fascinated…by scents
Scent is a form of time travel. Our olfactory organs are uniquely connected to limbic structures in the brain that affect memory and autobiographical recall. In a famous scene from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the taste and smell of a madeleine dipped in hot tea immerses the narrator in the memory of his beloved aunt’s bedroom, decades earlier. The scent of cedar returns me to moments when my grandmother opened her cedar chest to reveal an envelope full of letters, or my grandfather’s old pay stubs, or little things of mine she had carefully put aside for safekeeping.
Meanwhile, the smell and taste of a madeleine send me to a first-grade bake sale in 1984, not to Belle Époque France; and, if I open that cedar chest for you, you might just break out in a cold sweat, possessed by the vivid memory of chewing a nº2 pencil on your third try taking the SAT. Given memory’s role in interpreting it, scent is the hardest sense to share, a time travel journey we seem destined to take alone.
Sensory historians try to bridge this gap, to understand what it was like to sense in earlier times and how the senses shape history1. Alain Corbin writes that the early 19th-century French bourgeoisie’s tastes moved towards lighter fragrances and away from musks because those scents reminded them of the smell of the unwashed poor2; Tricia Starks examines how the scent of tobacco affected Russians’ ideas about the world, colonialism, and Russian society itself3. But these are, largely, commentaries on what sensing meant, not commentaries on the lived experience of sensing.
For the most part, when we try to understand that lived experience, we rely on the words of those who came before us; and those words can only rely on sensory signposts, many of which become meaningless with time. Even water, our standard for pure tastelessness, changes in flavor from moment to moment and place to place, as the captives serenading the rivers of Babylon4 could tell you.
The niche perfumers of today are trying to use scent to translate the past into the present, dropping us into our own Proustian moments. ānti Perfumes’ “bast” recreates an ancient perfume used by the pharaohs; Stora Skuggan’s “Silphium” uses contemporary ingredients to try to replicate Silphium, an ancient-world herb once more valuable than gold that was picked to extinction thousands of years ago. Future Society creates unique fragrances using DNA experiments to capture the scents of long-extinct flowers. I have tried all of these, wondering how close I am coming to the moment some grave-robber pried open a sarcophagus and was briefly overwhelmed with Hatshepsut’s perfume, or whether I now know what Apicius’ kitchen smelled like.
Unlike these long-gone substances, frankincense and myrrh are scent referents that survive across thousands of years—and still exist today. Most people only encounter them in luxury fragrances or Biblical recipes for worship; in their raw forms, however, they are sticky, aromatic resins that form when certain trees are cut or injured. From the trees’ perspectives, they are the scents of panic and pain; for us, they are otherworldly, acrid resins that called our ancestors to prayer.
These sensory guideposts entered Jewish history when our desert people burned their first offerings to their God and deliverer. Frankincense and myrrh sanctified prayer; they were essential components of worship until the destruction of the Second Temple. Myrrh was stirred into anointing oils, frankincense was burned as incense, rising along with the scents of roasting meat and desert grasses hot under the sun.
Converts to Judaism are told that, traditionally, all Jewish souls throughout all of history “stood” at Sinai when the Torah was given to the Jewish people. When I smell frankincense and myrrh, I am, perhaps, smelling the moment that my Jewish soul was born. I am shoulder to shoulder with Miriam in the desert, and, for one inhalation, we are breathing the same air.
Emma Widdis, “The Challenges of Sensory History,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, no. 1 (2020): 199–206.
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks, eds., Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion. (Psalms 137:1)