The Energy in Scents

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Lately, the more I read about smell, the more enigmatic it seems too me, "Most of us cannot smell a fragrance of an orange by mentally concentrating on the idea of an orange" When I Initially read this statement, I tried to think of an orange and though in my mind, I know that its a fresh, sweet yet citrus smell, I know that I like the smell, but in that moment the orange in my mind, didn't have the smell. It makes me thing of the fleeting, impermanent yet highly impressionable nature of smell. It is able to stick in memory and trigger biological processes without us consciously processing it. Green talks about how its pervasiveness overwhelms our body when we inhale certain scents, but I also think its pervasiveness overwhelms our existence as a society. 

The heavy description of Women though these opulent smells is testament of this idea. The way women smelt and the scents they used, as well as the scents used for worship being categorically different from the rest, are proof of the prevalence and the influence that smell has on us and our lives. The interpretation of god as a living breathing and hence smelling being, paves way for rituals to feature certain smells, and therefore allow them to have a deeper hold on people. I enjoyed reading about the way they Rabbis spoke about different scents being a very real and tangible part of the values that the Hebrew Bible preaches. 

Something that I found absolutely intriguing was the way acts of worship and virtue are described to be pleasant smelling, whereas bad deeds make a stinky.  The description of the "soothing odor" released after the successful completion of a sacrificial ritual, wafting through the air, made me think of scents as energy.  The soothing odor is the feeling of contentment and calm, even with the men committing bad deeds, can their smelling stinky be looked at as emitting bad energy? Energy which affects those around around said men and influences them just as the smell is said to? Would it be easier to explain this idea of energy transmission through smell as it is in some capacity experiential, rather than energy that is more or less an intangible entity? 



Maybe it is, or maybe it isn't at all! I really couldn't tell you, these are just the questions that kept popping up as I read the book :) 



Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausFebruary 25, 2022 at 12:58 PM

    "Would it be easier to explain this idea of energy transmission through smell as it is in some capacity experiential, rather than energy that is more or less an intangible entity? "
    Yes, exactly!

    ReplyDelete

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