In a review for
AllMusic, William Ruhlmann wrote: "Columbia Records could not have been pleased at Santana's determined drift into esoteric jazz:
Illuminations was the first of the nine Santana-related albums so far released in the U.S. not to go gold." Saxon Baird of
Red Bull Music Academy noted that the album is "as strange and fascinating as the pairing" of Coltrane and Santana would suggest, and called "Angel of Sunlight" the album's centerpiece, commenting: "The nearly 15-minute, feverish free-jazz number is heavily indebted to John Coltrane's late output... But if much of the saxophonist's late work felt like a musician in search, Santana and Alice Coltrane here are also musicians journeying in the same style." Writing for
All About Jazz, Rob Caldwell described
Illuminations as "quite a bold album," and stated that it is "all about drama and grandiosity." He remarked: "At times bordering on New Age, it's much too adventurous to be pigeonholed as such and just when it seems to get too syrupy or cosmic, it veers into free jazz." Buckley Mayfield of Jive Time Records remarked that the album "is all about transmitting blazing beams of enlightenment into listeners' minds," and stated that
Illuminations and
Love Devotion Surrender "stand as [Santana's] creative peaks." A reviewer for Overgrown Path wrote: "It is, of course, very easy to dismiss this album as New Age whimsy. But that denies the primordial and mystical power of sound to transform, and it is elitist and myopic to contend that this transformative power is the exclusive property of the masterworks of the Western classical music." ==Track listing==