instrument of enlightenment but of sustained unknowing: it maintains the Real at a liveable distance, preventing both direct exposure to its traumatising force and its premature dissolution into representational content.

This concept operates at the intersection of the ontological and the clinical. The "screen" function recalls the role fantasy plays in sheltering the subject from the traumatic kernel of the Real, but here the screening device is collective and pre-modern: the entire tapestry of mythic narrative, liturgical enactment, and divine personification. The "numinous" modifier (from Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum, though Boothby's framing draws this into the Lacanian register) underscores that what the screen holds at bay is not merely the unknown but the overwhelming — what Lacan, via Freud's "Project," called das Ding, the pre-symbolic Thing whose proximity would be unbearable. Myth, on this reading, is an archaic sublimation: it raises ordinary narrative materials to the dignity of the Thing without surrendering to the Thing directly, anticipating the structural role Freud would later assign to the unconscious.

The concept appears once, in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p. 92), and functions as a pivotal theoretical hinge in Boothby's argument that archaic religiosity already intuited what Lacan theorises as the Real. Its closest canonical neighbour is Fantasy: both the numinous screen of myth and fantasy operate as structured surfaces interposed between the subject (or collective) and a traumatic, unrepresentable remainder. Fantasy "protects the real" by papering over the impossibility of the sexual relation; the numinous screen of myth analogously "protects" the Real of divine, impersonal force by wrapping it in narrative and ritual. The difference is that fantasy is individualised and tied to the formula $◇a, while the numinous screen is collective and archaic — a cultural, pre-individual apparatus.

The concept also resonates strongly with Das Ding. Boothby's "irreducibly unknowable force" behind appearances maps onto the structural place das Ding occupies: an exterior-intimate kernel that cannot be assimilated to the signifying chain. Myth performs the operation Lacan assigns to sublimation — "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — by constituting the gods as dignified stand-ins for the Thing without claiming identity with it. Additionally, the concept implicitly touches Castration and the Big Other: the mythic screen can be read as the cultural mechanism through which archaic societies "castrated" the overwhelming jouissance of the Real, transferring it into the symbolic field of divine narrative, thereby installing a proto-Other. Finally, the concept anticipates Freud's unconscious — and by extension Objet petit a as the trace left by das Ding after symbolisation — since the screened mystery that myth preserves is precisely what psychoanalysis will later encounter as the structured opacity of the unconscious.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.92)

What if the real function of the whole tapestry of myth was not to solve a mystery, but to provide a screen behind which it could remain one?

The phrase "tapestry of myth" figures myth as a woven surface — structured, aesthetically organised, yet opaque — and the word "screen" is theoretically double-edged: it means both a projection surface (something on which meaning is displayed) and a concealing partition (something that hides what lies behind it), capturing the paradox that myth simultaneously articulates and preserves the Real's inscrutability; "remain one" then insists that sustaining the mystery is not a failure of myth but its positive structural achievement.