Antiquitopia

In an earlier post , I noted that while vision and audition are the predominant aspects of sacred or divine encounters (hierophany and theophany respectively) that there is a dearth of comment from a modern perspective on the engaging of other senses.  It is not just seeing God or hearing God, but also smelling, tasting, and touching.  Taste, indeed, will play an important role in Christian encounters, largely due to the Eucharist.  But Jewish, Christian, and Islamic works (and I limit myself to these since I am most familiar with them; not because I think it is lacking elsewhere) often engage multiple senses at once when speaking of the self and God.  Of these, perhaps smell is the most interesting:  it permeates and envelops but is not enveloped by you; it is evanescent but ever-present; it may surround you, but you cannot grasp it.  Touching often gives a sense of immediacy and intimacy, and tasting is perhaps most intimate, but also can be used to discu...

As I am revising my dissertation into a book for publication, I was thinking about smells and taste, especially smelling and tasting God. The Epistle to the Hebrews uses "taste" to describe salvific experience: "For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy..." (Hebrews 5:4-6a; RSV). Tasting and partaking are, in fact, strong indicators of proximity to God throughout ancient Jewish and Christian literature. There is the famous Psalm that says "taste and see that the LORD is good" (Ps. 34:8). But olfactory language is vibrant whether interpreted metaphorically or more literally. Most analyses of Jewish and Christian mysticism focus primarily on vision and audition, and rightfully so since these are the primary senses...