Smells and Bells

Green’s subtle feminism throughout Aroma of Righteousness sparked many ideas in my head. In another course I’m taking, Psychology of Women, we recently discussed Freud’s “groundbreaking” psychological theories of women and girls being born with this innate “penis envy”, yes, penis envy. His theory proposes the idea that men are superior, and when girls get to an age when they realize that they do not have a penis, they realize their inferiority and are therefore envious. As a rebuttal to Freud’s prospections, psychoanalyst Karen Horney proposes that power inequalities, not biology, cause the psychological differences observed in girls and women and that there is more likely to be “Womb envy” present among men- an envy of women’s reproductive ability, which motivated men’s desire to dominate women. This made me think of the ways in which, throughout religion specifically, scent has been so heavily associated with women and their oh so evil seductiveness and sexuality. I get really confu...

This semester was one unimaginable, unprecedented, and unconventional. The transition to online learning was something that I thought I'd never have to do in any of my classes, especially one that had a focus on the senses. I appreciated our weekly zoom calls and efforts made by groups to implement each of the senses through the computer screen. If anything, I thought that this experience brought us closer together as a class. Hearing everyone's sound, seeing their image, a story of a sixth sense experience, and even observing a slideshow of foods put something of importance to each individual student on display. As I said during our banquet last week, I thought that I knew all there was to know about sensation and perception being a psychology major. When presented with readings and being tested to dive deeper into thinking about what each sense means, I have grown in perspective. Although I had read the Song of Songs many times before, I had discovered a new point of view w...

Deborah Green's The Aroma of Righteousness elaborates on scents and their biblical origins and significance. In chapter three titled "Election and the Erotic: Biblical portrayals of Perfume and Incense", Green discusses the biblical origins and importance of rituals which inherently require and incorporate spices and incense. Two of which Green uses as examples are frankincense and myrrh. "The two spices that most often appear together in the text are frankincense and myrrh. Widespread use of these spices is well attested in the ancient world and long predates the Israelites. Egyptians used myrrh extensively for perfuming and embalming, while other civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, used myrrh for incense in cultic rituals, as a medicine, and as an ingredient in perfume."  The author explains that frankincense (or levonah) is associated with "white" since it is harvested in autumn when it is white in color. (Green 67). Myrrh derives fr...

As a kid, I loved the smell of perfumes, but I never had any myself. In elementary school I hated "girly things" such as the color pink, perfume, concerns about my hair or appearance, but as I grew older I began to embrace the change that comes with being an adult. I don't know much about perfumes, and I'm sure there's science about it I could learn, but I usually go off of how pleasant the smell is to me, which I don't think is based on statistics.   "Eros Perfume Bottle" Last semester I went to Syracuse, New York to visit some friends, and we went to the mall where I picked out my first perfume. If I had to describe it, I would call it complex, mature, something that doesn't quite fit my image but I'm okay with that. In A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, she meets with a perfumer who talks about the mechanics of making a successful scent to then sell to the public. As a kid I didn't know what the big deal was; I ...

Fish Smell is an important yet often overlooked part of our experience with the outside world. Smells carry a world of meaning that is largely undescribed. Fish smells like fish; and anything that smells similar is said to smell like fish. In a strange way, we only describe smells based on other smells, hoping that whoever we are talking to knows the comparison smell. Even if people disagree on whether or not a scent is pleasant or repulsive, the scent itself is assumed to be uniformly understood. Meow What is one of the first memories of the zoo? For me, there smell was always a distinct memory. The smell of a zoo is distinct but I cannot truly describe it unless I compare it to a farm or other place with certain animals. Smell exists in our memories in a peculiar way, extremely vivid and easy to recollect, yet difficult to describe. While I can forget what the zoo, I went to looked like, or when I went there, I remember the smell. When I encounter that smell again, ...

"Spices and perfumed oils do not endure over long periods of time, however, and the destruction of incense, through burning, is integral to its employment" (Green, 5)  After reading this, what struck me as interesting wasn't the actual fact, but rather, by conclusions to be made about the power(s) of scent and its limitations. Is the power of scent reliant on its state of temporality? This idea was further elaborated by the scientific notion of scents dissipating from our perceptions after a certain period of time. This corresponds with the phrase of spending enough time in a monkey exhibit, you no longer smell it. The longer you stay in an area and experience a particular scent, the less you experience and eventually it begins to fade into oblivion. The same can be said with certain skin receptors which are only activated once and then are only activated again when another touch or a change of touch occurs. The same applies with all of smells. Eventually we all get...

What a google search revealed a nard to be Starting on Valentine’s Day, we started reading The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, explores the imagery of fragrance in rabbinic literature. Two months later, we had Dr. Rachel Herz from Brown give a lecture on her work unraveling the neural processes of olfaction and gustation. The readings and lecture gave the class a well-rounded understanding at how scent is employed in ritual for invoking emotion. As mentioned earlier, our sense of smell is the most memorable due to its proximity to the pre-frontal cortex. Although research behind this phenomenon is relatively recent, practitioners of religion understand the influence of associating scents with divine concepts. In her introduction, Green mentions how we lack a vocabulary to describe our sense of smell, and refer to such using simile, metaphor or simply naming the scent. The explanation for such is that the olfactory bulb is located so “far down” that the circuitry co...

In the introduction to The Aroma of Righteousness Deborah Green writes about how the sense of smell is left out in all sorts of ways, in all different kinds of studies, because it is one of the “lower sense.” I was particularly interested in how this related to the study of aesthetics. I am in an aesthetics course this semester and I had not thought of smell even once before reading this chapter. Green references someone who completely rules out smell as aspect of aesthetics. People written their pens dry about the aesthetics of visual and auditory sensations but completely ignore smell. I think smell (and touch, but maybe not so much taste) could be a great thing to study aesthetically. We do basically the same things with smell as we do with sight and hearing. Way may not make “art” or museums or theaters for olfactory sensations, but we do have a huge perfume industry and we’re constantly trying to make the space around us smell good just like we try to make the space around us l...

The incredible inequality of the sexes is revealed in this week’s reading of the Aroma of righteousness by Deborah Green. It is not only that women are not equal to men but that women are practically a different species. According to R. Joshua, the Bible states that Adam was created from the earth while Eve was created from the bone. Therefore, women slowly decay over time and must cover up their putrid smell by using different unguents (137). Throughout this chapter, Green gives instances in which women would purposefully adorn themselves or their garments with perfume. It was believed that the women used the smell of spice to keep their husbands interested for the forty years of wandering through the desert (136). It is as if the only reason to keep a woman around is to entice her husband to have sex with her and that she has no other purpose or used expect to take care of the resultant children. Green also mentions several times how it was Eve who sinned and got Adam kicked o...