While many Westerners once assumed that sensory perception is more or less constant and universal, scholarship in the area of sensory studies has shown how volatile and diverse sensory discernment can be. For instance, though Western epistemology categorizes sensory knowledge into five senses, people across world cultures do not agree on the number of human senses that exist (some enumerate two, four, six, or seven senses), nor do they agree on how the senses function. As anthropologists have illuminated, these various notions of sensory perception lead people to translate sensory experience into vastly different worldviews. Thus, researchers have concluded that there is no such thing as “common sense,” as the senses are not universally common, nor do they function together to produce one shared understanding of how the world works.
In addition to highlighting cross-cultural differences, scholarship has demonstrated how sensory values and priorities shift within cultures over time. Changes in society often impact the “sense ratio,” or the conception and valuation of the different senses in a culture. One example is the increased preoccupation in the West with the sense of sight over the past three hundred years. In medieval Europe, a variety of sense ratios reigned that did not always privilege sight over the other senses. However, since the eighteenth century, the importance of vision has grown exponentially in Western epistemology, and the “medical gaze” has become intrinsically linked with scientific knowledge. This emphasis on sight is evident in language about knowledge. For example, people often use the phrase “I see” to indicate “I understand,” as sight and knowledge are virtually one and the same in contemporary culture. But this oneness has not always been the case. To illustrate this point, consider the common phrase “Seeing is believing.” This phrase used to be “Seeing is believing, but feeling [is the] truth.” With the rise of visual, scientific knowledge, however, the truth of feeling by touch or through emotion was no longer considered valid, so the latter part of the phrase was dropped.
Culture-specific paradigms of sensory perception impact the way that people conceptualize and describe spiritual experience. That is, sensory perception shapes spiritual perception. As a religious educator, I have seen that one of the biggest challenges for Latter-day Saints is recognizing spiritual communication, which could be partially due to how members of the Church pigeonhole the Spirit into a specific sensorium. While Saints typically conceptualize spiritual promptings according to auditory or tactile models—hearing the still, small voice or feeling the Spirit—other cultures throughout history have understood spiritual communication differently. And just as scholarship on the physical senses has transformed the way anthropologists conceptualize sensory experience, exploring the spiritual sensoria of other peoples can open our eyes to the various ways that the Holy Ghost communicates. This article explores the sensory worlds of ancient Jews and Christians, focusing particularly on how these ancient believers portrayed spiritual experience by appealing to synesthesia, which is the phenomenon of sensory convergence (for example, hearing color, tasting sound, and so forth). Synesthetic descriptions of spiritual experience demonstrate not only the “divers manners” in which people perceive divine communication (Heb. 1:1) but also the unique, transcendent characteristics of such communication.
Seers and Hearers
Spiritual experiences are impossible to adequately render into language. As the Apostle Paul explains, the Spirit communicates with “groanings too deep for words.” Thus, humans must resort to employing inadequate metaphors to describe spiritual communication, metaphors that often limit the divine. To better understand this notion, we must explore recent advancements in metaphor theory. While a metaphor has been traditionally understood as a simple substitution of meaning from X to Y, the scholar George Lakoff has recently demonstrated that the phenomenon is more complex than this simple equation. That is, a metaphor can be a matter of larger concepts, not mere words. For example, the metaphor “love is a journey” is a broader concept that assembles several subsidiary metaphors, like “we are at a crossroads,” “we are moving forward,” and so on. These latter traveling metaphors are not discrete, independent verbal expressions but products of the larger notion of “journey.” They apply to the target domain of love wherein “the lovers are the travelers, love is the vehicle, and mutual goals are the destination.” Thus, the larger concept of “journey”—which Lakoff calls a “conceptual metaphor”—permits humans to conceptualize the abstract notion of love in the more concrete terms of traveling.
In contemporary Latter-day Saint discourse, spiritual communication operates primarily within the conceptual metaphor of hearing: heeding the whisperings of the Spirit, listening to the voice of the Spirit, and so on. While members of the Church are not typically referencing an actual voice, they conceptualize spiritual promptings as messages to be heard. Consider, for example, Gerald N. Lund’s practical guide on how to receive revelation, Hearing the Voice of the Lord, or Tom Mould’s study of Latter-day Saint folklore related to spiritual experience entitled Still, the Small Voice. While Lund’s work is devotional, and Mould’s is academic, both books clearly situate spiritual experience within the conceptual metaphor of aurality—the Spirit functions like a voice to be heard. Admittedly, Latter-day Saints employ other sensory metaphors for spiritual communication. The notion of “feeling” the Spirit is particularly prevalent in the Church, as promptings are likened to touch. But this tactile metaphor is not conceptual in the way that the auditory is. In other words, “feeling” the Spirit is not a larger concept that provides a map of correlated, subsidiary metaphors for spiritual touch. But the auditory model is just that.
The recent #HearHim initiative is a good example. In 2020, President Russell M. Nelson invited members of the Church to consider the “insistent and consistent” call by God to “Hear [Christ].” Thus, President Nelson issued the following charge: “I invite you to think deeply and often about this key question: How do you hear Him? I also invite you to take steps to hear Him better and more often.” The Church subsequently produced a number of videos highlighting the various ways that Church leaders “Hear Him.” In these brief video clips, Apostles and other leaders employ a variety of auditory metaphors to explain the different ways they hear the Spirit in their lives. Thus, according to this larger conceptual metaphor of hearing, spiritual communication functions as an auditory phenomenon.
Like most figurative language, the metaphor of “hearing” the Spirit bleeds into the nonmetaphorical realm of Church culture. When Saints worship at church or at the temple, they practice reverent devotion by engaging in silent meditation; only whispering is appropriate when communication is necessary. Implied is the notion that loud noises prevent members of the Church from “hearing” the still, small voice of the Holy Ghost. To a large degree, this notion has guided the construction of Latter-day Saint meetinghouses. In a 1943 Improvement Era article, Franklin Y. Gates—an acoustic consultant at KSL broadcasting and for Church construction projects—wrote, “Noise means confusion, quiet is associated with rest and composure. To reduce the noise and create a peaceful atmosphere, we use as much sound absorption material as is practical.” In other words, Church buildings are designed to dampen noise that could drown out the whisperings of the Spirit.
While such notions of quiet piety might seem natural, they are not, even within the Christian tradition. In a work examining the soundscape of early America, Leigh Eric Schmidt surveys rambunctious Christians whom he calls “sound Christians.” Among these were noisy Evangelicals of the early American republic, who worshiped in a manner that was anything but conducive to hearing a still, small voice. Furthermore, the famous cathedral Hagia Sophia, constructed in the sixth century, is renowned for its unparalleled reverberation. Designed by architects known for producing acoustic “special effects”—including replicating the sound of thunder—the enormous cathedral was constructed with marble and other hard surfaces that reflect sound, making Hagia Sophia likely the most reverberant building in the ancient world. One effect of this reverberation is that it blurs semantic speech, swallowing up individual syllables in the resonance of the church. Especially when hymns are sung, the cathedral’s reverberation “relativizes time” as reverberated sounds collide or harmonize with newly sung pitches, creating the impression of endless omnipresence. In an edifice built to honor the eternal and “uncontainable” divine wisdom, as one early observer of the cathedral noted, the seemingly endless reverberation conveys the greatness of God through its unparalleled sound. In fact, one sixth-century writer likens the cathedral to Solomon’s temple but argues that the cathedral is superior to the ancient temple largely due to its grander sound.
Figure 1. Interior view of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul from the balcony. Tinted lithograph with hand-coloring from a series of twenty-five lithographs by Louis Haghe after Gaspard Fossati, published in 1825 with title “Aya Sofia, Constantinople, as recently restored by order of H.M. the svltan Abdvl-Medjid.” © The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (original in public domain), lightened.
This type of resonant worship is foreign to Latter-day Saints, who are accustomed to straining to hear the whisperings of the Spirit. But like medieval worshippers at Hagia Sophia, the auditory metaphor of a soft voice leads members of the Church to place inordinate stress on acoustics (though in the opposite direction). Compare norms of sound control in the Church to other sensory parameters. No regulation about vision exists, for instance. Is there ever a concern that the fluorescent lights are too bright in a church building, preventing a person from “seeing” what the Spirit has to show? Is this perhaps because contemporary members of the Church almost never conceptualize the Spirit as something to be “seen” or “watched”? Similarly, are Latter-day Saints ever concerned with diminishing the aromas of a church building, so the Spirit can be properly smelled? These questions seem absurd, but we will see that such sensory preferences are particular to our culture’s “sensory textures.”
To better understand our sensory preferences, we must explore our past. One could trace the Latter-day Saint preoccupation with “hearing” the Spirit to the Protestant milieu in which the Church emerged. Protestants of the sixteenth century equated the sensory-rich mass of traditional Christianity with the “flesh” of the Old Testament, and they identified the simple word with the pure Christianity of the New Testament. In other words, they preferred the simplicity of the written or spoken word to the multisensory tradition of “bells and smells.” This sensory preference, which emerged with the Reformation, transformed Christian piety in a rapid fashion. For example, the visual presentation of the Eucharist, which was the focal point of the medieval mass for centuries, lost preeminence in the early sixteenth century. As one scholar points out, while worshippers in 1515 wanted to “see” the Eucharist host, worshippers in 1525 wanted to “hear the plain word of God.” Such a dramatic fluctuation in religious sensibility certainly reverberated in the metaphorical realm. As hearing the word became the dominant medium of worship, hearing the Spirit became the dominant metaphor for perceiving divinity in many circles. Thus, one could plausibly argue that Latter-day Saint preferences for auditory spiritual metaphors stem from this Protestant cultural transformation.
However, Joseph Smith throws a wrench into this simple equation. In a recent monograph, Mason Allred traces a narrative of visual piety from Joseph Smith’s First Vision through the first two decades of the restored Church’s existence. Joseph’s numerous visitations from Moroni—more than twenty in number—represent a visual experience that Allred describes as “not only repetitious but repeatable.” In addition to the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon, scores of others—including Mary Whitmer, Zera Pulsipher, and Oliver Granger—testified of seeing angels or other celestial phenomena, essentially “repeating” Smith’s visual experience. Like Joseph the Seer, Saints were invited to see spiritual phenomena. In fact, Allred identifies a key difference between scriptural reading practices of Latter-day Saints and their Christian neighbors in the 1830s and 1840s: “Where Evangelical print culture . . . was a sustained attempt to use the Word to transform the world,” early Latter-day Saint scriptural practice endeavored “to see through the word into the spiritual realm that was material and ever present.” For Latter-day Saints, scripture functioned like the seer stone, offering views of spiritual reality beyond the text. This notion of looking at scripture and seeing something yonder—what Allred describes as “becoming a visionary observer by turning natural vision into spiritual vision”—was a harbinger for realities in the hereafter. Indeed, Joseph Smith taught that all exalted residents of the celestial kingdom would one day possess a white stone, or “Urim and Thummim,” wherein they would see all things.
Since Joseph’s day, however, the Church has experienced a shifting sensorium. Despite the marked visuality of the Restoration—not only the First Vision but the entire visionary mission of the latter-day Seer—twenty-first century Saints typically focus on the auditory command uttered in the First Vision, “Hear Him.” Thus, rather than underscoring the invitation for all to be seers like the Seer, the contemporary Church invites all to be hearers. What caused this sensory transformation? An adequate answer to this question would require extended analysis and is beyond the scope of this article. But one component could be the misuse of spiritual sight in the early restored Church. For example, Hiram Page, one of the eight witnesses of the gold plates, required correction of his visionary powers when he began seeing problematic visions in a seer stone. Ultimately, misguided spiritual viewing like Page’s led Joseph Smith to feel the need to delineate true visions from counterfeit ones. Apparently, seeing spiritual truths in the early Church was just as difficult as hearing the still, small voice is for many in the modern Church.
To be clear, this discussion of shifting senses is not a call for the Church to return to visual-based spirituality. Any historian of the senses recognizes that sensoria—both physical and spiritual—change over time. This is to be expected. Modern prophets, who we sustain ironically as “seers,” have invited the world to “hear” God, as audition is the primary conceptual metaphor for contemporary spirituality in the Church. Nonetheless, members of the Church would do well to recognize that the discourse of spiritual hearing was not always dominant.
Throughout history, God has communicated with people via different spiritual media. Nephi teaches this principle when he asserts that God “speaketh unto [humankind] according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Ne. 31:3). Commenting on this notion, Mark Alan Wright observes that “language is not limited to the words we use” but also “entails signs, symbols, and bodily gestures that are imbued with meaning by the cultures that produced them.” I would also add that “language” includes a culture’s sensorium. And just as we should learn new grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation when we wish to understand a foreign tongue, we should also learn the sensory realities of other cultures when we wish to understand their spirituality. If we impose our sensorium—and especially our spiritual metaphors—on others, we risk elevating our “blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception,” to use Roland Barthes’s expression. In other words, we fail to recognize that our spiritual metaphors are not normative for all human spirituality, and we essentially limit God’s communicative power. However, by interrogating the sensory realities of others, we can better understand spiritual communication across time and space.
Synesthesia of Scripture
Ancient Jews inhabited a different sensorium than we do, and learning about their sensory notions can be challenging. Researchers of ancient Jewish senses have limited data, as ancient Hebrew has no verbal category that parallels the modern term “sense” or “sensorium,” and no extant Hebrew writing overtly theorizes about the senses. Nonetheless, researchers can glean an ancient Jewish sensorium based on the linguistic associative patterns in the Old Testament. Employing this methodology, one study identifies seven different senses among ancient Jews: sight, hearing, kinaesthesia, speech, taste, touch, and smell.
Scholars of the Old Testament have traditionally understood ancient Jewish culture as one that privileged hearing over all other senses, including vision. This preference for the auditory is particularly evident in accounts of perceiving the divine. Deuteronomy, for instance, preaches an audiocentric God who is encountered sonically rather than visually (see Deut. 4:12). Furthermore, prophetic books include a large “number of verbal oracles which attest no visual component.” And when visions do occur, they are often reliant on auditory explanations (for example, Zech. 4; Dan. 10–12). Thus, ancient Hebrew revelation was, according to the traditional scholarly narrative, primarily an acoustic phenomenon.
But recent scholarship challenges this notion, arguing that sight was the preeminent sense in the ancient Jewish sensorium. Simply put, according to one recent study, “sight leads to knowledge” in the Hebrew tradition. A number of biblical passages pair the verb “to see” with “to know,” exhibiting close connection between the two. Furthermore, proof of God’s miracles are attested in the visual arena, and divine reality is visually perceived by prophetic “seers.” “Seeing God” is also central in cultic ritual, as “viewing” Yahweh is the “preeminent image for the experience of God in the temple.” On the other hand, without divine aid, limited human vision results in error and madness in the Old Testament. Furthermore, the hallmark of divine punishment is blindness, which is directly associated with lack of knowledge and understanding. Drawing on this tradition of visual knowledge, several Second Temple and rabbinic writers hypothesize that the name “Israel” (ישראל) stems from the Hebrew verb “to see” (ראה), rendering the Jewish people “a nation of lookers.” And as one study demonstrates, rabbinic writers of late antiquity sought to establish themselves as the ultimate arbiters of vision; rabbis taught that only those who looked on the radiant face of a righteous rabbi could receive Torah knowledge.
Despite this newly recognized Jewish ocularcentrism, Latter-day Saints typically do not focus on the visual when they discuss spiritual communication in the Old Testament. Instead, they refer to the soft-spoken Holy Ghost in 1 Kings 19, in which Elijah journeys to Mount Horeb (Sinai), the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments. There, Elijah recognizes messages from God not in the traditional signs of theophany associated with the holy mountain—fire, “great wind,” and earthquake—but in a voice that is either soft or silent, translated in the King James as a “still small voice.” This depiction of God is quite rare in the Hebrew Bible, however. As one scholar notes, this passage is “almost alone” in its portrayal of God as “accessible to neither the eye nor the ear but evident to an inward sense that can hear silence.” Despite Latter-day Saint preference for this unique passage, one can imagine worshippers at Hagia Sophia gravitating more toward biblical passages depicting the theophanic hubbub associated with Moses receiving the law at Sinai (for example, Judg. 5:4–5; Ps. 18; Ps. 29). For them, the thundery manifestation of the divine—who spoke with thunder and a remarkably resonant trumpet—resonated with their own experiences (Ex. 19:16–19).
While Latter-day Saints often reference Elijah’s experience with the still, small voice, a different sensory notion prevails in scriptural accounts of God communicating with ancient Israelites: synesthesia, which is defined as the convergence of sensory faculties or when “the senses touch one other.” Sensory scholars typically distinguish two types of synesthesia. The first is a neuropsychological phenomenon, wherein “a stimulus in one sensory modality triggers an automatic, instantaneous, consistent response in another modality (e.g., sound evokes color) or in a different aspect of the same modality (e.g., black text evokes color).” The second is verbal synesthesia that joins “terms derived from the vocabularies of the various sensory domains,” such as a “loud perfume.” The Old Testament employs both of these forms of synesthesia, typically when it describes a vivid experience with divinity. As we shall see, God was known to evoke the neuropsychological phenomenon of blurring sensory modalities (seeing words, and so on). This notion likely inspired the broader conceptual metaphor of verbal synesthesia that pervades written accounts of divinity. Thus, while contemporary Latter-day Saints operate within the conceptual metaphor of spiritual hearing, ancient Jews operated within the conceptual metaphor of divinely inspired synesthesia.
The emphasis on synesthesia does not mean, however, that sensory mingling was the only conceptual metaphor for divine communication. As discussed above, scholars debate the degree to which Jews operated within conceptual metaphors that were primarily auditory or primarily visual. Nonetheless, synesthesia is a paradigm for divine communication that is prevalent not only in the Old Testament but also in the Book of Mormon, New Testament, and other early Christian and Jewish sources, as we will see below. Divine presence was often recognizable due to its sensual alterity.
The ancient emphasis on synesthesia should not be surprising, as the phenomenon is relatively common in descriptions of heavenly encounters across an array of religious traditions. Broadly speaking, the merger of sensory perception underscores the convergence of human and divine. In the Symposium, for instance, Plato describes the process of approaching pure, divine beauty in its totality. The penultimate step before ascending to this transcendent experience is synesthesia, where sensory experiences are unified. Similarly, in the medieval Christian liturgy, sensory commingling serves to “transfigure at once the things perceived, and the subject perceiving them, and to unite them through the ‘immutation’ of the senses which conforms them to, rather than extrinsically representing, the [divine] objects of perception.” In other words, synesthesia represents transformation and ultimately union with God.
Old Testament Synesthesia: Seeing Smells and Sounds
In the Old Testament, synesthesia very often involves the combination of vision and other senses. In these instances, the merger of sensory modalities indicates divine presence and confirms the execution of God’s will. Genesis 27, for example, recounts a very sensory story of birthright inheritance. Isaac, whose “eyes were so dim that he could not see” (Gen. 27:1), tells his eldest son, Esau, to go hunt game and prepare “tasty” food for him to eat before he blesses the potential heir with a ritual of inheritance (Gen. 27:4). Overhearing this, Rebekah hatches a plan with Esau’s younger brother Jacob for him to deceptively take the place of his older brother. But Jacob is concerned with touch—what if Isaac feels his smooth skin that doesn’t resemble Esau’s hairy body? Assuaging his concerns, Rebekah cooks tasty food with Jacob for his father, dresses the boy in Esau’s clothes, and places the skins of goats on his hands and neck. When Jacob approaches his father and claims to be Esau, inquisitive Isaac wonders how his son has the voice of Jacob but the hands of Esau. Nonetheless, Isaac eats the meal prepared for him and asks Jacob to come close to kiss him. It is at this suspenseful moment when synesthesia confirms Jacob’s birthright. So far, the story has incorporated all the Hebrew senses except smell—sight (or lack thereof, blindness), hearing, kinaesthesia (going out to hunt), speech, taste, and touch. When Jacob comes near his father, however, Isaac’s doubts are put to rest as he smells the garments of his son—this is the divinely ordained heir. The patriarch exclaims: “See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed.” Blind Isaac ironically now knows, or “sees,” that the smell of Jacob’s clothing has the aroma of a blessed field. In this case, the sense of smell confirms true birthright and functions like authorizing vision.
Interestingly, several rabbinic commentaries on this text compare the scent of Jacob to other sacred fragrances. According to one rabbinic opinion, recorded between AD 300 and 500, “When our patriarch Jacob entered to his father, the Garden of Eden entered with him.” That is, Isaac smelled the pungent aromas of Eden in Jacob’s garment, aromas that were known in ancient Jewish sources to have inordinate power. In fact, in first-century versions of the Life of Adam and Eve, the only items that Adam takes from the Garden of Eden upon his expulsion are spices and aromatic plants. Thus, these fragrances become the “one element in the inhabited world that had its direct source in Eden’s splendor.” By smelling Eden, Jacob links heaven and earth, the human and the divine.
Another rabbinic opinion connects Jacob’s clothes to a different holy scent. According to some late ancient rabbis, the smell of Jacob prefigured the fragrant incense that would burn in the Israelite temple centuries in the future. One rabbinic work even claims that God let Isaac see the future temple of Israel, with its pungent incense, when he smelled the garment of his blessed son. Ultimately, regardless of what Isaac smelled and saw in Jacob’s clothes, divine favor was sanctioned in synesthetic sight and smell.
Throughout the Old Testament, synesthesia is a hallmark of biblical theophanies. In these accounts of divine encounters, hearing and seeing typically complement one another. Ezekiel 43:1–5, for instance, employs visual and verbal descriptions of the “glory” of God; the presence of the almighty Jehovah is like the rising sun from the east combined with the sounds of many waters. Speaking of Ezekiel’s synesthetic description, Mark Smith observes, “By combining two types of natural phenomena, this passage may be suggesting that the nature of God is so great that it incorporates aspects of both types. It may also indicate that God’s appearance was considered so great that it could not be identified easily with, or reduced to, one natural phenomenon. In effect, God is above the language of natural phenomena; God is truly ‘super-natural.’” Thus, by transcending one sensory mode, God demonstrates that he is beyond terrestrial perception.
God’s supernatural nature is also revealed at Sinai, which is the most famous instance of synesthesia in the Old Testament. When Moses is on the mount receiving the Ten Commandments, “all the people see the voices” of thunder that God articulates. Enigmatically, God’s speech is something to see, not hear. This defining moment for the people of Israel—the divine bestowal of their law that sets the precedent for all subsequent relations with God to a large degree—occurs in a mysterious, synesthetic fashion of visible speech.
For millennia, this passage has inspired Jewish interpreters to theorize about the nature of God’s visible voice. For example, according to one ancient Jew named Philo of Alexandria (around 20 BC–AD 50), God’s words at Sinai are words of light, not sound. Moses sees them; he does not hear them. On the contrary, the idolatrous golden calf represents the inferior sense of hearing (as it was made from the golden earrings of the Israelites). Thus, God is experienced in the visual realm. Significantly, however, according to Philo, the divine and the human merge when God descends via the verbal to his prophets, who ascend via the visual. God speaks luminosity, and prophets experience synesthesia to symbolize the coming together of human and divine, the auditory and the visual.
Jewish writers throughout the ages have similarly theorized about the Sinai revelation, though they have not found widespread agreement about the nature of this synesthetic encounter with divinity. A near contemporary of Philo, Rabbi Akiva (around AD 50–135), taught that the Israelites saw the fiery word extend from the mouth of God and strike the Ten Commandments onto the tablets. On the contrary, Rabbi Judah the Prince (around AD 135–217), argues that the notion of seeing the word of God refers to the Israelites’ miraculous ability to immediately visualize and interpret the divine voice, which was originally auditory. The medieval Jewish mystical work called the Zohar includes several other rabbinic opinions about the nature of the visible speech on Sinai, with each interpretation underscoring the transcendent nature of the synesthetic voice. Similarly, one fifteenth-century rabbinical commentary on Exodus teaches that each word that God uttered at Sinai took on physical form and could be seen in the air as floating letters. Ultimately, no matter how these Jewish readers interpreted the Exodus passage, they understood the revelation of God as something that occurred in a manner that differed from standard sensory experience. The synesthetic description of Sinai inspired these interpreters to conceptualize divine communication as otherworldly.
Book of Mormon Synesthesia: A Delicious Word, Tasting Light, and a Piercing Voice
Like many writers of the Old Testament, Nephi conceptualizes divine communication as a combination of the visual and verbal. He explains that while the “words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do,” the Holy Ghost “will show unto you all things what ye should do” (2 Ne. 32:3, 5, emphasis added). Various figures in the Book of Mormon also resemble Old Testament writers in their descriptions of sight-based synesthesia. For instance, in 1 Nephi 8, Lehi is journeying in a “dark and dreary waste” (1 Ne. 8:4) when he sees a tree bearing fruit that is not only the sweetest that he has ever tasted but the whitest thing that he has ever seen. When Nephi sees the same tree in a vision a few chapters later, he remarks that it exceeds “the whiteness of the driven snow” (1 Ne. 11:8). The fruit of this tree is so white that it is essentially light—this is at least how Alma the Younger interprets the vision. In his discourse on planting the seed of the tree of life in Alma 32, Alma compares the process of cultivating the growing tree to tasting its luminous fruit. He asks, “After ye have tasted this light is your knowledge perfect?” (Alma 32:35). How can a person taste light? Normal sensory functions render this notion impossible. But the love of God, represented in the fruit, is otherworldly—it is perceived differently.
Figure 2. Fruit of Life by Megan Rieker, oil on canvas, 2017, by permission of the artist.
This notion of tasting light gains more significance when we consider that Alma’s discourse on growing the seed of the tree of life was originally in the same chapter as his rebuttal of the antichrist Korihor. Thus, as Grant Hardy argues, we should read these passages in light of one another. Korihor is fundamentally ocularcentric, arguing that humans cannot know of things they cannot “see” (Alma 30:15). He denies traditions about God who “never has been seen or known,” unless Alma will “show” him a (presumably) visible sign. Ironically, Alma conjures an auditory sign, striking the visually oriented Korihor dumb. While this ostentatious display silences Korihor in a flurry, the narrative does not provide a fleshed-out rebuttal of Korihor’s epistemology until Alma discourses on the seed of the tree of life a little while later. There, Alma explains that spiritual knowledge functions differently than Korihor’s visually oriented paradigm. Rather than the result of standard eyesight, sure knowledge, or “light,” is the product of eating the fruit that is “white above all that is white” (Alma 32:42). In other words, light and knowledge are the result of eating the metaphorical fruit, not seeing with the literal eye. This synesthesia of tasting light reinforces the notion that spiritual knowledge cannot be perceived the same way as physical knowledge.
The counterintuitive connection between tasting and seeing is prevalent in the Book of Mormon. In this regard, Nephite prophets echo the sentiments of the Psalmist, who states, “Taste and see how good the Lord is.” In Alma 36, for instance, Alma tells his son Helaman how he came to know Christ, “not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of God” (Alma 36:4). Then, outlining his conversion, Alma speaks of “the exceeding joy” which he “did taste,” as well as the many converts who also “have tasted as I have tasted, and have seen eye to eye as I have seen” (Alma 36:24, 26). Being “born of God” permitted Alma and his subsequent missionary converts to experience spiritual knowledge in the form of delicious vision. Similarly, King Benjamin and Mormon also draw on the discourse of spiritual taste to describe their knowledge of divine truths. Thus, just as the contemporary Church maintains the spiritual injunction to “Hear Him” from its founding story, the Nephites draw on the synesthetic combination of taste and light from their founding story: the famous account of the tree of life.
The climactic theophany of the Book of Mormon is also rich with synesthetic themes and resembles Old Testament revelations. In 3 Nephi 8, the most terrible storm in Nephite history announces the death of the Messiah. With thunder, lightning, and earthquakes, the tempest evokes the divine demonstration at Sinai. But 3 Nephi includes an even more overt reference to the events of the Exodus: a “thick darkness” comes upon the land so that all the inhabitants of the Nephite lands “feel the vapor of darkness” for three days (3 Ne. 8:20, emphasis added). While many readers explain this tangible darkness as the likely result of volcanic ash, it also recalls the ninth plague of Egypt where God curses the Egyptians with “darkness” so thick “it can be felt.” Following this synesthetic darkness in Egypt, which lasts three days, the Lord slays the firstborn Egyptians, and the Israelites flee Egypt to Sinai, where they experience a synesthetic theophany and see the sound of God’s voice. Likewise, in 3 Nephi, the three-day tangible darkness comes in the wake of the death of the Firstborn Son, and the people subsequently experience a synesthetic theophany when Jesus appears. Just as the Israelites at Sinai had seen divine words, the Nephites see the Word. Furthermore, these Nephite witnesses of Christ later testify that they “saw and heard Jesus speak” (3 Ne. 17:16–17, emphasis added), combining the visual and aural like the account of the famous theophany of Exodus. Clearly, Christ is the synesthetic “God of Israel,” the title he uses to introduce himself to the people of the Americas (3 Ne. 11:14).
Another central component of this Book of Mormon theophany is the voice that comes from heaven. In the darkness, the people hear a loud declaration that echoes “upon all the face of [the] land, crying” woes and repentance (3 Ne. 9:1). Then, about a year later, the people at the temple of Bountiful hear a “small voice” announcing the arrival of Christ (3 Ne. 11:3). Thus, like Sinai—where God’s thundery presence is experienced by liberated Israelites, and his still, small voice is heard by Elijah—the divine voice in the Book of Mormon resounds at opposite ends of the decibel scale. And when it announces the arrival of Christ in a quiet tone, the voice bears synesthetic properties. The people are physically affected by it—“[the voice] did pierce them that did hear to the center,” causing their frames to “quake” and their “hearts to burn” (3 Ne. 11:3). Furthermore, the Nephites and Lamanites are unable to understand the voice until they look “towards the sound thereof” (3 Ne. 11:5). Similar to Sinai, there is a synesthetic nature to the voice.
New Testament Synesthesia: See the Word; Jesus Narrates the Father
Like the Book of Mormon and Old Testament, the New Testament often employs synesthetic descriptions for divine phenomena. It almost goes without saying that Christ’s incarnation represents an anomaly in history, as divinity “was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Even though there was “nothing [special] in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2, NIV), there was something unique, even synesthetic, about his presence. For instance, in a recent analysis of divine speech in Luke’s nativity account, Brittany Wilson notes the significance of seeing, not just hearing. “For Luke,” Wilson observes, “there is something important to ‘seeing’ divine speech.” This sensory merger is evident in the shepherds’ reaction to the angelic annunciation of Christ’s birth: “Let us see this word which the Lord revealed to us.” Like the Israelites who see the divine words at Sinai, the shepherds go to see the divine word recently spoken to them. This notion recalls the synesthetic statement of Jesus in Luke 8: “Watch how you listen.”
A similar synesthetic description is found at the beginning of the Gospel of John. The fourth gospel is perhaps the most ocularcentric text in the New Testament. In this account, Christ is the “light of all humanity” who invites potential disciples to “come and see” where he dwells. When Nathanael answers the call to see Jesus in John 1, the Lord informs him, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree” (John 1:48, NIV). Christ’s visionary power leads Nathanael to dub Jesus the “King of Israel.” Potentially drawing on the tradition of Israel as a “nation of lookers,” Nathanael recognizes Jesus as the king of seers. But Christ overlooks this acclaim and promises Nathanael grander vistas than Christ himself just witnessed: “You will see greater things,” Jesus informs Nathanael. “You will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” Then, throughout the fourth gospel, the disciples see the incredible views promised by Jesus, including the Father himself in Christ. As Jesus states, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9, NIV). Christ is the ultimate theophany, revealing even the Father.
Despite this overtly visual witness, Christ inspired notions of synesthesia in John. The Gospel’s prologue (John 1:1–14) declares Jesus to be “the Word” (Logos), which is a common title in ancient Greek writings for the divine reason that orders the cosmos. As this Word, Christ espouses a visual, luminary function: he is the “true light that gives light to everyone” (John 1:9, NIV). At the same time, however, Christ also resonates acoustically with Jewish tradition; John links Christ the Word to the Genesis account of God speaking a word “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1; John 1:1). In this regard, Jesus embodies both the visual and the verbal simultaneously. This amalgam is particularly evident in the Johannine reference to Sinai. After outlining the wondrous sight of Christ incarnate—asserting “we viewed his glory”—John declares that “no one” had previously “ever seen God” (John 1:14, 18). This statement is almost certainly a reference to Exodus 33:18–23, where Moses is allowed only a partial view of God’s “glory.” John distinguishes this partial view from the unobstructed divine revelation embodied in Christ and his visible “glory.” That is, John implies what is explicitly proclaimed later in the Gospel: “Anyone who has seen [the Son] has seen the Father” (John 14:9, NIV). But, curiously, John’s prologue uses a verbal word to convey this visual reality. The Gospel explains that Jesus, the Word, “exegeted” or “narrated” the Father, employing the verb ἐξηγέομαι, which denotes the dictation of words in a narrative. Thus, the prologue—which is filled with optical and luminous depictions of the Word—concludes with an auditory descriptor. Similar to, though grander than, Sinai, Christ’s revelation is a synesthetic combination of sight and hearing.
After the death of Jesus, his post-Resurrection appearances likewise trigger synesthesia. On the road to Emmaus, for instance, Jesus interprets scripture to his disciples and causes their hearts to “burn,” linking an oral interpretation to a physical sensation. Then, when Jesus breaks bread, he causes their eyes to be “opened,” connecting the tactile breaking of bread to the notion of vision. His other post-Resurrection appearances are likewise overtly sensory, combining visual, tactile, auditory, and gustatory phenomena. Ultimately, the Gospels bookend Christ’s earthly life with synesthetic descriptions of his birth and Resurrection. Jesus is revealed by synesthesia.
Conclusion
Ancient scripture is replete with synesthetic descriptions of divinity. Transcending the standard sensory perceptions of everyday life, divine communication occurs beyond the discrete, terrestrial senses. The faithful see divine words, smell the promises of God, and taste heavenly light. These notions pervade ancient sacred texts, as synesthesia constituted a primary conceptual metaphor of divine phenomena. Though these notions were “foolishness” to the “natural [hu]man,” spiritual communication was known to be sui generis, or “spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14, KJV). It defied the sensory modalities of everyday life.
While the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints inhabits a conceptual metaphor of auditory spirituality, members would do well to recognize that this notion is specific to our era. Studying other spiritual languages, so to speak, can inform learners about divine communication generally. Perhaps, as we respond to the call to “Hear Him,” we can recognize that his messages come in a variety of forms, including synesthesia. With the ancient faithful, we can taste the light or see the words of his love.
