mysticity

From mystic +‎ -ity, after French mysticité.^[1]

mysticity (uncountable)

1. The quality of being mystic or mystical.
   • 1753, , Reflections of *****: Being a Series of Political Maxims, Illustrated by General History, as Well as by Variety of Authentic Anecdotes (Never Published Before) , London: D. Wilson, and T. Durham, , page 145:

     The Count de Sinzendorf has ſhewn all Europe, that in the moſt enlightened age, perſeverance ſupported by enthuſiaſm and devotion, could recall that zeal, that Miſticity, thoſe extraordinary follies, which one would think proper only for the barbarous and dark ages.

   • 1834, Thomas Medwin, The Angler in Wales, or Days and Nights of Sportsmen, volume II, London: Richard Bentley, , page 1:

     I will endeavour to “make note” of their tenets, though many of them escaped me through their mysticity.

   • 1884, Mary Linskill, Between the Heather and the Northern Sea, volume III, London: Richard Bentley and Son, , pages 348–349:

     For three days it had been drifting. The land lay white and still under a lowering, threatening snow-cloud of dark indigo blue. It is a sky that is indescribable in its effect, and that effect is heightened by the unbroken whiteness that lies everywhere underneath it. Has any artist ever given us its mysticity, its strange gloom, its ominousness?

   • 1885, Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, 2nd edition, London: Macmillan and Co., page 115:

     Flavian had caught, in fact, something of the rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music of the medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction and mysticity of spirit.

   • 1886, George Moore, A Drama in Muslin: A Realistic Novel (Vizetelly’s One-Volume Novels), London: Vizetelly & Co., , pages 265–266:

     And when somebody, it never was known who, but it was said to have been Olive, suggested that it was all fate, for Violet had played the beggar-maid to King Cophetua, the brain-excitement grew acute as that attendant on solemn rites,—and, overcome with mysticity, the women lay prone before the coincidence.

   • 1891, William M[oney] Hardinge, “A Note on the Louvre Sonnets of Rossetti”, in Temple Bar, with Which Is Incorporated “Bentley’s Miscellany.” A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers., volume 91, London: Richard Bentley & Son, ; New York, N.Y.: Willmer and Rogers; Paris: Galignani, page 434:

     That is all: the touch of “idea” in the picture—of what is unusual a little—is the introduction of that guiding angel near the child, the mysticity of the place being merely Leonardesque—accidental to the painter’s mind, its own scenery;—[…]

   • 1905, M A R Tuker, “The Religion of Rome—Classical and Christian”, in L[awrence] P[earsall] Jacks, G[eorge] Dawes Hicks, editors, The Hibbert Journal: A Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology, and Philosophy, volume III, London: Williams and Norgate, page 590:

     Whether the somewhat rugged Roman, with his inattention to small matters and to the unobvious, saw the mysticity of the early Christian service and the early Christian basilica, may be doubted; […]

   • 1957, Hilton Hotema, The Breath of Life and the Flame Divine, Pomeroy, Wash.: Health Research Books, page 4:

     We now approach a point in ancient philosophy concerning Man that is amazing for its simplicity and startling for its mysticity.

   • 1990, Anna Hasenfratz, “The Standard Model from Actions to Answers”, in From Actions to Answers: Proceedings of the 1989 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute in Elementary Particle Physics, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., →ISBN, page 170:

     The scalar sector of the standard model is well understood. The triviality of the scalar φ⁴ model and the Weinberg-Salam model lost its mysticity.

   • 1996, Charles-Auguste Sainte-Beuve, “Industrial Literature (1839)”, in Rosemary Lloyd, transl., Revolutions in Writing: Readings in Nineteenth-Century French Prose, Bloomington, Ind., Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 27:

     Every age has its own brand of folly and ridicule; in literature, we have already witnessed (and perhaps given too much aid to) many manias. The demon of elegy and despair had its day; pure art had its own cult, its mysticity, but now the mask has changed.

• mysticness