Coffee, Churches, and Sacred Scents

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Might clean this up later. Probably won’t.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯



“Love is a beautiful bondage, too” (Ackerman xviii). (As a poet, can I just say that’s a sick turn of phrase?)  In my experience, religion has often been described as trying to ‘pay back’ the love given to humans by the divine: despite being bound by rules, it’s still something cherished and looked for, and has all sorts of special sensations to go with it: hearing a sermon and songs, smelling the candle smoke, seeing the stained glass and the icons, feeling the uncomfortable ‘Sunday best’ clothing in a cold sanctuary on a hard pew, tasting the coffee shared with the congregation after the service.

Describes scents, by virtue of the difficulty in describing them, as having a sacredness (9). Most religions use specific scents like candle smoke, oil, and incense, to separate the holy from the secular. Smell associates deeply with memory (11) and actually causes biological changes in humans (12): assumably, scents typically associated with sacredness invoke changes which ‘feel holy,’ as well as bringing to mind peaceful, loving memories of times spent in holy places (similar to Ackerman and her eucalyptus-glades, 20). (Funny enough, my own experience with scent and religion is less of a ‘beautiful bondage’ and more just angsty pre-teen rebellion: the idea of ‘religious smells’ makes me think incense, sure, but also takes me back to my father’s old Unitarian Universalist church, where he’d force us kids to attend services with him, and then spend hours afterwards in the common room, drinking the coffee they’d made and chatting with the congregation. Maybe that’s why I like my coffee iced, or at least room-temperature: same taste and caffeine content (thank you, addiction!), less scent, and less memories of standing around bored, restless, and pissed off that my day was commandeered?). 

“We don’t like to lose control, except on purpose – during sex or partying or religious mysticism or doing drugs” (29-30). Behavior can be ‘controlled’ by pheromones and odors: love the fact that ‘religious smells’ are described in the same breath as ecstatic experiences typically performed in social settings, with the scents of other people mixed in with the ‘ecstatic agent’ (Going back to my pre-teen angst, I’d never really been ‘in control’ of the scent of coffee at church: it was always made during the service, so it was ready and waiting by the time it let out. Definitely a social setting, and definitely smelled of coffee, sweat, and faint candle smoke from the altar: can’t say that I found it especially ecstatic, though).  

Perfume and scent have a long history of religious use, and are generally thought to have ‘downgraded’ from something just for the gods to enjoy, “then priests were allowed them, then godlike leaders, then leaders, then aides, all the way down the social totem pole” (56). (The minister and the older members of the church were always the first to get a mug: everyone else, especially the people younger than 40 (not that there were many of us) had to wait in a line that stretched across most of the room). Liked the bit about the sandalwood women of the Koran: a pleasant scent is one of the greatest rewards possible to the faithful (again, from a poetic standpoint, sick as hell).

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausFebruary 1, 2022 at 7:06 AM

    Fascinating and perceptive observations about smells and religion especially as you have experienced them. How do you feel about the smells you experience when you're in an artisanal coffee house - if that is something you've experienced? Dissociated from a religious context, do the aromas of roasting and freshly brewed coffee smell better to you? One of the most important things I've learned about how the senses evoke certain memories and feelings, pleasant and less so, is what one scholar of taste calls "evaluative conditioning." Even if particular sensory experiences may trigger an initial chemical response of pleasure, what personal experiences our brains associate it with can nullify or redirect to ti provoke other emotions.

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