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8 - Death and the Polluting Spirit

from The Soul: From the Table to the Grave

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2021

Yitzhaq Feder
Yitzhaq Feder
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
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Summary

People stink. Rocks don’t smell (or at least we don’t smell them). Trees may give off smells, especially rotting ones, but they don’t stink like rotting animals. There seems to be a great chain of being, whereby the more dynamic the creature (e.g. the more it engages in activities such as locomotion, eating, sex), the more disgust-potential is manifested in its decomposition. While biochemists may attribute this odor to emissions of sulfur and ammonia, many cultures interpret the smell of death to the spirit of the deceased at it leaves the dead body.

Type
Chapter
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Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible
From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor
 , pp. 145 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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