Does God have a sense of smell? Does God have an aroma? These may seem like fanciful questions, but consider: there is hardly a religious tradition that doesn’t at least suggest that god smells, in both senses of the word. Aromatic burnt offerings are a common feature in Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist temples. Incense also figures prominently in Catholic and Greek Orthodox rituals. And think of Native American smudging ceremonies.

Such aromatic offerings are often explained as a way to purify the atmosphere or concentrate the attention for meditation or prayer. But they are also meant as a gesture of respect and a means of getting God’s, or the gods’, attention. As the scented air rises toward the heavens, the gods, the Bodhisattvas, or the beneficent ancestors detect the aroma and gather round. Probably the first religious use of fragrance was to sweeten the smell of animal flesh burned as sacrifice. As incense was tossed onto a fire, it would fill the sky with a smoke somehow otherworldly and magical, as it climbed to the realm of the gods, making a path for prayers to follow.

Certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is portrayed as having a sense of smell. In the Old Testament acceptable sacrifices and pious conduct are repeatedly spoken of as “a sweet smell or savor, well-pleasing to God.” Those who do not honor God are said to offend God’s sense of smell. In the New testament, the Christian is compared to the sweet smell of Christ and a saint’s prayer is said to bring a sweet odor before the throne of God. As Christianity developed, smell was recommended as a tool of discernment for the state of one’s soul. Supposedly if you had a pleasant aroma, that was proof that you were close to God; if you had a repellant odor, it was a sign of your sinful nature. Holy people were said to give off a winsome fragrance even in situations in which others would have smelled wretched. Consider the case of St. Irene, an abbess, whose clothing caught on fire while she was in the midst of prayer. Her fellow sisters beat out the flames and as they pulled the hot cloth from Irene's burned flesh, it’s said that "a strange fragrance incomparably more fragrant than any perfume" wafted from Irene's wounds. Corpses of saints didn’t stink, but were said to give off an “odor of sanctity” comparable to the most fragrant of roses.

Even in Islam, which for the most part eschews the use of scent in worship, there is a connection between spirituality and aroma. Builders of mosques used to mix rose water into mortar so that the noon sun would heat it and bring out the perfume. According to the Sufi mystic Yunus Emre, the rose is a spiritual symbol because it sighs “Allah! Allah!” each time one smells it. And the Islamic man religious enough to attain paradise, and be awarded those 72 heavenly maidens who attend to every whim and desire, will discover they are made, not of flesh and blood, but of pure sandalwood.

Sweet smells have been seen not only as something pleasing to God or something that indicates holiness, but also as a means of knowing the divine. As I mentioned, smell concentrates the attention and so it is has been used through the ages as an aid to meditation or prayer in both Western and Eastern religions. But further, religious writers argued that the sense of smell is particularly well suited to reveal something about God to human beings, because smells were a bit like God—you sensed them, but you couldn't see or touch them. You knew that an odor had a source, even if the source was far away. Scents, then, pointed toward a God people couldn’t see but who was, nonetheless, real.

Now, I imagine that for those of us more familiar with Protestantism and its’s typically more austere form of worship, the idea of smell as an avenue toward or feature of the divine may seem strange. And, even if we are familiar with references to smell in relation to God, we are apt to interpret them, at best, metaphorically. But what if we took smell seriously as something that could reveal to us the nature of ultimate reality and inform us about what it means to live a live of wholeness? As Unitarian Universalists ours is an incarnational theology—to us the sacred doesn’t exist in some other realm but is rather all around us, all the time. What spiritual lessons might our sense of smell impart?

Every time we breathe—and we breathe over 23, 000 times a day—odors flood our smell receptors with information. And yet how often do we notice? Our world is awash with fragrance—not only the odors of the natural world, but the smells attendant upon modern living. On the one hand, we seem to crave smells. We perfume our bodies, our hair, our breath; we perfume almost everything that enters our lives, from detergents to toilet paper. Only 20% of the perfume industry’s income comes from making perfumes to wear; the other 80 percent comes from perfuming the objects in our lives. It has been proven repeatedly that if you give people two cans of identical furniture polish, one of which has a pleasant odor, they will swear the pleasantly scented one works better. Aromatherapy, which purports to bestow physical and psychological well being through the use of aromatic plant oils, is all the rage. We seem to lust for fragrance and, yet we often take our sense of smell for granted. When people are asked to rank the senses, in terms of which would be most awful to lose, smell consistently ranks at the bottom. And yet, as those who have lost their sense of smell can attest—people who suffer from anosmia, as its called—our sense of smell is central to our psychological, emotional, and, I would argue, spiritual health.

Loss of the sense of smell, whether as a result of head trauma or illness, radically diminishes one’s engagement with life. Patients with anosmia report feelings of sadness, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, loss of motivation, inability to concentrate, a loss of interest in normally pleasurable pursuits, and thoughts of suicide. Doesn’t this sound like a description of depression? In fact, these are all key symptoms of depression and current research indicates that loss of smell leads to depression. Now, you might think that this could be explained simply as the reaction to the onset of any disability. It isn’t unusual, for example, for those who are suddenly blinded or lose their hearing to go through a period of depression; but, unlike in these cases, with anosmia, the depression doesn’t get better with the passage of time as patients adapt to their disability. Rather the emotional health of anosmics continues to deteriorate. When asked about their experiences, anosmics report a life irreparably impoverished. For them food has no taste—80% of what we call taste is derived from smell. To anosmics eating is like chewing sawdust; they often have to remind themselves to eat. Their sex drive also disappears and when they do engage in sexual activity, it brings them only the faintest echo of the pleasure they used to enjoy. And they live with constant anxiety—of offending others by their own body odors they can no longer detect—or of not being able to detect fire, gas leaks, or rotten food. But most tragic of all they feel disconnected from other people and worse, disconnected from their own self; that their lives are empty, as if they are is some kind of eternal limbo.

Why would the loss of the sense of smell have such dramatic effects on the personality and sense of identity? The answer lies in the origins of our sense of smell and how our sense of smell is tied to memory and emotion.

Smell, or olfaction, was the first of the senses to evolve and it’s the only sense that single-celled creatures share with us today. In its most basic form olfaction is a chemical sense; its function is to enable an organism to know what is good and what is bad for survival. Is this a “good” chemical like food? Or is this a “bad” chemical like poison? Do I approach or avoid? From this primitive survival guide, the sense of smell evolved into a highly intricate go/no-go system for finding food and mates, establishing social hierarchies, avoiding predators and many other complex behaviors. The sense of smell is the primary sense by which most of our animal brethren, including our primate relatives, negotiate the world. For us, vision has taken over as the primary sense that facilitates our survival. But odors still evoke in us the remnants of this primeval survival code and they are intimately linked to our emotions.

The most immediate reaction we have to a scent is whether it is good or bad—we approach what smells good, avoid what smells bad. Emotions also convey a similar simple message. Positive emotions, such as joy and interest, tell us to approach—and ultimately result in our successful survival. Negative emotions, such as anger or fear, tell us to avoid, triggering a flight-or-fight response. Our emotions impart the same approach/avoidance codes that smell imparts to animals. But the connection between smell and emotion is not only metaphorical but also is founded on the evolution of our brain. A primitive olfactory cortex was the first type of brain. From this tissue grew the amygdala, where emotion is processed, and the limbic system, the parts of the brain that are responsible for basic memory and motivation. In other words, the ability to experience and express emotion grew directly our of our brain’s ability to process smell. Emotions are to us what scents are to our animal cousins. And, unlike stimuli from other senses which are processed in other parts of the brain first, smells go directly to the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls emotion.

Much of our reaction to smell goes on below the conscious level and more than any other sensory experience, odors have the ability to trigger our emotions—to fill us with joy and rage, to bring us to tears and make our hearts ache, to incite us with terror and to arouse our desire. Moreover, in laboratory experiments, scents can be conditioned so that they act as emotional proxies, stimulating thoughts and influencing behavior just as the original emotions did. Is it any wonder then that, deprived of a sense of smell, our emotional life becomes bleak, our motivation and interest inert?

The origin of our sense of smell and its link to emotions also explain the almost uncanny ability of smells to reawaken memories and transport us in space and time. Almost everyone has had the experience of suddenly being overtaken by a vivid or poignant memory triggered by a particular smell. And most often these memories are laced with potent emotion. Studies show that memories evoked by scent are more emotionally laden, the amgydala more active, than memories evoked with visual or sound cues. Because of this link to memory, a sense of smell is key to a sense of self. Our memories make us who we are. Without memory we are at sea in a constant jumble of the present, lost in place and time. Losing one’s sense of smell doesn’t destroy memory, but it diminishes and alters it. As one anosmic put it, “it’s as if a part of myself is missing and forever gone.”

Perhaps this all sounds like too much science, too far removed from the original question, does God smell? But if, as can be argued from this science, our sense of smell more than any other, helps define us, doesn’t that lead us into the dimension of the spiritual? Think for a moment of your own personal lexicon of important smells. The smells of your childhood, the smells of courtship and union, the smells of those people and places you love. When I think back on my childhood, I bring to mind the smell of freshly turned earth in spring, newly mown hay in high summer, dried corn stalks and burning leaves in fall. I think of mint that grew wild by the side of the road, of sassafras whose bark evoked that distinctive root beer aroma, and the lilac bush heavy with blossom and heavenly scent just outside my grandmother’s door. I think of the scent of laundry hung to dry outdoors, its fresh smell evocative of sun and grass and wind itself. Or the smell of an approaching storm as the barometric pressure fell and the earth released its vapors from nooks and crannies in the soil. I think of my father’s smell, as he returned hot and dirty from the fields, a combination of perspiration, grime and the pungent aroma of cattle, horse and swine—a scent that, though potent, spoke of honest labor borne close to the earth. And my mother—a sweet, nurturing blend of soap, cooking odors and the subtle perfume of the one luxury she afforded herself—a scented talcum powder whose name I simply cannot remember—the smell of her dusted arms a refuge of sustenance and warmth. And, that smell I can recognize yards away which never fails to transport me to adventures of my youth—the intoxicating blend of saddle leather, horses steaming from a gallop across the meadows and, yes, even manure. As a child I would bury my nose in my beloved horse Breeze’s neck and simply inhale.

What are the smells of your childhood? What are the smells of your courtship and desire? Could you recognize your beloved, your children, in the dark by their scent? Our personal lexicon of smells can tell us whom we love and what we fear. They can ground us and tell us where we belong. When Mark and I first moved to Houston, one of the disconcerting things was that Houston didn’t smell right. The woods had an unfamiliar moldy smell; the bayou smelled like no creek either of us had known. Now, that bayou smell, that smell like no other, speaks to us of home.

Whatever your personal lexicon of defining smells, they are unique to you, yours alone. Two decades ago, we knew very little about the sense of smell—it was deemed hardly worthy of study. But as scientists have begun to appreciate how vital a role it plays in human well being, we are learning more and more. We now know that there are no intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aromas, not even the smell of death and decay. All our estimations of scents are learned and learning begins before we are born. At twelve weeks in the womb we have a fully functioning sense of smell. We smell what our mother consumes in her amniotic fluid, effecting our preferences after we are born. Babies whose mothers ate garlic or curry while pregnant prefer those scents to others. Even a taste for vanilla, which is typically thought universally appealing, is learned—vanilla is a strong flavor component of human breast milk and most milk formulas. Human beings are immensely variable in what smells we find appealing—or disgusting. People from Europe, where skunks are not indigenous, don’t find skunk odor to be unpleasant unless previously warned. Asians despise the smell of cheese, while the Japanese relish a fermented soybean dish most North Americans couldn’t bear to bring close to our mouths. Even fecal smells have their afficionados—the Masai like to dress their hair with cow dung. But surely, you think, there must be consensus about truly horrid stenches—like the smell of a burning body? But if you live in a country where outdoor cremations are the norm, often accompanied by celebration, the emotions you associate with that smell and hence your estimation of it would be quite different. The U.S. Army has been trying to develop a universal “stink bomb” to use for crowd dispersal, as a safe alternative to tear gas. That’s proved impossible. No odor tested, including “U.S. Army issue latrine scent”, was found to be unanimously unpleasant across ethnic groups.

Our reactions to smells are shaped by our individual history and culture. Moreover, your individual body odor is as unique as your fingerprint. That’s why bloodhounds can track a missing person by smelling an item of clothing. Your body odor is somewhat influenced by diet and hygiene, but that is only a superficial overlay. Scientists have discovered that our body odor is an external manifestation of the genes for our immune system, which is also unique to every one of us. And it appears that body odor plays a key role in our selection of mates; that it is our unique body-odor chemistry that makes things click between two people—and I am not referring to pheromones, which, despite popular misconceptions, are not smells. For heterosexuals, the people whose smell we find attractive and sexy turn out to have immune systems exactly complementary to our own. This seems to be evolution’s way of ensuring the survival of the species, because mates who have complementary immune systems produce children with a greater resistance to disease. But the relation of body odor to sexual attraction also holds for homosexuals. In blind studies, gay men prefer the smell of gay men to either straight men or women. For both sexual pleasure and survival of the species, scent is a crucial factor. And when we can no longer smell our partner, as with anosmics, a crucial dimension to sexual pleasure is gone.

Body odor also plays a role in kinship and friendship ties. Because people who are genetically related to one another smell similarly, we recognize family by smell. Mothers can easily distinguish the scent of their own newborn from another by nothing more than a sniff of their crown. Infants can recognize the smell of their mothers in less than three hours after birth. Siblings can identify each other by smell alone even after long periods of separation. And spouses and friends can easily recognize each other by body odor because of the familiarity of each other’s scent learned through physical proximity and shared experiences.

We identify whom and what we love by smell. And also what we loathe. Charles Dickens abhorred the mere whiff of a certain type of paste used to fasten labels to bottles because it brought back painful memories of his childhood when bankruptcy forced his father to abandon him in a hellish warehouse where they made such bottles. Each of us has a unique matrix of smells we find delightful and smells we would rather avoid, constructed through our individual history and the culture in which we are raised. The science of smell teaches us that what we find repellant often says more about ourselves than the nature of the thing itself. Surely there is a spiritual lesson here, literal and metaphorical—that we can educate our noses through exposure and association enriching and deepening our lives. As William Carlos Williams’ poem suggests, why should we limit our experience of the world by what would we not be smelling?

It is probably not possible to enjoy every smell that comes our way. Indeed, some smells warn us of danger, things we should avoid. And there are odors to which we might hope we never become inured—the stench of war, the smell of unnecessary pain. But perhaps even these smells can instruct. Is there a smell of suffering which could lead you to greater compassion? A smell of sorrow that points to grief work that needs to be done? I once knew a woman who abhorred the smell of roses. She had first smelled them at her mother’s funeral when she was five. Roses evoked feelings of abandonment and loss, anger and guilt. She avoided them altogether until a wise therapist suggested that roses might provide a way into the mourning necessary for her to heal. When this woman concluded her therapy, she planted roses in her garden to celebrate—and to put that part of her who felt like a forsaken child to rest.

The average human nose can distinguish as many as 40,000 aromas, aromas which add dimensionality, intensity and meaning to our lives. And what’s more, by paying attention to smells we enhance our ability to smell. Walking around my neighborhood this week with my newly awakened appreciation for smell, blocks I have walked a thousand times suddenly exposed new worlds of sensation. Our sense of smell is an astonishing gift, a miracle from our evolutionary past when we were a deeply connected part of nature. Smells link us to all creation and thus, to God, the ultimate source and mystery of life. Can we not, as Mary Oliver’s roses do, rise in joyfulness to sing songs of thanks and praise?

Major Sources

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Avery Gilbert, What the Nose Knows. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.
Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.