Gods can taste too?

By -

 



In class so far we have discussed the different religious connections that can be made through the senses in it's believers, but what about gods? 

In Elizabeth Pérez's book Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions she states that Caribbean gods do have senses, and that they love to experience symbols and gestures. Pérez states that their love of food dictates the ceremonial calendars of religious individuals and families and all of the labor and ritual that is involved. It is a very common thing for people among faiths from around the world to offer food to their gods, but I feel that as Westerners we rarely think about deities or God to experience the senses like we do. Pérez's book opened my eyes to a way of interpreting and understanding gods or God that I have never thought or known of. Although I am unreligious myself I realize that my assumption was that most people thought gods to be otherworldly beings that had no interest in mankind's goods or activities, I certainly never thought of them as needing food, or hungry as Pérez describes in her book. The author explains their specific likes and dislikes in dishes and the way it is prepared, the same way that we do, which to me introduces the question as to what others ways that gods might have experiences like us?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more