Coming to (Terms with) Our Senses: Seeing, Hearing and Smelling the Gods

Abstract

ABSTRACTDivinities all over the world are seen, heard and smelled. It is remarkable how common reports of sensory perception of the gods are and how casually they are presented, similar to any other sensory perception. Furthermore, scholarship contains a fairly detailed picture of the first-person reports about seeing, hearing and smelling divinities. Both reports about sensing the gods and scholarly reports about such accounts will briefly be introduced before the neurophenomenology of sensory perception is looked at as an additional conversation partner in this debate. This article is an attempt to appreciate the complexity of the biocultural processes that constitute sensory perception as well as to critically engage with claims of sensing the divine because immaterial gods and supernatural entities and agents cannot be seen, heard or smelled in any ordinary sense. The aim of this article is to explore the crosscultural and neurophenomenology of the senses and sensory perception as a background to understanding claims of perceiving the divine; it is not to add any new analysis or description of first-person accounts or actual instances of sensory perception of the divine but a theoretical reflection about the senses and sensory perception. An attempt at understanding what is going on when the divine is seen, heard and smelled is not made in order to dismiss or endorse such claims but to situate them. Sensing the gods leads to believing but believing also leads to perceiving.