Artists of the written word, please submit a one paragraph description of your artistic project, and not more than 2 pages of prose or poetry (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry or hybrid are all welcome) to [email protected]

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Artists in dance, acting, musical theater, music, graphic arts, film, sculpture, painting, or other art forms other than creative writing, please submit a one paragraph description of your artistic project, and an embedded audio or video file no more than 2 minutes in length showing an example of your art form to [email protected]

Include your mailing address and your email address. 

We’d love to consider funding your art.  

Thank you for your commitment to helping the world see with new eyes and helping the world experience uncommon beauty.  

We will return a response of yes or no regarding funding in a timely fashion by email.  

Historical Foundation of Mysterium Artist Trust

We believe in beauty in everyday life–uncommon beauty, as expressed by the artists around us.  

We also believe art does not receive enough funding.  Specifically, we value the individual artist as  representative of the diverse world community, and hope to support artists through providing some small financial help in the process of producing art.  Knowing that the process of securing grants (large or small) is sometimes prohibitive, we want to make the process more fluid by asking for only a single paragraph description of the project.  

Mysterium is Latin for “mystery,” and was further defined by Rudolf Otto, the profound and iconoclastic German thought leader who lived and died in the shadow of the first World War.

We believe in a world of art, international and local.  We believe in artists, writers, painters, dancers, all.  We believe in divine mystery.  We believe in James Welch, Sherman Alexie, Debra Magpie Earling, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich.  We believe in sacredness.  We believe in Misty Copeland, Ashley Murphy, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem.  We believe in Nazim Hikmet, Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Shusaku Endo, Pablo Neruda, and Leo Tolstoy.  We believe in Makoto Fujimura, Yusef Komunyakaa, Graham Greene, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Li-Young Lee.  We believe in the sacred nature of divine mystery.  We believe in Toni Morrison, C.D. Wright, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Federico Garcia Lorca, Michael Ondaatje and Melanie Rae Thon.  We believe in critical race theory, bell hooks, Judith Butler, and Angela Davis.  We believe in love.  

Otto was one of the most influential thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his analysis of the experience that, in his view, underlies creative endeavors and the quest for multivalent truth. He calls this experience “numinous,” and says it has three components. These are often designated with the Latin phrase: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. As mysterium, the numinous is “wholly other”– entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of silence. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum. It provokes terror because it presents itself as overwhelming power. Finally, the numinous presents itself as fascinans, as merciful and gracious. 

Outline of Otto’s concept of the numinous (based on The Idea of the Holy. Trans. John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923; 2nd ed., 1950 [Das Heilige, 1917]):

• “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (fearful and fascinating mystery):
• “Mysterium”: Wholly Other, experienced with blank wonder, wholeness or richness of life 
• “tremendum”:
  • awefulness, terror, dread, awe, absolute unapproachability, “wrath” of God (the idea of God as undefinable and beyond rational human capacity)
  • overpoweringness, majesty, might, sense of one’s own nothingness in contrast to its power
  • creature-feeling, sense of objective presence, dependence 
  • energy, urgency, will, vitality 
• “fascinans”: potent grace, attractiveness in spite of fear, terror, etc.