The God Turns Up in Person. Now What Does Everybody Do?

A divine figure becomes present to a human in a way that cannot be mistaken for anything else. The encounter is unsought in most accounts, occurs at a specific place that frequently becomes significant afterwards, and produces an immediate physical reaction in the human, usually terror, falling to the ground or covering the face. A message or commission follows. The human responds, frequently with an objection or a request for a sign. The account closes with something marking the spot or the event, such as a stone, an altar or a new name.

Traditions differ in how the presence is made perceptible:

• •Fire, smoke or overwhelming light
• •A voice with no visible source
• •A human form not recognised as divine until afterwards
• •An animal form, in several traditions
• •A dream or vision during sleep
• •Natural violence, including storm and earthquake

Describing a direct appearance raises a difficulty that traditions handle in visibly different ways. If the divine is unlimited and unlike anything created, then it cannot be seen or contained, so a straightforward account of seeing it is theologically awkward. Hebrew scripture handles this by introducing intermediaries, by describing what surrounds the presence rather than the presence itself, and by stating explicitly that nobody may see and live. Greek accounts have fewer difficulties, since the gods are embodied, and they instead emphasise the danger of seeing one undisguised. Later theology in several traditions treats such passages as accommodations to human limits.

Two settings recur across unconnected traditions often enough to be worth noting. High ground is the commonest location, which is usually explained as the nearest place to whatever is above and as ground separated from ordinary life by effort. Cloud, smoke or thick darkness appears constantly as the medium, concealing while indicating presence, which solves the problem of describing something that cannot be looked at. Both appear in Mesopotamian, Greek, Hebrew and Hindu material independently, and both survive into later art, where a figure is shown emerging from cloud rather than standing plainly.

These episodes are among the most durable material in any tradition and their function explains why. They authorise, since a person or a lineage or a place holding a claim to authority frequently rests it on such an event. They locate, attaching a tradition to a specific mountain, spring or stone that can still be visited. They explain why a practice began. And they dramatise the gap between human and divine in a form that can be told rather than argued, which is why the same episodes are retold in art and in liturgy long after the theology around them has moved on.

A divine figure becoming unmistakably present produces a consistent narrative shape, with terror, a commission, an objection and something left to mark the place. Fire, voices, unrecognised human forms and dreams are the usual media. Traditions holding that the divine cannot be seen handle such accounts with intermediaries and indirect description, and the episodes survive because they authorise claims.