Smells and Bells

  Sacrifice, not necessarily bloody after all? (The Aroma of Righteousness) Calliope Mills  Personally, the associations I have with incense are related to late nights in rooms where the amount of tapestries on the walls is a fire hazard two times over, and the smokey, spicy, and multifaceted aroma of thinly coated burning wood is working overtime to mask the smell of freshly blazed “mary jane”.   It is also connected to small corner stores that sell gold-plated trinkets and scrolls covered with Tibetan prayers. I also have memories of it in my home, where my mother would light a stick while she was reading in the late evenings, on nights when my dad was off on his own adventure, as his deeply asthmatic lungs cannot cope with the light haze it cast over the downstairs area.  Before encountering the words of Deborah Green or taking part in this class, I would not have put such peaceful and slow images in the same frame as the word “sacrifice”.  This word for me h...

Perfuming As Obedience By Ava Barry ... The word obedience often has a negative connotation to it, but what if something was telling you to act obediently every day? Every second? What if I told you that almost all people are obedient to standards set by society and/or religious doctrines. In Deborah Green's book, The Aroma of Righteousness, she speaks about the importance that scent has in both rabbinic life and scripture. Green shows the reader different interpretations of scent from different midrashim. Therefore, women putting perfume on shows that it inherently is a form of obedience. “‘And why does a woman need to perfume herself, but a man does not need to perfume himself?’ He said to them, ‘Adam was created from the earth, and the earth never decomposes. But Eve was created from bone. For example, if you leave meat three days and it is not salted, it becomes putrid.’” (Gen. Rab. 17:8) Green, 137 This quote emphasizes how this midrash speaks of women perfuming themselves n...

Deborah Green’s writings explore the role of smell in religious rituals, texts, and culture, focusing on Jewish religious traditions. Green argues that scholarship has generally overlooked the sense of smell in religious texts for many reasons. Mainly, smell is a more subtle and less overtly intellectual sense compared to sight or hearing, which have been prioritized in religious studies. The sense of smell is associated with physicality and bodily experience, which may be dismissed by scholars who focus on the more spiritual, abstract, or intellectual aspects of religion. Additionally, the focus in religious texts often centers on sight, witnessing miracles, and hearing the voice of God. At the same time, the bodily senses, including smell, were often underexplored in academic religious study. In the bible, scent plays a vital role in sacrificial rites. Incense and fragrant offerings were part of worship and had a symbolic association with pleasing God. Incense had both a practical an...

  Hyperfixation; How Focusing on One Sense Can Calm the Others      As human's it seems both completely reasonable and normal to crave a calm mind state, or rather a neutral one. We strive to calm our senses, and remain "ration". At least, that's how I see it. To me being calm, or at least at ease, is what I strive for as a base emotion on a day to day experience. As a person with anxiety it's not necessarily an easily achievable thing, but with the help of both personal strategies and outsiders, I tend to be able to control my worries most of the time. When I don't I find it best to resort as what is commonly know as a state of hyperfixation. For me, that looks like sitting in a plain environment, closing my eyes and listening to music but it can look many ways for many people.        States of ease can be achieved in many ways. Ackerman sites the idea of scent as something both calming and accessible, " Hanging from my bathtub’s shower att...

Smell -  I liked when Ackerman wrote that  “we each have our own aromatic memories.” Being from a family that cooks almost every night I love when I can smell all the different foods being made from all the way down the hallway in my room. One of my favourite's being my mom's Cassava Pie. Like Ackerman said, it is hard to describe a smell to someone who hasn't smelt it before so I don't think I could even try. When I come back to the states, I bring Cassava Pie with me so that I can eat it while I'm away from home. When I heat it up and smell that memory filled aroma, all of sudden I am sitting in the living room watching a movie with my family while we wait for the pie to bake.   Touch - “Touch allows us to find our way in the world in the darkness or in other circumstances where we can’t fully use our other senses. " This quote is found in the section, The Skin Has Eyes. This quote reminds me of all the hurricanes that would pass Bermuda, knocking our power o...

  Touch Quote and Question from the Chapter 1 of Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman ; Quote: “It imprisons us, but it also gives us individual shape protects us from invaders,” Question: how do senses both limit and free us Other Notes: Massaged babies gain weight as much as 50 percent faster than unmassaged babies. They’re more active, alert, and responsive, more aware of their surroundings, better able to tolerate noise, and they orient themselves faster and are emotionally more in control. “At the University of Colorado School of Medicine, researchers conducted a separation experiment with monkeys, in which they removed the mother. The infant showed signs of helplessness, confusion, and depression, and only the return of its mother and continuous holding for a few days would help it return to normal.” WHY would you do this experiment to monkeys?? “Any first-time touch, or change in touch (from gentle to stinging, say), sends the brain into a flurry of activity. Any ...

  Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses explores how we perceive the world through the five senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—and shows their intricate roles in shaping human experience. Combining science, history, and storytelling, Ackerman explores how these senses influence not just interactions with the world but also provide a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Each chapter is a deep dive into a different sense, with a mix of personal stories, historical background, and cultural exploration. Her explanation of smell is richly detailed with a focus on how fragrance connects to memory and emotion in profound ways. Her descriptions of how the senses worked on a scientific level along with the social and cultural importance of each one taught me a deeper appreciation for the human body. I greatly appreciated the section on synesthesia as it helped me understand more about this aspect of myself. 

  Pain and Devotion       There are many different kinds of devotion, not all involving pain, but in many instances it seems the greatest acts of devotion for any entity is the suffering of pain in the name of something other than yourself. As Diane Ackerman states in  A Natural History of the Senses ,                      " Religions have always encouraged their martyrs to experience pain in order to purify the spirit. We come into this world with only the slender word 'I,' and giving it up in a sacred delirium is the painful ecstasy religions demand ."(Ackerman, 130)       As seen in the painting on the right ( The Crucifixion  (1762) by Pompeo Batoni), Jesus is said to have been crucified, both as a sacrifice for his movement, and so he could die in the place of mankind and take on the spiritual burden of their sins.  This act is one of the most famous acts of ...

  Smell: The Skeleton Key to Memory (A Natural History of the Senses) By Calliope Mills As much as I would love to say that the most powerful sense to me is taste–due to my obsession with food and constant pursuit of my next culinary undertaking–or hearing–as I find comfort, creativity and great joy in dancing to music–I find that smell, is truly what keeps me on my toes in everyday life.      As Diane Ackerman says in her opening paragraph to her chapter on this sense, “Nothing is more memorable than a smell” (16), I find this to be quite true. It is almost always a scent that has me catapulted back, days, months, or decades into memory. A whiff of one specific type of antique furniture, and I am transported back to my grandmother's living room. Like I am in that moment looking out her window, seeing a sunset over the ocean at the bottom of the hill, listening to my cousins run about, wreaking havoc throughout her old hallways, and I can feel a worn sheepskin...

"It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full." - Diane Ackerman      Can you love without any senses? I suppose we'll never know, because we, as humans and animals, have never done so. For as long as I've been alive, love has always been at the forefront of my brain: the concept of it, the science behind it, its many forms, etc. This often results in a lot of effort put into my interpersonal relationships; in something like a ritual, I write down little notes about all my friends, my mother and father, about the things they like or don't like, their favorite foods or scents or things to be called. For this blog post, I'm going to endeavor to relate each of the five senses that we covered in Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses to love. p.s. linked above is a beautiful video from 14 years ago featuring beautiful lesbians dancing :) Smell:      This one seems fairly obvious with all the Ackerman talk about pherom...

  Classen explores how various cultures and societies have approached and understood the sense of touch. In many Western cultures, touch has historically been considered a more "primitive" or "animalistic" sense compared to sight or hearing, which have often been deemed more intellectual or refined. This devaluation of touch can be seen in how tactile experiences are often downplayed or dismissed, especially in comparison to the visual or auditory senses in experiencing the world. In other cultures, touch has much greater significance. In certain Eastern and indigenous cultures, touch is considered a vital sense for understanding the world, connecting with others, and healing. Touch in these contexts is viewed as a means of communication and a way of expressing affection and solidarity. Classen also discusses how cultural attitudes toward touch influence social norms and practices. In some modern societies, touch is often regulated by formal and informal codes that ...

  In Hinduism, sight is a spiritual tool that connects the human with the divine. Sight holds a central role in religious practice and the experience of divinity. For Hindus, seeing is a form of spiritual engagement, and through the act of darśan, believers encounter the sacred in a deeply personal and transformative way. In her analysis, Diana Eck explores how vision shapes religious experience in Hinduism. Unlike Western perceptions of sight as a passive, external sense, darśan involves an active exchange between the devotee and the idol or sacred image. The act of gazing upon an image of a god or goddess is believed to create a moment of divine interaction where the devotee receives blessings, protection, and insight. This reciprocal exchange transcends physical sight, touching upon spiritual and cosmic dimensions. By seeing the divine, the devotee is spiritually "seen" by the deity in return. In Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India , it is emphasized that divine imag...

 I found it interesting that there were famous artists who also have synesthesia, and had varying degrees of what sense triggered another for them. The idea is that it acts as a sort of evolutionary hold-over and could be how our ancestors once perceived the world something that I find to be fascinating. The section that discussed how different musical notes and letters were each associated with a color or taste stood out to me the most because that is similar to my own experiences with associating some letters, different musical notes, and numbers with colors. While the closest I can get to having others experience my synesthesia is describing what number is linked to what color, it does not work the other way around. While the number four looks purple in my mind's eye, seeing the color purple does not automatically make me think of the number four. Below is a visual representation of how numbers appear in my mind.