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Sensory Blending
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

SensoryBlending
On Synaesthesia and Related
Phenomena
EDITED BY
Ophelia Deroy
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

3
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First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Tables ix
List of Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Ophelia Deroy
Part I. Deﬁning and Measuring Synaesthesia
1. Synesthesia, Then and Now 13
Lawrence E. Marks
2. Synesthesia vs. Crossmodal Illusions 45
Casey O’Callaghan
3. Synesthetic Perception as Continuous with Ordinary Perception, or:
We’re All Synesthetes Now 59
Jonathan Cohen
4. Reporting Color Experience in Grapheme-Color Synesthesia: On
the Relation Between Color Appearance, Categories, and Terms 84
Yasmina Jraissati
Part II. Challenges Raised by Synaesthesia
5. Synesthesia and Consciousness: Exploring the Connections 107
Myrto Mylopoulos and Tony Ro
6. Synesthetic Binding and the Reactivation Model of Memory 126
Berit Brogaard
7. Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Synaesthesia 151
André J. Abath
8. When is Synaesthesia Perception? 166
Mohan Matthen
9. Can Synaesthesia Present the World as it Really Is? 179
Michael Sollberger
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

Part III. Boundaries of Synaesthesia: Unconscious,
Acquired, and Social Varieties of Sensory Unions
10. Questioning the Continuity Claim: What Difference Does
Consciousness Make? 191
Ophelia Deroy and Charles Spence
11. The Induction of Synaesthesia in Non-Synaesthetes 215
Devin B. Terhune, David P. Luke, and Roi Cohen Kadosh
12. Patrolling the Boundaries of Synaesthesia: A Critical Appraisal of
Transient and Artiﬁcially Induced Forms of Synaesthetic Experiences 248
Malika Auvray and Mirko Farina
13. Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Intersubjective or Intermodal Fusion? 275
Frédérique de Vignemont
14. Personiﬁcation, Synaesthesia, and Social Cognition 292
Noam Sagiv, Monika Sobczak-Edmans, and Adrian L. Williams
Index 309
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi
viCONTENTS

List of Figures
1.1. Schematic representations of monism, which treats synesthesia as 32
the end-point on a continuous spectrum of perception; dualism,
which distinguishes sharply between synesthetic perception and
nonsynesthetic perception; and pluralism, which, like dualism,
distinguishes between synesthetic perception and nonsynesthetic
perception, but also distinguishes subcategories within the broad
category of synesthesia.
1.2. An example of a pluralistic model of synesthesia, in which 36
cross-modal synesthesia is prototypical, with other kinds of
synesthesia falling close to the prototype (e.g., cross-dimensional
synesthesia, such as colored graphemes) or farther from the prototype
(e.g., mirror touch, induced cross-modal imagery).
6.1. When normal subjects are presented with theﬁgure on the left, it 130
takes them several seconds to identify the hidden shape. Some
grapheme-color synesthetes instantly see the triangular shape
because they experience the 2s and the 5s as having different colors.
See e.g. Rich and Karstoft (2013).
10.1. People consistently match meaningless speech words, such as 192
‘kiki’or‘mil’, with angular and small visual shapes (see Köhler,
1929, 1947; Sapir, 1929; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001).
These crossmodal correspondences also appear in the literature
on‘sound symbolism’.
10.2. Two ways of recognizing a continuity between cases of 194
non-conscious crossmodal matchings known as crossmodal
correspondences and cases of systematic unusual conscious
experiences known as synaesthesia: (a) Inherited from Martino and
Marks (2001), this view merely acknowledges that a shared
mechanism can lead continuously from non-conscious matchings
all the way through to conscious joint experiences; (b) Adapted
from Rader and Tellegen (1987), the latter view postulates two
dimensions of variation (speciﬁcity and the vividness of
concurrent).
10.3. An alternative hypothesis positing that variations between 203
crossmodal correspondences and synaesthesia vary along three
dimensions (speciﬁcity, frequency, and control of the concurrent(s)).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

14.1. Stimuli used to induce object personiﬁcation in synaesthetes. 301
The right image resembles a social exclusion situation which
typically causes those who regularly personify objects to pity the
sad and lonely object. The left image represents the baseline
condition.
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viiiLIST OF FIGURES

List of Tables
2.1. Synesthesia vs. crossmodal illusions. 54
5.1. A summary of the mainﬁndings on the question of whether conscious 113
awareness of the inducer or its identity are required for a synesthetic
response to occur.
10.1. Summary of the different dimensions along which a continuity 207
between crossmodal correspondences and canonical synaesthesia
can be articulated. The evidence quoted for each hides the existence
of clusters of cases.
12.1. Summary of the criteria fulﬁlled by four alleged cases of synaesthetic 265
experiences: post-hypnotic suggestion, drug-use,ﬂavor perception,
and use of sensory substitution devices. In the table we also added
congenital synaesthesia and crossmodal correspondences. The terms
yes and no are used when the claim is not controversial, debated is
added when there are existing data but their interpretation is subject
to controversy, and lack of data is used when more empirical data
are needed.
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List of Contributors
ANDRÉJ. ABATH, Department of Philosophy, Federal University of Minas Gerais
M
ALIKAAUVRAY, Institut des Systemes Intelligents et de Robotique, Centre National
de la Recherche Scientiﬁque, Paris
B
ERITBROGAARD, Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research, University of Miami
J
ONATHANCOHEN, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
O
PHELIADEROY, Institute of Philosophy, University of London and Munich Centre
for Neuroscience, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich
M
IRKOFARINA, Department of Philosophy, King’s College, University of London
Y
ASMINAJRAISSATI, Department of Philosophy, American University of Beirut
R
OICOHENKADOSH, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
D
AVIDP. LUKE, Department of Psychology & Counselling, University of Greenwich
L
AWRENCEE. MARKS, Department of Psychology, Yale University
M
OHANMATTHEN, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
M
YRTOMYLOPOULOS, Department of Philosophy and Institute of Cognitive Science,
Carleton University, Ottawa
C
ASEYO’CALLAGHAN, Department of Philosophy, Washington University, Saint
Louis
T
ONYRO, Department of Psychology, City College & The Graduate Center, CUNY
N
OAMSAGIV, Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging, Brunel University
M
ONIKASOBCZAK-EDMANS, Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging, Brunel
University
M
ICHAELSOLLBERGER, Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg
C
HARLESSPENCE, Department of Psychology, University of Oxford
D
EVINB. TERHUNE, Department of Experimental Psychology, Goldsmiths, University
of London
F
RÉDÉRIQUE DEVIGNEMONT, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris
A
DRIANL. WILLIAMS, Brunel University, Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 20/3/2017, SPi

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Introduction
Ophelia Deroy
When she was sixteen, Patricia Duffy and her father were reminiscing about how, as a
child, she learned to write all of the letters very quickly except for the letter‘R’. She
said to her father that this lasted‘until one day, I realized that to make an“R”all I had
to do wasﬁrst write a“P”and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so
surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line’.
‘Yellow letter? Orange letter?’her father wondered,‘what do you mean?’‘Well, you
know,“P”is a yellow letter, but“R”is an orange letter. You know, the colours of the
letters.’‘The colours of the letters?’her father replied.
It is at that moment, when seeing her father’s bewildered reaction, that Patricia
realized that the whole world might not share these perceptions. As far as she
remembered, each letter of the alphabet would automatically appear with a speciﬁc
colour, and remain invariably the same, time after time. However, until then, it never
came up in any discussion that she saw yellow Ps, orange Rs, or purple Vs. Had it
appeared before, she would still have thought such a statement to be as ordinary as
saying that apples are red and leaves are green. At that time, Patricia had never heard
of synaesthesia, a condition in which ordinary stimuli elicit unordinary experiences.
She suddenly realized that perception could be something individuals did not share,
although most assumed they did: Could perception, she wondered, be‘something
that put them on a private island, mysteriously separated from others’?
1
Patricia’s reaction at the discovery of synaesthesia will certainly be shared by
everyone learning about the strange‘sensory blending’that seems to affect her,
along with 4 to 6 per cent of the population. While most cases of synaesthesia are
similar to Patricia’s experience of coloured graphemes, some also consist in visual-
izing colours when hearing certain musical notes, others in experiencing a taste when
reading the names of famous individuals or subway stations, or feeling shapes when
eating speciﬁc foods. What these cases have in common is not just their oddity, but
also their involuntary character: synaesthetes are not able to turn off the eruption of
1
Duffy, 2001: 5.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 17/3/2017, SPi

additional experiences, like they would do for other forms of mental imagery.
Whereas a piece of music, for instance, might lead us to imagine a landscape or
some moving lines, it still leaves us with the possibility to stop this visual imagery, or
eventually control its content. Synaesthetes who have colour experiences when they
hear musical notes cannot stop them from occurring, nor can they decide to
modulate the colour which these sounds bring to mind. Even training has almost
no power on the content of these additional experiences.
2
Cases of synaesthesia such as coloured graphemes or colour hearing do not easily
ﬁt within our usual way of carving conscious experiences: They are vivid, automatic,
and consistent like perceptual experiences, and yet they do not seem to represent
objective properties of objects, or to arise from the same route as normal percepts.
They could be assimilated to cases of mental imagery if it was not for the lack of
control that characterizes their induction and content. Explaining how the content of
synaesthetic experiences is determined is no less difﬁcult thanﬁnding their place
within our usual taxonomy of experiences: they do not seem absolutely random, as
synaesthetic repertoire sometimes obeys a form of regularity, within or across
individuals, and yet remains highly idiosyncratic; the association does not seem to
be innately determined, as synaesthetic monozygotic twins will not associate the
same colours to the same sounds or letters; nor does it seem to come from past
experience, and respond to exposure to new associations.
What makes synesthesia so interesting to consider is that it is a separate kind of
mental state, and—what is pretty rare—a positive symptom. In other words, it is
deﬁned by the presence of additional experiences, rather than by the absence of a
function. Synaesthesia is not associated with any other particular pathology or
general cognitive or perceptual dysfunction, although it can co-exist with other
conditions, like savantism and autism, for instance.
3
In other words, besides their
synaesthesia, synaesthetes are in all respects similar to non-synaesthetes. This avoids
some of the concerns one can have when generalizing from atypical to typical cases,
where key differences might exist beyond the symptom at stake.
Questions remain as to what the general lessons of synaesthesia should be. What
do synaesthetes’experiences, and the capacity for the synaesthetic brain to generate
such experiences, reveal beyond fascinating idiosyncrasies? In recent years, synaes-
thesia has started to be used as a model to think about more widespread cases of
sensory interactions, making sensory blending a broad characteristic of our sensory
systems and experiences. As synaesthetes come closer to non-synaesthetes, new
questions arise as to whether these arbitrary sensory pairings should not, after all,
join up with our concepts of perception, mental imagery, or learned associations, or
whether the category of synaesthetic association should not be extended to phenom-
ena previously labelled under different names. At this stage it is important to see that
2
See Deroy and Spence, 2013 for a discussion of some recent training studies.
3
E.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 2007.
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INTRODUCTION

the problem is not terminological, but conceptual. Sorting mental phenomena in the
same or different categories has implications for the way we think about the mind
and its relation to the brain as well as the external world. This is what the philo-
sophers and cognitive neuroscientists in this volume address.
Most of the scientiﬁc efforts have for a long time been concentrated on establishing
the reality of the reports given by a few individuals. The patient work of key researchers,
such as Richard Cytowic, Lawrence Marks, Vilyanur Ramachandran, Simon Baron-
Cohen, Jamie Ward, David Eagleman, and many others, has provided researchers
with a battery of psychophysical tests and neuro-imagery criteria to show how the
behavioural responses and brain activity of synaesthetes differ from control groups.
This increased evidence, however, has not made theoretical questions disappear: the
problem here is not merely that synaesthetes’experience is different from that of
others, but that it is at odds with reality: the orange shade experienced by a coloured-
hearing synaesthete when she hears a certain note is not a sign that the note out there
is really orange. What can this experience be about, then? Does it attribute an illusory
colour property to the sound? Does it have any representational content at all?
Synaesthetic experiences, as we begin to understand, do not easilyﬁt into the
dominant representationalist framework. More recent studies, though, give us new
reasons to look at synaesthesia as a source of objections to standard theories of
perception and mental processes.
I.1 Beyond minority reports
Philosophers and cognitive neuroscientists mostly base their accounts of synaesthesia
on coloured graphemes, which remain the most frequent kind of synaesthesia. Many
other forms of synesthesia exist, however, with inducers as diverse asﬂavours,
swimming movements, or proper names. The additional experiences generated by
the presentation of these objects may involve colour, but also all sorts of sensory or
non-sensory contents: digits can be associated to certain locations in space, words
can induce taste sensations in the mouth, tastes can trigger tactile shape sensations.
In cases of personiﬁcation, numbers or days of the week are associated with person-
ality traits, emotions, or gender.
These peculiar experiences, despite their variety, still have much in common
regarding their aetiology, duration, and range of manifestations: atypical conscious
manifestations were experienced from a very early age, when a stimulus was presented
or imagined in a certain sensory modality, and they continue to do so automatically
and in a highly consistent way in adulthood. Congenital cases, in this respect, remain
the most investigated and discussed form of synaesthesia. Still, there are other cases
where the stimulation of one sensory stream coincides with the involuntary activation
of another unstimulated stream, to which the synaesthetic label could apply. There are
cases where the activation in the unstimulated stream remains non-conscious, but
might still interfere with the processing of information in the stimulated one; there are
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 17/3/2017, SPi
OPHELIA DEROY 

transient drug-induced experiences where hearing sounds also leads to experiencing
visual concurrents while one’s eyes are closed;‘visual experiences’can also emerge
after the onset of blindness, and individuals might feel pain when they see someone
else in pain.
Deciding to count these cases as related to synaesthesia not only makes it more
frequent and widespread, but also potentially universal. If the occurrence of a
conscious concurrent is not necessary, or if the occurrence of a thought is sufﬁcient
to count as synaesthesia, then the surprising intuitive connections we all make
between sensory attributes, such as high pitch and high spatial elevation or low
pitch and darkness, become potential candidates to join the synaesthetic crowd. But
should we classify all sorts of surprising, or at least unpredicted, conscious experi-
ences as synaesthesia—independently of the content of the experience? Should we
restrict the name synaesthesia to the idiosyncratic forms of sensory blending, or
extend it to other regular forms of cross-talk across sensory channels? If only some
forms of synaesthesia are conscious, doesn’t consciousness at least make a difference?
These questions come with normative constraints, asking us to go beyond superﬁcial
similarities between a large variety of phenomena, to see whether they share some
relevant commonality, or where the differences are.
I.2 Revising our deﬁnitions of perception
These questions raise new challenges for philosophers, who have to accept that they
need to move beyond the quasi-idealized version of synaesthesia they have held over
the last decades.
4
The assumption that synaesthetic experiences behave exactly like a
perceptual experience, except for being anomalous and non-veridical, made them too
quickly look like another kind of illusion or hallucination. The speciﬁc as well as the
general lessons of synaesthesia might have been lost in this assimilation.
Isn’t the systematic correlation with the external world sufﬁcient to consider syn-
aesthetic experiences as perceptual? The insistence on veridicality after all can be
bargained for a set of accuracy conditions, which can relate the experience of, say,
the colour yellow to the occurrence of a middle C. The fact that the synaesthetic colour
comes hand in hand with the experience of the musical note, and perhaps as an
enrichment of its content,
5
means that the synaesthete can eventually use it as further
evidence that the note was played, and to form the true belief that they heard middle C.
Not being shared is certainly not a reason to consider a certain kind of experience
as non-genuinely perceptual, or illusory. Take the case of taste perception: due to
genetic determinants, certain perceivers (super-tasters) have an experience that very
few other tasters share, and taste intense bitterness where others taste nothing. It has
been argued thatﬂavour perception, because of this genetic and other acquired
4
E.g. Auvray and Deroy, 2015 for a review and discussion.
5
Deroy, 2015.
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INTRODUCTION

differences, makes us all live in‘different taste-worlds’
6
similar to the‘private islands’
that Patricia Duffy describes in her opening story. In a more conceptual fashion, the
so-called‘inverted spectrum’thought experiment
7
presses the same point: if the
qualitative experience an individual has when they see ripe apricots, oranges, and
mandarins is similar to the ones the rest of us have when seeing limes or leaves,
and vice-versa, the individual, unique character of their experience doesn’t rule
out that they are having a perception. Likewise, the idiosyncratic difference exhibited
by synesthetic experiences is not sufﬁcient to say that they are not perceptual.
More generally, the deﬁnitions and descriptions of synaesthesia given in the
scientiﬁc literature all seem to converge on its inclusion as perception—for criteria
which seem to be to do with the underlying mechanism. Synesthesia is deﬁned as‘the
stimulation of one sensory modality reliably caus[ing] a perception in one or more
different senses’(Cytowic, 1997) or as an‘anomalous sensory perception’(Asher
et al., 2009). One way to think of synesthesia might be as a case of‘indirect
stimulation’occurring when‘stimulation of one sensory modality automatically
triggers a perception in a second modality, in the absence of any direct stimulation
to this second modality’(e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 2007). An important question to
ask, then, is whether we should insist on the difference between direct and indirect
stimulation (Cohen, Chapter 3 of this volume) or welcome cases of non-retinal vision
as instances of‘phantom perception’, as proposed by Pearson and Westbrook (2015).
I.3 Accepting arbitrariness and missing control
New questions need to be answered before we can decide how conscious cases of
synaesthesia compare to other cases of multisensory interactions, notably cases
where one automatically forms a mental image in a non-stimulated sensory modality.
Is the difference to be found in the fact that synesthetic experiences really present
themselves like perceptual experiences, whereas mental images remain subjectively
distinguishable from perceptual experiences? Is this indistinguishability sufﬁcient to
consider synaesthetic experiences as perceptual?
An important question to consider here concerns the mechanisms that differen-
tiate between sensations that are under voluntary and involuntary control. Is there a
distinct mechanism that explains why we have the sensation of voluntarily inducing
or changing a mental image, and could such a volitional mechanism also be present
during synaesthesia, but missed by synaesthetes who would then feel the mental
image to be involuntary? The latter possibility shows that synaesthesia might have to
do with a failure not of control, but of being metacognitively aware of such control.
Of all the neural accounts of synaesthesia that are currently available—i.e., disin-
hibition of feedback, a breakdown of modularity, enhanced neural connectivity, or
6
Bartoshuk et al., 1996.
7
Block, 1978.
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OPHELIA DEROY 

neural cross-talk
8
—none makes a strong prediction regarding such discontinuity
between the synaesthetic and non-synaesthetic brain. If the available evidence seems
to point to there being a critical period for the development of synaesthesia, probably
only in those with a genetic predisposition to develop the condition, this does
not rule out the existence of transient or weaker forms of synaesthesia in the rest
of the population.
9
But how weak can the effects of a connection between sensory areas or sensory
domains be to still count as synaesthesia? What if these connections make no
difference to the conscious experience we have, or to the categorizations or discrim-
inations we make? Is the apparently arbitrary character of the association, which is
characteristic of both the conscious and unconscious cases, sufﬁcient to be deﬁned as
synaesthesia?
I.4 Redrawing the distinction between the senses
If it is possible to hear colours or experience colours as a result of auditory stimu-
lation, synesthesia suggests that the senses are not as separated as we commonly
think and cannot be individuated by pairs of characteristic stimuli and experiences.
It is therefore a challenge to modularity and the individuation of the senses.
10
If pairs of stimuli and experiences start to appear as far too simple, shall we not
look further into the sensory pathways that are activated during non-synaesthetic
and synaesthetic experiences? Brain imaging studies have revealed that synaesthetic
experiences often involve increased activation in primary sensory brain areas. For
instance, when synaesthetes hear an auditory inducer that triggers colours for them,
there is increased activity in the area in the fusiform gyrus known as V4 or V8; that is,
the brain areas involved when non-synaesthetes perceive colours. Interestingly, such
increased activation does not occur in non-synaesthetes trained to associate sounds
with colours and who are subsequently asked to visually imagine the corresponding
colour when hearing the sound. Other—not strictly sensory—areas of the brain (i.e.,
parietal and frontal regions) also show speciﬁc patterns of activation in some
synaesthetes. Synaesthesia is likely to be characterized more broadly as an increased
cortical connectivity between various sensory brain regions, either directly or indir-
ectly (via the mediation of non-sensory processing). Further questions then arise as
to whether the increased connectivity comes from a lack of inhibition or from an
abnormal increase in connectivity. Localization of the activity might also end up
playing a less crucial role thanﬁner structural or functional differences in terms of
the neural correlates of synaesthesia.
8
See Rouw et al., 2011.
9
See Martino and Marks, 2001; Simner, 2012.
10
E.g. Deroy, 2015 ; Segal, 1997; Keeley, 2013.
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INTRODUCTION

More recently, doubts have also arisen as to whether shared localization in V4/V8
from bold activity means that the same kinds of neurons are active in synaesthetic
colour-enriched auditory experience and non-synaesthetic colour experiences. A study
by Van Leeuwen et al. (2010) revealed that the neurons involved in synaesthetic
experiences do not show the same patterns of suppression through repetition as the
ones involved in typical perception, concluding that‘the neural correlates of synaes-
thetic colour experience and real colour experience are not fully shared’.
11
A cautious note is needed here, given the obvious need for further exploration and
empirical research, but also the dependence between the neuroscientiﬁc investigation
and the conceptual questions highlighted before: if it is not clear that there is a uniﬁed
condition called‘synaesthesia’, which is the same in coloured-grapheme, coloured-
hearing, and taste-words synaesthetes, and which also includes mirror-touch
phenomena or spatial-number cases, the underlying mechanisms of synaesthesia
might be much more varied and complex than expected.
I.5 Overview
As the range of sensory blending documented as synaesthetic becomes wider,
researchers like Lawrence Marks (Chapter 1) admit spending‘much time and energy
chasing down the elusive creature known as synesthesia’.‘Early in this quest’, Marks
reﬂects,‘I thought I’d caught up with it: I was poised, ready to snare it—only to watch
it get away. Apparently, myﬁrst synesthesia-catcher was too small, and insufﬁciently
ﬂexible, to capture a critter at once so large and agile’.
Saying that synaesthesia is getting larger is almost a euphemism: some, like
Jonathan Cohen (Chapter 3), consider that synaesthesia might be a pervasive trait
of sensory processing, where one sense modality draws on the information present in
another sensory stream. The challenge raised by Cohen in this respect is not to accept
that atypical cases of coloured graphemes or coloured hearing might present dis-
tinctive characters, but to question why they should not be seen as continuous with
typical cases of sensory integration.
However, the extension of the list of synaesthetic phenomena also depends how
synaesthesia is assessed and measured, as discussed by Yasmina Jraissati (Chapter 4).
Crucially, extending the list of synaesthetic phenomena also depends on whether one
thinks that synaesthesia blurs into perception, something which is at the centre of
the debate between Casey O’Callaghan (Chapter 2), Mohan Matthen (Chapter 8),
and Michael Sollberger (Chapter 9). As Merleau-Ponty noted, and as discussed
by André Abath (Chapter 7), the same question might arise for a broader range of
less conscious synaesthetic effects, which might come to play an unnoticed role in
everyday perception.
11
See also Hupe et al., 2012.
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OPHELIA DEROY 

Obviously, though, the occurrence of anomalous, arbitrary conscious experiences
is still the sore point which raises questions for our theories of consciousness (as
discussed by Myrto Mylopoulos and Tony Ro, in Chapter 5) and our models of
perceptual circuitry (as detailed by Berit Brogaard, in Chapter 6). It is perhaps the
systematic and involuntary character of the conscious experience, more than its
unusual content, which makes synaesthesia so special, as Charles Spence and
I argue in Chapter 10.
What then of the boundaries of synaesthesia? Pharmacological agents, in particu-
lar serotonin agonists, have consistently been shown to produce synaesthesia-like
experiences, but whether such experiences are associated with the same behavioural
markers as genuine synaesthesia remains unknown. Associative training, notably under
hypnosis or following the loss of sight, isalso accompanied by more or less transient
forms of synaesthetic experiences, with black shapes or sounds starting to elicit colour
experiences. What would be the marker of synaesthesia that could decide on whether
these phenomena are continuous with the more canonical developmental cases? This is
discussed in Chapters 11 and 12 respectively by Devin Blair Terhune, David P. Luke,
and Roi Cohen Kadosh; and Malika Auvray and Mirko Farina.
Even developmental cases and non-transient cases raise new questions: in mirror-
touch or mirror-pain cases, for instance, individuals experience a conscious tactile or
painful sensation on the same body part as the person they observe being touched or
hurt. Is this‘synaesthesia’, or is the connection not arbitrary enough to count as such?
Would the idea of vicarious experience do a better job, as suggested by Frédérique de
Vignemont in Chapter 13? The question is not terminological and asks which cases
we should see as related; it arises acutely when considering cases of blendings which
are more frequent in synaesthetes, but not speciﬁc to them, like the tendency to
attribute genders or personality traits to inanimate objects—a case of personiﬁcation
with which Noam Sagiv, Monika Sobczak-Edmans, and Adrian L. Williams conclude
in Chapter 14. These series of cases question the function of such apparently arbitrary
conscious experiences—i.e. whether they arise out of certain learning conditions or
subserve a social or memory function.
Overall, these contributions stress the increased relevance synaesthesia has for our
understanding of the mind. They also show why this relevance depends on philo-
sophical and neuroscientiﬁc issues being addressed together: the lessons of synaes-
thesia depend on the deﬁnition and extension that the category takes, and how one
chooses to draw the boundaries of the condition, or individuate its various forms.
Functionalist and physicalist criteria, anda prioridistinctions between perception
and mental imagery, are all challenged by the cases discussed here. Synaesthesia in
this respect might be unique in having offered, since its veryﬁrst discussions in the
early decades of the nineteenth century, a forum where the criteria for individuating
psychological kinds have always come into tension, and generated opposite solutions.
What it shows now, more than ever, is how conceptual and empirical challenges need
to be addressed together.
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INTRODUCTION

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of London
for sustained support for the research that has led to this volume. Many colleagues, collabor-
ators, and postdoctoral students have been an inspiration and a source of instruction on this
path, and their contribution to the present volume, as well as their patience all through its
completion, are the best testimonies of the intellectual friendship that academic life can create.
I would particularly like to thank Malika Auvray and Charles Spence, who were myﬁrst
interlocutors and collaborators on the topic of sensory blendings. Additional thanks should
go to Amir Amedi, Paul Boghossian, Ned Block, Yi-Chuan Chen, Sam Coleman, Paul Coates,
Tim Crane, Merle Fairhurst, Chris Frith, Vittorio Gallese, Vincent Hayward, Ron Kupers,
Anthony Marcel, Peter Momtchiloff, Bence Nanay, Matthew Nudds, Daniel Ospina and the
Crossmodalists,David Papineau, Christopher Peacocke, Maurice Ptito, Joelle Proust, David
Rosenthal, Nick Shea, Dan Sperber, and the members of the NASH, Ana Tajadura-Jimenez,
and Manos Tsakiris, for the rich discussions that have formed the background to this volume.
Among the most precious friendships and sources of support and intellectual stimulation to
have blended with this volume is the one I have had the pleasure to share at the Centre for the
Study of the Senses with Barry Smith.
References
Asher, J. E., Lamb, J. A., Brocklebank, D., Cazier, J. B., Maestrini, E., Addis, L., Sen, M., Baron-
Cohen, S., and Monaco, A. P. (2009) A whole-genome scan andﬁne-mapping linkage study
of auditory-visual synesthesia reveals evidence of linkage to chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12,
and 12p12.American Journal of Human Genetics, 84(2), 279–85.
Auvray, M. and Deroy, O. (2015) Synaesthesia: How synaesthetes experience the world,
in Matthen, M. (2015)Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bargary, G. and Mitchell, K. J. (2008) Synaesthesia and cortical connectivity.Trends in
Neuroscience, 31(7), 335–42.
Baron-Cohen, S., Bor, D., Billington, J., Asher, J., Wheelwright, S., and Ashwin, C. (2007)
Savant memory in a man with colour form-number synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(9–10), 237–51.
Bartoshuk, L. M., Duffy, V. B., Reed, D., and Williams, A. (1996). Supertasting, earaches and
head injury: Genetics and pathology alter our taste worlds.Neuroscience & Biobehavioral
Reviews, 20(1), 79–87.
Block, N. (1978) Troubles with functionalism. In C. W. (ed.),Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, vol. IX. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Repr. in
N. Block (ed.),Readings in Philosophy of Psychology(pp. 268–305). Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cytowic, R. E. (1997) Synesthesia: Phenomenology and neuropsychology. In S. Baron-Cohen
(ed.),Synesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings(pp. 17–39). Oxford: Blackwell.
Deroy, O. (2013) Synaesthesia: An experience of the third kind? In R. Brown (ed),Conscious-
ness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience. Studies in
Brain and Mind(pp. 395–407). Amsterdam: Springer Press.
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Deroy, O. (2015) Synaesthesia as enriched experience, in Coates, P. and Coleman, S. (eds.),
Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness(pp. 376–399). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Deroy, O. and Spence, C. (2013) Training, hypnosis, and drugs: Artiﬁcial synaesthesia, or
artiﬁcial paradises?Front. Psychol., 4, 660.
Duffy, P. L. (2001)Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synaesthetes Color their World.
New York: Times Books.
Hupé, J. M., Bordier, C., and Dojat, M. (2012) The neural bases of grapheme–colour synesthesia
are not localized in real colour-sensitive areas.Cerebral Cortex, 22(7), 1622–33.
Keeley, B. L. (2013) What exactly is a sense? In J. Simner and E. Hubbard (eds),The Oxford
Handbook of Synaesthesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leeuwen (van), T. M., Petersson, K. M., and Hagoort, P. (2010) Synaesthetic colour in the brain:
Beyond colour areas. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of synaesthetes and
matched controls.PLoS ONE, 5(8), e12074.
Martino, G. and Marks, L. E. (2001) Synesthesia: Strong and weak.Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 10(2), 61–5.
Pearson, J. and Westbrook, F. (2015) Phantom perception: Voluntary and involuntary
nonretinal vision.Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(5), 278–84.
Rouw, R., Scholte, H. S., and Colizoli, O. (2011). Brain areas involved in synaesthesia: a review.
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Segal, G. (1997) Synaesthesia: Implications for the modularity of mind. In S. Baron-Cohen and
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Simner, J. (2012) Deﬁning synaesthesia.British Journal of Psychology, 103(1), 1–15.
Ward, J. (2013)Synesthesia. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 49–75.
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INTRODUCTION

PART I
DeﬁningandMeasuring
Synaesthesia
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1
Synesthesia, Then and Now
Lawrence E. Marks
Over a good part of my scientiﬁc career, I’ve spent much time and energy chasing
down an elusive creature known as synesthesia.
1
Early in this quest, I thought I’d
caught up with it: I was poised, ready to snare it—only to watch it get away.
Apparently, myﬁrst synesthesia-catcher was too small, and insufﬁcientlyﬂexible,
to capture a critter at once so large and agile.
When I began to study synesthesia (Marks, 1975, 1978b), the topic had already
been a matter of inquiry for roughly a century, with scores of articles and books
already written about it. Many of these early works discussed colored hearing
(audition colorée,Farbenhören), the evocation of color sensations or color images
by sounds (e.g., Bleuler and Lehmann, 1881; Flournoy, 1893), or colored graphemes,
the evocation of color sensations or images by (achromatic) numbers, letters, or
digits (e.g., Galton, 1880, 1883; Flournoy, 1893; Calkins, 1895). The term synesthesia,
however, is itself not quite so old. Flournoy (1893) was apparently theﬁrst to use
synesthésiein its modern sense, applying it not only to colored hearing, colored
graphemes, and other examples of visual synesthesia or synopsia, but also to the
anomalous arousal of sensations and images of all modalities: auditory, tactile,
gustatory, and olfactory, as well as visual. Synesthesia, in one form or another, is
relatively uncommon, being found in about 4 percent of the population, according to
the most recent and most authoritative study of its prevalence (Simner et al., 2006).
Flournoy usedsynopsieto designate the topic of his own research, which focused on
the evocation of visual (optic) synesthesia. Butesthesiscasts a wider net thanopsis,
and the termsynesthesiahas stuck.
Atﬁrst, I viewed synesthesia primarily from the perspective of sensory processing
(Marks, 1975, 1978b), fully expecting that an understanding of sensory processes
would help elucidate the mechanisms of synesthesia. At the same time, recognizing
that perceptual processing involves multisensory as well as unisensory mechanisms
1
This chapter is abridged and revised from: Lawrence E. Marks, Synesthesia, Then and Now, originally
published inIntellectica(2011), 51, 47–80, copyright by the Association pour la Recherche Cognitive and
published here by permission.
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(Marks, 1978a), I had hoped that a better understanding of synesthesia might, in
turn, shed further light on mechanisms of sensory information processing, especially
multisensory processing. My prototype for synesthesia at the time was visual
hearing—the ways that, in a very small fraction of people, acoustic stimuli produce
not only auditory percepts of sound but visual sensations as well: Speech may evoke
colors, or melodies may evoke moving patterns or shapes.
A fruitful approach to begin studying human sensory processing in general is
psychophysical: the systematic investigation of the ways that basic perceptual attri-
butes, such as the pitch, loudness, and timbre of sounds, depend on pertinent aspects
of the physical stimulus, such as acoustic spectrum. Extending this psychophysical
perspective to synesthesia, it is possible to ask how the hue and brightness, the shape
and motion, of a synesthetic visual response depend on the temporal and spectral
distributions of an inducing sound’s acoustic spectrum. A striking outcome of
this psychophysical approach is the simple mapping, in several instances, between
nonsynesthetic and synesthetic psychophysical relations. To aﬁrst approximation,
both the nonsynesthetic perception of auditory pitch and the synesthetic perception
of visual lightness and brightness are monotone increasing functions of sound
frequency (Marks, 1975).
2
This outcome implies, in turn, that synesthetic lightness
and brightness relate directly to auditory pitch (see Marks, 2011: 48–50 for detailed
discussion).
The psychophysical relation between the brightness of induced color and the
pitch of inducing sound serves to quantify a principleﬁrst suggested by Bleuler
and Lehmann (1881) and Flournoy (1893), dubbed in both cases alaw of brightness
(Helligkeitsgesetz,loi de clarté). Findings of this sort appeared especially compatible
with the view that sensory processes underlie synesthesia. Even if sensory processes
do provide an underpinning to synesthesia, however, synesthesia can also reveal
itself in higher-level cognitive processes, especially to the extent that these higher-
level processes capitalize on lower-level sensory information, as information from
synesthetic perception is made available to more abstract cognitive systems, such
as language.
A broad, inclusive account of synesthesia would embrace both its functions in
perception and its manifestations in cognition. After all, sensory and perceptual
processes themselves play a substantial role in cognitive processing—nihil est in
intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. So it is not surprising that synesthesia
plays a role in both the senses and the intellect. This approach to the study
of synesthesia rests on the heuristic principle that sensation and cognition are
2
Technically, brightness applies to the perception of luminous objects, varying along a dimension that
runs from dim to bright. Lightness applies to the perception of reﬂecting surfaces, varying along a
dimension that runs from dark to light—in the case of achromatic surfaces, from black to white. In
visual-auditory synesthetes, and in the perception of similarity in nonsynesthetes, visual brightness and
lightness both correlate closely with auditory pitch, although only brightness but not lightness correlates
closely with loudness.
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SYNESTHESIA,THEN AND NOW

continuous and contiguous processes, connected and overlapping; as Alexander Pope
(An Essay on Man) suggested,‘Remembrance and reﬂection how allied/What thin
partitions sense from thought divide.’
1.1 Synesthesia and the‘unity of the senses’
The theoretical framework for understanding synesthesia that I described nearly
forty years ago is neatly characterized by the expression‘the unity of the senses’
(Marks, 1978b)—a term borrowed from Hornbostel (1925) and Werner (1934), who
both used it to emphasize the argument, considered heterodox early in the twentieth
century, that sensory systems act in concert and not in isolation, dependently and not
independently. As both asserted, the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell
interrelate and interact. Borrowing again, this time from Charles Baudelaire’s poem
Correspondances, we might say that the senses speak a common language—in the
poet’s words,‘les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.’From my vantage
point in 1978, synesthesia in perception represented a dramatic example of sensory
unity, an extension and elaboration of the broader view that synesthesia is importantly—
indeed, fundamentally—a sensory phenomenon (see also Cytowic, 1989).
The conceptual framework captured in the expression‘unity of the senses’rests, in
large measure, on aWeltanschauungoften found in science, especially in physics; an
approach to understanding the world that seeks to discern uniformities and coher-
ence in apparent diversity, an approach that Isaiah Berlin (1953) famously associated
with hedgehogs as opposed to foxes—attributing to Aristarchus the remark that‘the
hedgehog knows one great thing while the fox knows many little things.’By this
account, the cadre of hedgehogs includes Sensory Unitarians. And to a Sensory
Unitarian, synesthesia can be paradigmatic. Striking in this regard is the evidence
that analogous psychophysical principles can characterize both the perception of
those relatively few individuals who experience vivid synesthetic perception and
the perception and cognition of the vast majority of individuals, who may show
synesthetic tendencies, but who do not experience synesthesiaper se.Evidenceof
widespread, perhaps universal, synesthetic tendencies in perception and cognition
suggests that synesthesia may rest substantially on mechanisms of sensory
processing that are found in everyone, not just synesthetes (Marks, 1978b; see
also Ward et al., 2006).
1.2 Synesthetic perception
Synesthesia commonly refers to the curious experiences reported by a small fraction
of the population, in whom, to give one example, sounds may reliably, consistently,
and automatically induce visual sensations, images, or qualities. To a person with
auditory-visual synesthesia, music or voices may evoke colors or shapes, as when the
composer Rimsky-Korsakov reported‘seeing’music in the key of A-major as yellow
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LAWRENCE E.MARKS

(Myers, 1911). These induced sensations, images, or qualities are vivid and can
sometimes interact with the processing of nonsynesthetic perceptual information,
for example in perceptual grouping (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001; Kim et al.,
2006) and in synesthetic analogs to Stroop interference. In a task requiring subjects to
identify the colors of digits printed in red and green ink, a person with digit-color
synesthesia who sees 3 as synesthetically red or 5 as synesthetically green mayﬁnd it
relatively difﬁcult to quickly and accurately identify a green 3 or a red 5, due to
interference from the synesthetic colors (e.g., Mills et al., 1999; Dixon et al., 2000;
Mattingley et al., 2001).
Synesthesia is multifaceted, in part because it assumes so many forms. Synesthetes
may experience a gamut of hues and shapes when they hear music or voice, or they
may experience different hues when they view achromatic printed letters or numbers.
Synesthetes may see colors in pains, or tasteﬂavors in words. Or they may see
sequences of numbers, days of the week, or months of the year as laid out in space,
each number, day, or month having its location in a one-dimensional, two-
dimensional, or even three-dimensional array (e.g., Eagleman, 2009). Many neuro-
scientists in particular limit the domain of synesthesia proper to these phenomena,
which I have elsewhere calledvivid synesthesia(Marks, 2009). There is mounting
evidence that the experience of vivid synesthesia is correlated with patterns of neural
activity in the brain that differ from the patterns observed, under comparable
stimulus conditions, in the brains of nonsynesthetes (e.g., Nunn et al., 2002;
Hubbard et al., 2005; Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005) and that synesthesia,
long known to run in families, has a genetic component (Baron-Cohen et al., 1996;
Barnett et al., 2008; Asher et al., 2009).
3
1.3 Synesthetic tendencies in perception
Sometimes, synesthesia is also taken to refer to a set of much more common, and
much less idiosyncratic, perceptual experiences than those evidenced in vivid
synesthesia. Thesesynesthetic tendencies, to use the terminology of Osgood (1960),
encompass several well-grounded and widespread perceptual similarities between
and among sensory experiences in different modalities. Much as the color aqua is
more similar phenomenologically to cerulean than to pink, theﬂavor of lime more
similar to lemon than to banana, so too are low notes played on a bassoon or an
organ more like dark colors such as brown or black than bright colors such as yellow
or white, while the higher notes played on a clavier orﬂute resemble yellow or white
more than brown or black.
3
The evidence applies to what has been called idiopathic or developmental synesthesia. It is also
possible that there are speciﬁc neural correlates to acquired forms of synesthesia, for example to synesthesia
resulting, say, from brain injury, disease, or ingestion of psychoactive drugs—entailing, of course, an
underlying neuroanatomical substrate having its own genetic basis.
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SYNESTHESIA,THEN AND NOW

Few people are vividly synesthetic. Most of us do not see colors or shapes when we
hear voices or when we listen to music. Nevertheless, most of us do recognize or
appreciate similarities between sensory experiences in different modalities. When
asked,‘which is brighter, a cough or a sneeze?’, most of us readily acknowledge that
sneezes are brighter—perhaps because sneezes are more compact in terms of the
distribution of energy over time,‘sharper,’if you will, and generically higher in pitch.
So the connection between brightness and pitch does not typify vivid perceptual
synesthesia alone, but also typiﬁes synesthetic tendencies. And synesthetic tenden-
cies, in turn, may be universal, or nearly so.
Many of the principles that characterize synesthesia—in particular, many of
the rules of cross-sensory correspondence in individuals with auditory-visual
synesthesia—also characterize synesthetic tendencies in individuals who lack
synesthesia. Nonsynesthetic subjects systematically set higher frequencies to match
surfaces with greater luminous reﬂectance, for example, implying a correspondence
between auditory pitch and visual lightness, analogous to the correspondence
observed in auditory-visual synesthesia (e.g., Marks, 1974; T. Hubbard, 1996; Ward
et al., 2006; for additional examples, see Marks, 2011).
Auditory-visual correspondences are commonly found in several domains:
between pitch and brightness/lightness (higher-pitched sounds induce brighter
responses in synesthetes and are judged by nonsynesthetes to be more similar to
brighter than dimmer/darker colors); between loudness and brightness (louder
sounds induce brighter responses in synesthetes and are judged by nonsynesthetes
to be more similar to brighter lights); between pitch and size (higher-pitched sounds
induce smaller-sized visual images in synesthetes and are judged by nonsynesthetes
to be more similar to smaller sizes); and between pitch and shape (higher-pitched
sounds induce more angular and pointed visual images in synesthetes and are judged
by nonsynesthetes to be similar to more angular and pointed shapes). A possible
example of this last principle is the well-known pair of abstractﬁgures that Köhler
(1947) constructed, an angularﬁgure that people readily matched to the name
‘takete’, with it high-pitched consonants and vowels, and a roundedﬁgure that
people readily matched to the lower-pitched‘maluma’(aﬁnding replicated by
Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001, who used similarﬁgures and the names‘kiki’
and‘bouba’; for review, see Spector and Maurer, 2009).
1.4 Synesthesia versus synesthetic tendencies
All of this said, synesthesia and synesthetic tendencies are far from being identical.
Synesthesia and synesthetic tendencies differ phenomenologically, of course, in that
synesthetes report actually experiencing sensory transfers—to an auditory-visual or
grapheme-color synesthete, sounds or letters of the alphabet actually evoke color
experiences. Evidence from neuroimaging studies shows activity in regions of the
brains of synesthetes that are also speciﬁcally activated by optic stimuli—for instance,
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LAWRENCE E.MARKS

reports of synesthetic colors correlate with activity in regions, such as V4, that are
activated by chromatic visual stimuli. Evidence of this sort, discussed further at the
end of this chapter, lends additional credence to the phenomenal reports. Neverthe-
less, it is possible, as also considered later, that the difference between perception in
synesthetes and in nonsynesthetes is a matter of degree rather than kind.
Be this as it may, there appear to be a couple of crucial differences between the
transfers or translations of sensory quality experienced in vivid synesthesia and
the cross-modal similarities or correspondences between qualities revealed in
synesthetic tendencies: These differences reside in the extent to which synesthesia
and synesthetic tendencies are absolute versus relative, and rigid versus malleable.
First, synesthetic tendencies are largely relativistic. The level of a sound’s pitch or
loudness that people judge to be most similar to the brightness of a visual stimulus
depends strongly on the stimulus context; for instance, on the range of possible
stimulus levels. When people who do not report experiencing vivid synesthesia
compare sounds and lights, they tend to match the brightest light to the highest-
pitched and loudest sound of the stimulus ensemble, regardless of their absolute
levels (Marks, 1989). Vivid synesthesia, on the other hand, appears more absolute.
People with auditory-visual synesthesia show much more precise and consistent
matches of colors with sounds than do people who do not report synesthesia
(Ward et al., 2006; but see also Arnold et al., 2012). Indeed, long-term consistency
is a hallmark of vivid synesthesia, and is used by many as a‘test of genuineness’
(Baron-Cohen et al., 1987), a criterion for validating the presence of synesthesia (e.g.,
Rich et al., 2005; Simner et al., 2006; Barnett et al., 2008). This said, we still do not
know just how absolute or relative synesthesia itself may be: To what extent do the
psychophysical properties of vivid synesthetic experience depend on stimulus con-
text? To the best of my knowledge, no studies to date have quantiﬁed whether and
how, for example, the brightness, color, size, or shape of vividly experienced visual
synesthesia depends on the context of the inducing acoustic events.
Second, where the cross-modal transfers of sensory quality that characterize vivid
synesthesia are generally rigid and often automatic, cross-modal similarities observed
in synesthetic tendencies are much moreﬂexible (e.g., Marks, 1974, 1989; see also
Gertner et al., 2009). It is perfectly possible, for instance, to instruct a person to match
stimuli in a manner that contravenes the rules of cross-modal similarity; for example,
to match bright colors to low-pitched or soft sounds rather than high-pitched or loud
ones. This capacity reveals a kind ofﬂexibility to cross-modal similarity that vivid
synesthetic perception lacks. Cross-modal similarity is controlled, or can be con-
trolled, by relatively high-level cognitive mechanisms that can operate on abstract
representations of sensory dimensions, a property that also characterizes metaphor.
It may also be sensitive to cultural conventions. As Gardner (1974) wrote,‘Which
particular line, face, description, etc., is metaphorically linked to loudness is a
communal decision dependent, in part, on the alternatives available and the nature
of the surrounding context’(85).
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SYNESTHESIA,THEN AND NOW

1.5 Synesthetic tendencies in children
Cross-modal similarities (synesthetic tendencies) reveal themselves in the perceptual
behavior of young children and infants. So, for example, children as young as four
years of age readily match the higher-pitched of two tones to the brighter of two
lights (Marks et al., 1987). Indeed, there are even reports that infants as young as
one month will implicitly‘match’greater loudness to greater brightness (Lewkowicz
and Turkewitz, 1980) and that infants at two to three months of age will respond
preferentially to dynamic sounds and visual stimuli that change congruently, increas-
ing in pitch with rising spatial position or increasingﬁgural angularity (Walker et al.,
2010), dynamic change being critical (Jeschonek et al., 2012).
Some intersensory similarities, such as those between pitch and brightness and
between loudness and brightness, are probably‘hard-wired,’although not all may be.
Marks et al. (1987) found that most young children (4–5 years of age), like most
adults, matched both the higher-pitched of two equally loud sounds and the louder of
two equal-pitch sounds to the brighter of two lights. But most 4–5-year-olds did not
match the lower-pitched of two sounds to the larger of two visual images; pitch-size
matching did not become consistent until about age eleven. It is possible, for
example, that the inverse similarity relation between pitch and size (lower pitch
corresponding to larger size) is learned through experience, in particular through
experience with the resonance properties of objects, as several investigators have
suggested (e.g., Osgood et al., 1957; but see Mondloch and Maurer, 2004, for evidence
that children as young as three years can recognize pitch-size similarity). For
extended discussion, see Marks (2011: 55–9).
There is an ecological association between lower sound frequency and larger size,
based in principles of physics. Given objects constructed of the same material, the
larger objects will have greater mass and consequently will resonate at lower sound
frequencies than will smaller ones (Osgood et al., 1957; Marks et al., 1987). Children
are generally smaller than adults, with smaller vocal apparatus and higher-pitched
voices, a relation that young children doubtless come to recognize. In reciting to a
child the story of‘The Three Bears’(Les Trois Ours), a parent is likely to assume
a deep voice forle grand ours, with increasingly higher-pitched voices forle moyen
oursandle petit ours.
Even if a few intersensory relationships are learned, as some undoubtedly must be,
it is plausible that several are‘built into’the nervous system, perhaps reﬂecting
overlapping neural codes, in different modalities, for sensory dimensions such as
pitch, loudness, and brightness (Marks and Bornstein, 1987; see also Walsh, 2003). If
so, then it is also plausible to infer, despite the phenomenological difference between
synesthesia and cross-modal similarity, that both share, at least in part, a core of
common mechanisms of sensorineural coding. That is, it is plausible that common
codes for pitch and brightness manifest themselves in a small portion of the popu-
lation as auditory-visual synesthesia, and in the vast majority of the population as
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similarity—although the precise nature of the underlying coding mechanisms need
to be clariﬁed.
1.6 Synesthetic tendencies in language and metaphor
Synesthesia is sometimes taken to refer not only to the experiences of vivid perceptual
synesthesia but also to certain tropes of language, to‘the perception, ordescription
of the perception[italics mine], of one sense modality in terms of another’
(Preminger, 1974: 839). Synesthetic cognition, a short-hand for the cognitive expres-
sion of synesthetic tendencies, includes the construction and comprehension of
cross-modal metaphors found in many languages—often in well-worn expressions
of daily life, such as‘loud colors.’Synesthetic cognition also includes the far more
esoteric synesthetic metaphors of poetic language, as when the poet Conrad Aiken, in
The House of Dust, contrasts‘violins . . . weaving a weft of silver’to‘horns . . . weaving
a lustrous brede of gold’or when Wallace Stevens, inParochial Themes, describes
how‘The wind blows. In the wind, the voices/Have shapes that are not yet fully
themselves,/Are sounds blown by a blower into shapes,/The blower squeezed to the
thinnestmiof falsetto.’
Synesthetic cognition is closely linked to synesthetic tendencies in perception, and
therefore to synesthesia. This is especially clear in the evidence that the rules of cross-
modal correspondence or similarity hold in language much as they do in perception.
Where people with vivid synesthesia report that loud or high-pitched sounds induce
bright images, and where most (nonsynesthetic) people note a perceptual resem-
blance between bright lights and relatively loud or high-pitched sounds, so do most
people interpret cross-modal metaphors along similar lines: Words or phrases
referring to acoustic events that are judged as soft or low in pitch are also judged
as dim, whereas words or phrases referring to acoustic events judged loud or high in
pitch are also judged as bright; conversely, words or phrases referring to optic events
described as dim (or bright) are also judged as low-pitched and soft (or high-pitched
and loud) (Marks, 1982; Marks et al., 1987).
The close connection between synesthetic tendencies in perception (cross-modal
similarity) and in language (cross-modal metaphor) is also evident in children, albeit
with one important caveat: Synesthetic tendencies are much stronger, or at least more
prevalent at a given age, when measured in perceptual tasks compared to verbal tasks
(Marks et al., 1987). Synesthetic tendencies observed in language lag behind analo-
gous tendencies observed in perception, and this outcome is consistent with the
hypothesis that the cross-modal similarities arise in perception itself, then become
available to higher-level, cognitive mechanisms, such as language. In his review of the
ways that adjectives in a given language transfer their meanings over time, from
one sense modality to another—that is,‘synesthetically’—Williams (1976) suggested
the possibility that common principles operate in various Indo-European languages
and in Japanese; Shen and Aisenman (2008) provided related evidence for a common
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principle of semantic transfer, from‘lower’to‘higher’senses, in Hebrew, Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, and Indonesian, as well as English. Perhaps there is a general
principle: that semantic changes in various languages reﬂect, at least in part, perceptual
similarities that are available to cognitivemechanisms (see Shen and Aisenman, 2008).
The close relation between synesthetic tendencies in perception and languageﬁts
well within the framework of the unity of the senses, in which synesthesia is
interpreted as largely a sensory phenomenon that expresses intrinsic similarities in
the coding of sensory information in different modalities. Although nonsynesthetic
individuals do not share the vivid experiences of synesthetes, nonsynesthetes have
linguistic access to the same cross-modal similarities, several of which may arise
directly from sensory coding mechanisms. These similarities express themselves
initially in perception, from which they become available, through development, to
more abstract representations in language. For further discussion of these synesthetic
tendencies in perception and language, and relations to metaphor, see Marks (2011).
1.7 The puzzle of synesthesia
There is little doubt that sensory processes can play an important role in synesthesia.
To interpret synesthesia within the framework of the unity of the senses entails a
critical assumption: that sensory processes play a leading role and not a supporting
one. But this interpretation also rests on a second, implicit, assumption—as,
I suspect, do most theories in science—namely, that certain pieces of evidence are
important to the theory and need to be incorporated into it and explained, while
other pieces of evidence should be ignored, either because they are relatively unim-
portant or, more crucially, because they will ultimately turn out to be irrelevant.
When Iﬁrst began investigating synesthesia, I felt like a character in the well-
known fable of the blind men and the elephant, trying on the basis of limited
information to comprehend synesthesia in all of its diversity and complexity. Even-
tually, it became clear that there is a better metaphor for understanding synesthesia
than integrating multiple views (or‘feels’) of a pachyderm; namely, solving what
might be called adecoyed jigsaw puzzle. A standard, run-of-the-mill jigsaw puzzle is
clearly deﬁned, in that all of the pieces belong to the puzzle: Put all of the pieces into
their proper locations and orientations relative to one another, and the picture is
complete, the puzzle solved. A decoyed puzzle, however, contains, as its name
implies, not only all of the pieces of a standard puzzle but several extra pieces as
well: a bunch of decoys, each of which looks, atﬁrst glance, as if it mightﬁt the
puzzle. But the decoys don’tﬁt, because they don’t belong.
To solve a decoyed puzzle, therefore, one must ignore or discard the extra pieces.
But to do this, one must know which pieces are decoys—obvious once the puzzle is
solved, but not during the solving. And solving scientiﬁc puzzles is made especially
difﬁcult because Nature often seems ingenious both at spawning decoys and at
concealing until the very end exactly what the completed puzzles will look like.
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Lacking predeﬁned algorithms with which they can search for decoys and discard
them, scientists typicallyﬁnd themselves engaging, willy-nilly, in practical, boot-
strapping strategies, trying toﬁt together as many pieces as possible, creating
tentative hypotheses to decide which pieces of information are likely to be decoys,
then setting these pieces to the side, leaving the option of bringing them back into the
puzzle-solving game if and when the hypotheses change.
1.8 Varieties of synesthesia
Which pieces matter to the puzzle of synesthesia? And which pieces matter most?
By its etymology,synesthesiashould be a sensory-perceptual phenomenon. After
all, the very name derives from Greek terms denoting a union or combination (syn)
of sensations or perceptions (esthesis)—evident in traditional deﬁnitions, such as
Warren’s (1934):‘a phenomenon characterizing the experiences of certain individ-
uals, in which certain sensations belonging to one sense or mode attach to certain
sensations of another group and appear regularly whenever a stimulus of the latter
type occurs’(270). Flournoy (1893) was apparently theﬁrst to use the term
synesthesia (synesthésie) in this modern sense. Two millennia earlier, in discussing
friendship (Eudemian Ethics,Nicomachean Ethics), Aristotle used its root, the Greek
verbsunaisthanesai, in a rather different way. To Aristotle,sunaisthanesai‘in all
likelihood designated a“feeling in common,”a perception shared by more than one
[person]’(Heller-Roazen, 2004: 36). Speaking etymologically, we might say that
before synesthetic sensation perhaps came synesthetic empathy.
Synesthesia, in its modern sense, comes in an astonishing variety. This would not
necessarily pose a problem to sensory accounts if synesthetic responses depended
mostly, or most of the time, on relatively low-level sensory features associated with
inducing stimuli, such as the pitch and loudness of an auditory inducer. But less and
less this seems the case, suggesting that sensory accounts of synesthesia are incom-
plete. Synesthesia sometimes relies on sensory features of the inducing stimulus.
But not always. So it is necessary to consider the range and variety of the pieces
to the puzzle, the range and variety of both synesthesia-inducing stimuli and
synesthetic responses.
To be sure, there are several different ways to classify or categorize the phenomena
that currently fall under the rubric of synesthesia. Flournoy (1893) suggested a pair of
terms to denote synesthetic stimuli and responses, which he calledinducteursand
induits;I’ll call theminducersandinductants. Both are diverse. Auditory inducers
range widely, from environmental noises and animal sounds to single musical notes,
melodies, and human voices, including spoken numbers and words. Visual inducers
range from printed numbers and letters to words, but also, notably, may include
examples of brief events or episodes—such as the sight of another person being
touched (in what has been calledmirror-touch synesthesia: Blakemore et al., 2005).
And inducers include pains, odors, andﬂavors—ﬂavors themselves being examples
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par excellenceof multisensory stimuli. Flavor perceptions result from integrated
responses to gustatory, olfactory, and somatosensory signals produced by food
stimuli, sometimes inﬂuenced also by sound (e.g., food being chewed) and sight
(e.g., the color of a food, seen before taking it into the mouth).
In his treatment of synopsia, where all of the inductants are visual, Flournoy
(1893) divided inducers into two subcategories, which he designated assensorielle
andpsychique. Theﬁrst is clearlysensory. But Flournoy expressed unhappiness with
the second term, as he noted that sensations too, and not only abstract ideas, are
psychique. Given that Flournoy described mental inducers as‘abstract’and given that
his mental inducers included days of the week, numbers, and names, it is reasonable
to characterize Flournoy’s second subcategory of inducers ascognitive. In any case, as
Flournoy and others long ago recognized, inducers need not be explicitly sensory,
which is to say that synesthetic responses often correlate better with an inducing
stimulus’s meaning than with its sensory or perceptual qualities.
Synesthetic inductants or responses too can be diverse. Although they often consist
of simple colors, inductants, like inducers, can also be more complex. For instance,
inductants may beﬂavors—ﬂavors being, as already noted, multisensory represen-
tations of food stimuli. And inductants may be affective responses, feelings of
liking or disliking, or personiﬁcations, attributes normally associated with people
and their personalities, as Flournoy (1893) and others (e.g., Galton, 1880; Calkins,
1895) reported more than a century ago.
It is convenient, therefore, to classify inducers and inductants as perceptual,
cognitive, or affective—taking‘perceptual’to include sensory features. And, at the
risk of sounding like a character in an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan who‘knows
the scientiﬁc names of perceptionssynestheticus,’as a matter of further convenience
I shall classify each variety of inducer-inductant synesthesia by labeling it, for
instance,perceptual-perceptual,cognitive-perceptual,orcognitive-affective. The sum-
mary that follows is by no means exhaustive, but instead selects a few examples that
seem critical to solving the puzzle of synesthesia. Indeed, there are other ways of
slicing the synesthetic pie, for example by classifying, where possible, inducers and
inductants as cross-dimensional (same modality) or cross-modal (different modal-
ities). Word-color synesthesia, for example, is cross-dimensional when the color is
induced by an achromatic visual word, but cross-modal when induced by a spoken
word. Just as signiﬁcant, however, is the extent to which words operate as inducers
because of their perceptual characteristics (constituent letters or phonemes) or
cognitive ones (semantic content).
1.9 Perceptual-perceptual synesthesia
Perceptual-perceptual synesthesia includes two main subgroups: cross-modal and
cross-dimensional. Cross-modal synesthesia includes not only colors, shapes, and
other visual characteristics synesthetically induced by sounds, but also colors
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(and other visual characteristics) induced by pains, touches, tastes, and smells, shapes
induced by touches, and so forth. Synesthesia has been, and still often is, deﬁned as a
cross-modal phenomenon, in terms of the arousal, by a single sensory stimulus, of
sensations or images in two (or more) modalities, and auditory-visual synesthesia
surelyﬁts this bill. But the fact of the matter is that cross-modal synesthesia is
relatively uncommon, even among synesthetic individuals. In the best study to date
of synesthesia’s prevalence, Simner et al. (2006) systematically and thoroughly tested
500 university students and found that roughly 4 percent of them (twenty-two in all)
showed at least one form, a considerably higher prevalence than earlier research had
suggested. Of the twenty-two synesthetes conﬁrmed by evidence of high consistency
over time, only one of them showed cross-modal, perceptual-perceptual synesthesia,
this being music-color (auditory-visual).
Even when inductants depend on low-level sensory features of the inducer, such as
pitch and loudness in auditory-visual synesthesia, the synesthetic responses often,
perhaps typically, depend also on the inducer’s learned perceptual or cognitive
features. This is clear in auditory-visual synesthesia, where speech and music are
often the most potent inducers of visual responses, whereas environmental noises
generally are not. Speech and music are meaningful constructions of a culture. To be
sure, the brightness of a synesthetically evoked color can vary systematically with
the pitch of a vowel phoneme or with the pitch height of a musical note—but the
synesthetic hue itself depends on the sound perceived as a phoneme of the language
or on the note as encoded on a familiar musical scale.
In this regard, music-color synesthesia may have something in common with
absolute pitch perception: To a typical music-color synesthete, a given note, such
as C or F-sharp, will consistently have its own hue; the brightness of the synesthetic
color may vary with the register of the note, but the hue remains constant (e.g., C may
be sky blue, brighter in high octaves and dimmer in low ones). To the extent that
every musical note is‘named’(identiﬁed) by its synesthetic hue, synesthesia confers a
degree of‘absoluteness’to pitch perception. Be this as it may, both musical notes and
phonemes, like the names of colors, are learned within frameworks deﬁned by a
particular culture—its musical scale and its language. Both exemplify perceptual
categories that are absorbed through experience in a particular culture (Ward and
Simner, 2003), constituting what Marks and Odgaard (2005) called‘cultural artifacts’.
Although some instances of perceptual-perceptual synesthesia are heteromodal, it
turns out that many are homomodal, taking place within a single modality. The
prototype here is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which achromatically printed letters
or numbers, presented visually, evoke color. Grapheme-color synesthesia wasﬁrst
reported more than a century ago (Galton, 1880, 1883; Flournoy, 1893; Calkins,
1893). Because grapheme-color synesthetes are relatively numerous, much current
research focuses on this form of synesthesia.
Many of the instances of synesthesia uncovered in the systematic study by Simner
et al. (2006) were homomodal, with visual stimuli (letters and/or numbers) inducing
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colors in ten of the twenty-two synesthetes. Of the ten, eight had colors induced by
both letters and number, one by letters alone, and one by numbers alone. Sometimes,
at least, synesthetic colors depend on relatively low-level sensory processes. Thus, for
example, Hubbard et al. (2006) found that the colors induced in a grapheme-color
synesthete depended strongly on the contrast level in the visual stimulus. In a related
vein, Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) reported that induced color could vary
with the retinal location of the grapheme inducer much as the color of a chromatic
visual stimulus can; they also showed effects of other perceptual processes in the
synesthetic responses, such as masking and grouping. Lastly in this regard, a recent
study by Nikolićet al. (2007) reported evidence of opponent-color processing in
grapheme-color synesthesia. In vision, opponent effects can appear early in the
processing of color, evident in responses of retinal neurons (e.g., ganglion cells).
Color-opponent cells derive information from wavelength-selective photoreceptors
and recode the information into chromatically opponent subsystems, one subsystem
coding red versus green colors and the other blue versus yellow colors (for review, see
Martin, 1998). Given that opponent-color processing is itself sensory, and given that
synesthetic color responses reveal effects of opponent processing, it is plausible to
infer that synesthesia can involve sensory processing.
Results such as these do not mean, however, that variations in synesthetic responses
must, or must always, reveal sensory or perceptual processing, or that the very same
synesthesia cannot reveal both sensory and higher-level cognitive processes. It is
useful in this regard to keep in mind a distinction that Garner (1970) made between
what he called state limitations and process limitations to human information
processing. Consider the ability to make rapid responses to different stimulus
events in the face of distraction. Performance may be better or worse depending on
the ability of the person to attend selectively and ignore the distracting stimulus
(process limitation), but performance may also be better or worse depending on
stimulus properties, such as energy or contrast, that affect the ability to detect or
discriminate the different events (state limitation), independent of the capacity to
attend selectively.
1.10 Cognitive-perceptual and perceptual-cognitive
synesthesia
Cognition has long been implicated in synesthesia, where it can play at least two
distinctive roles. On the one hand, it is often the meaning of an inducing stimulus
that determines the synesthetic response, as in those instances of digit-color
synesthesia in which the induced hue depends on the concept of the number. On
the other hand, cognition may also be a kind of beneﬁciary, as when personiﬁcations
serve to enrich the meaning of numbers by adding animate characteristics. Wheeler
(1920) and Wheeler and Cutsforth (1922a) studied sensory, perceptual, and cognitive
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processes in a blind synesthete, identiﬁed in the articles as Cutsforth, who had lost his
sight in an accident at age eleven. Despite focusing on the sensory constituents of the
synesthetic experiences, especially their color, Wheeler and Cutsforth (1922a, 1922b)
argued that synesthesia is not just a sensory or perceptual phenomenon but a
cognitive one as well. As they wrote,‘Synaesthesis in our reagent [subject] is not
conﬁned to theﬁeld of perception; it is a cognitive process per se, pervading his entire
life as far as it has been studied; functionally, it differs in no respect from any process
of meaning. Synaesthesis is a process of meaning’(Wheeler and Cutsforth, 1922a:
102). Notable was Wheeler and Cutsforth’s (1922b) claim that the development of
synesthesia plays an important role in perceptual development, and in particular in
the development of new systems of meaning, a claim that, although based primarily
on introspective evidence,ﬁts comfortably with recentﬁndings (e.g., Simner et al.,
2009; Simner and Haywood, 2009).
A related theme was later promulgated by Odbert et al. (1942) and Karwoski et al.
(1942). Karwoski and Odbert (1938) had found evidence that the sensory experiences
in colored-music synesthesia play a role in cognition, in both representing and
augmenting musical meanings. Odbert et al. and Karwoski et al. then showed how
the perception of analogous, cross-modal perceptual similarities (synesthetic tenden-
cies) play a comparable role in the cognition of nonsynesthetic individuals.
Recent investigations have asked, experimentally, whether, when, and how
synesthetic responses depend on cognitive processes. It has long been known that
some grapheme-color synesthetes report colors not only when they look at printed
letters or numbers, but also when they think about them. Dixon et al. (2000) showed,
in a digit-color synesthete who perceived the number 7 as yellow, that the sum of 5 + 2
also produced yellow. The implication is that the synesthesia is induced, or can be
induced, at least in part, conceptually, by the meaning of the number. In some digit-
color synesthetes, colors may be evoked by both Arabic and Roman numerals
(Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001), albeit perhaps more strongly by the more
familiar Arabic, suggesting that synesthetic responses can be governed by a relatively
high-level conception of quantity, rather than low-level sensory or perceptual prop-
erties of the inducing stimulus. Cohen Kadosh and Henik (2006) came to a similar
conclusion by using a color-interference paradigm to study the effect of varying
numeric (conceptual) distance in a digit-color synesthete. It is possible, of course,
that some synesthetic inducers gain their power intrinsically or primarily from
sensory or perceptual features, while others are intrinsically or primarily cognitive.
Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) offered a distinction between‘lower’and
‘higher’forms of synesthesia, roughly corresponding to forms of synesthesia evoked
by relatively low-level, perceptual mechanisms and by relatively high-level, cognitive
ones (also Grossenbacher and Lovelace, 2001; Cohen Kadosh et al., 2007).
In a related vein, Simner and her colleagues (e.g., Ward and Simner, 2003;
Simner and Ward, 2006) have explored extensively what they calllexical-gustatory
synesthesia—although this form of synesthesia is more precisely designated as
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lexical-ﬂavor; in the chemosensory sciences,‘gustatory’refers to sensory signals that
encode only the qualities sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and (perhaps) savory or‘umami,’
mediated primarily through the chorda tympani and glossopharyngeal nerves,
whereas‘ﬂavor’refers to multisensory signals that make it possible to identify
foods and beverages. Flavor percepts integrate gustatory, olfactory, somatosensory,
auditory, and visual signals arising from food. In lexical-ﬂavor synesthesia, a form
noted more than a century ago (e.g., Pierce, 1907), words evoke speciﬁcﬂavors. In the
synesthesia of Pierce’s young female subject, the name‘Edith,’for example, evoked
theﬂavor of potato soup,‘Francis’theﬂavor of baked beans. Theﬁndings of Simner
and Haywood (2009) suggest a sequence of events in the development of lexical-
ﬂavor synesthesia: Flavors comeﬁrst to be connected to the names of the foods
that evoke theﬂavors, then spread to other words that are connected to the food
names, either semantically or phonetically. Theseﬁndings place language learning
at the core of this particular form of synesthesia. Results such as these do not
mean, however, that synesthesia must, or must always, involve linguistic (or other
cognitive) processing.
1.11 Perceptual-affective and cognitive-affective
synesthesia
Two variants of synesthesia are especially curious. One of these is among the longest
known forms of synesthesia, the others among the most recent. I shall designate both
asaffective.
More than a century ago, Flournoy (1893) and Calkins (1893, 1895) included
within their framework for synesthesia the reports ofpersoniﬁcations. Calkins
described, for example, the ways that letters or numbers could evoke feelings of
‘liking’or‘disliking,’and, notably, the physical or psychological characteristics of
people. To give an example, one synesthete reported especially disliking the numbers
11, 13, and 17:‘I suppose,’she said,‘because they are prime’(Calkins, 1893: 454).
And another noted that‘Ts are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures. U is a
soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but mathematically angular and ungraceful.
3 I cannot trust, though it is fairly good-looking in personal appearance. . . . 9 is
dark, a gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under his suavity’(454). The title of a
recent article by Smilek et al. (2007) provides two additional examples:‘When“3”is a
jerk and“E”is a king.’Simner and Holenstein (2007) reported that personiﬁcation—
the attribution of animate qualities, such as personality traits or genders to letters,
numbers, days of the week, and months of the year—shows many of the same
characteristics found in other forms of synesthesia (e.g., being consistent and auto-
matic), and that personiﬁcation can interact with these other forms, from which
the authors concluded that personiﬁcation should therefore be considered as a form
of synesthesia.
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That personiﬁcation and (other forms of) synesthesia show similar properties, and
indeed can interact, does not prove, of course, that the one is a subset of the other. Is
personiﬁcation a decoy? Or is it one of the pieces critical to solving the puzzle of
synesthesia? In designating personiﬁcation as affective, it should not be assumed that
personiﬁcation is not also cognitive, for personiﬁcations certainly contribute to the
meaning of the overall experience. Butﬁrst and foremost, personiﬁcation expresses
dynamic properties, revealing evaluative and emotional attributes that have long
been associated, by some investigators, with synesthesia. Notable among these
investigators is Werner (1957), who proposed that perceptual processing is, in the
beginning (considered both ontogenetically and microgenetically), holistic, syncretic,
synesthetic, and physiognomic. To Werner, it is a physiognomic property of visual
perception that a willow tree looks‘sad’or that yellow may be a‘happy’color.
Personiﬁcations would presumably partake of such physiognomic properties, and physio-
gnomic perception, putatively a universal property of basic perceptual responses, provides
part of the substrate to Werner’s (1934) conception of a‘unity of the senses.’From this
perspective, personiﬁcation would not only be appropriately considered a form of
synesthesia, but would in fact be a paradigmatic form.
Where the vintage of personiﬁcation is old, dating from the nineteenth century,
the vintage ofmirror-touch synesthesiais distinctly modern, dating from the twenty-
ﬁrst. Blakemore et al. (2005) described a young woman who reported that the sight of
another person being touched evoked tactile sensations in an equivalent region of her
body—on the same side, when the person was next to her, but on the opposite
(mirrored) side, when the person faced her. The subject reported having several
family members with grapheme-color synesthesia, and had experienced it herself in
the past, though not at the time of testing. Neuroimaging suggested that the mirror-
touch sensations were accompanied by correlated activity in pertinent regions of the
brain, including somatosensory cortex.
Banissy and Ward (2007) subsequently showed, in a group of ten mirror-touch
synesthetes, that mirror-touch sensations could interact with nonsynesthetic tactile
sensations produced by a mechanical stimulus. Perhaps most signiﬁcantly, the
mirror-touch synesthetes evidenced greaterempathyon one of three measures
(emotional reactivity, but not cognitive empathy or social skills). The authors
concluded that,‘experiencing aspects of affective empathy may particularly depend
on shared interpersonal representations. This supports the notion that empathy is
multifaceted and that the tactile mirror system may modulate some, but not all,
aspects of this ability’and that‘the differences in empathic ability reported here
appear consistent with the hypothesis that we understand and empathize with others
by a process of simulation’(816).
It is probably fortuitous that Banissy and Ward’s interpretation of mirror-touch
synesthesia so strikingly resembles the distinctly non-modern way, mentioned earlier,
that Aristotle, perhaps presciently, used the Greek rootsunaisthanesaito refer to
common perceptions among friends (Heller-Roazen, 2004). In any case, these recent
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revelations of mirror-touch synesthesia raise the possibility of some connection
between empathy and synesthesia. Once more, we may have another piece to the
puzzle of synesthesia—or another decoy.
If mirror-touch perception in particular and empathy more generally turn out to
be important pieces in the puzzle of synesthesia, then it may be useful to consider
other examples of empathy that, atﬁrst glance, share at least a few general charac-
teristics with synesthesia. One case in point isempathic pain, where the sight of, or
other information about, another person’s pain or distress may, quite automatically,
consistently, and reliably produce discomfort or even pain.
4
Theﬁndings of several
neuroimaging studies converge in revealing a distinctive cluster of neural correlates
to empathic pain. Especially noteworthy is theﬁnding that direct pain produced in a
person by delivering noxious stimulation (e.g., pinprick) and indirect, empathic pain
induced when the person sees someone else receiving noxious stimulation have
common neural correlates in the brain. Regions of the anterior cingulate cortex,
anterior insula, and cerebellum are activated by both direct pain and empathic pain
(e.g., Singer et al., 2004; Jackson et al., 2005). Jackson et al. noted further that activity
in the anterior cingulate correlated strongly with the participants’ratings of the pain
in others. These regions of the brain are themselves associated with the affective
dimension of pain, but not with its purely sensory component.
5
Evidence from
functional magnetic resonance imaging indicates that sensory responses may be
limited to directly stimulated pain but not indirect pain (Singer et al., 2004); evidence
from event-related cortical potentials, however, suggests that empathic pain too may
be associated with activation of sensory pain mechanisms (Bufalari et al., 2007).
As with mirror-touch perception, we may ask: Is empathic pain a variant of
synesthesia? If so, then what about other possibly related conditions, such as the
couvade syndrome? The couvade syndrome refers to a set of empathic symptoms,
including nausea, toothache, backache, and abdominal pain, that are sometimes
observed in‘expectant partners’—partners of women during pregnancy and shortly
after childbirth.
6
Although the syndrome’s name may be unfamiliar, the syndrome
itself (or at least one component of it) is reported fairly often. An epidemiological
study by Lipkin and Lamb (1982) of husbands of pregnant women in Rochester,
NY reported a prevalence of the couvade syndrome (deﬁned by the husband report-
ing at least one symptom) of 22 percent. Unlike synesthesia, which is a‘long-haul’
phenomenon, the couvade syndrome is generally limited to the time period during
4
I experience a version myself, the induced sensation being a‘queasy feeling in my stomach.’
5
As is well known, Aristotle did not include pain in his enumerations (De Anima,De Sensu) of theﬁve
senses, omitting it from the qualities of touch. Instead, Aristotle identiﬁed pain among the‘passions of the
soul.’Omitting/ignoring the sensory component, Aristotle zeroed in on pain’s affective nature.
6
The termcouvadelikely derives from the Frenchcouver, to brood or hatch. Tylor (1865) was
apparently theﬁrst to name and describe thecouvade ritual, with variants found in many cultures. In
the couvade ritual, the male partner of a pregnant woman takes to bed, as if he too were pregnant.
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LAWRENCE E.MARKS

and just after pregnancy. Even if, as seems likely, it does not itself represent a form of
synesthesia, the couvade syndrome may well share mechanisms with empathic forms
of synesthesia.
1.12 Boundaries of synesthesia
There are lots of potentially useful ways to slice the synesthetic pie—according to
broad characteristics of the inducers and inductants (both of which may operate
largely, signiﬁcantly, or primarily at any of several levels, including the perceptual,
cognitive, and affective); according to narrower characteristics of the inducers and
inductants (for instance, according to sensory modality); and according to various
other schemes. To mention three: Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) distinguished
between lower and higher synesthesia—similar to the distinction between perceptual
and cognitive inducers in synesthesia. Dixon et al. (2004) distinguished between
projection and association synesthesia—between inductants projected into the exter-
nal space of the inducer, as when the color is seen in the inducing grapheme, and
inductants perceived‘in the mind’s eye’(but see Ward et al., 2007, for a different
interpretation). And Martino and Marks (2001) distinguished between strong and
weak synesthesia—related to the distinction made in the present chapter between
synesthesia and synesthetic tendency.
Further, it is not always clear exactly what constitutes an example or type of
synesthesia and what does not. Personiﬁcation has long been included among the
types of synesthesia (Calkins, 1895), but tradition is not infallible. Number forms
share many characteristics with other types of synesthesia (Sagiv et al., 2006), a
ﬁnding that is also suggestive but not conclusive. And if mirror-touch perception is
a type of synesthesia, then perhaps we should also give serious consideration to other
reported examples of empathetic perception, such as empathic pain, and maybe
even to instances of couvade syndrome in which there are clear inducers as well as
inductants. Alternatively, some of these examples may constitute intermediate cases,
not being paradigmatic of synesthesia, but examples of synesthesia nonetheless.
Analogous questions arise with regard to other synesthesia-like phenomena, such
as strong visual imagery in response to music (Karwoski et al., 1942), which might fall
somewhere between synesthesia and synesthetic tendency. It has become a common
practice, in recent research on synesthesia, to rely on a high level of consistency in
inducer-inductant relations over time as a measure of‘genuineness’(Baron-Cohen
et al., 1987), to require consistency to classify a given person as synesthetic. Every
grapheme, for instance, should induce the same color, each word aﬂavor, not only
automatically but also repeatedly, over long intervals of time (e.g., months; consist-
ency has even been observed over decades: Simner and Logie, 2007). Participants
who report having synesthetic experiences but who do not pass a test of consistency
as a matter of convenience are commonly excluded from the experimental cohort
of synesthetes. Yet Ward and Mattingley (2006) have cautioned against using
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SYNESTHESIA,THEN AND NOW

consistency in the deﬁnition of synesthesia, and it is possible that at least some people
who report experiencing synesthesia but do not show long-term consistency differ in
important ways from those who do not even report synesthesia. Where, and how, to
set boundaries is central to eliminating decoys from the puzzle of synesthesia.
Perhaps synesthesia is simply not conducive to a single, overarching, comprehensive
theoretical formulation (for suggestions along related lines, see Harrison, 2001;
Mattingley et al., 2001; Marks and Odgaard, 2005).
1.13 Monism, dualism, pluralism
Several formulations of synesthesia have been offered over the years, and in a recent
review (Marks, 2009), I tried to encapsulate many of them by distinguishing among
what I called monistic, dualistic, and pluralistic viewpoints. To summarize: Synesthetic
monismposits a single category of perception and behavior, with vividly experienced
synesthesia represented at one end of a perceptual-behavioral continuum. Synesthetic
dualismposits two broad categories of perception and behavior, one corresponding to
synesthesia (in all of its vividly experienced forms and varieties) and the other to
nonsynesthesia. And synestheticpluralismposits three (or more) categories: nonsy-
nesthesia and at least two categories of synesthesia.
Figure 1.1 compares the three viewpoints schematically, with monism on the left,
pluralism in the center, and dualism on the right. The aim here is not to be exhaustive
and catalog all possible varieties of synesthesia or formulations of monism, pluralism,
and dualism. Instead, the aim is to point out the main characteristics of each
viewpoint, focusing on a handful of critical examples. These examples include (a)
vivid synesthetic perception, as when musical notes, achromatic letters or numbers, or
pains induce what a small number of people report as sensations of color; (b) cross-
modal imagery, as when music leads to visual images of colors or patterns, but not
necessarily either automatically or with great consistency; (c) cross-modal similarity
in perception, where people who report neither vivid synesthesia nor cross-modal
imagery nevertheless perceive, for example, that drum notes resemble black and brown
colors, while violin notes resemble white and yellow; and,ﬁnally, (d) cross-modal
similarity in language, where people who report neither vivid synesthesia nor cross-
modal imagery nevertheless metaphorically interpret the words‘squeak’and‘sneeze’to
connote brightness, the words‘thunder’and‘cough’darkness.
7
As it is represented in Figure 1.1, monism essentially abolishes any distinct bound-
ary separating synesthesia from quasi-synesthetic perception or synesthetic tenden-
cies, positing instead what is essentially a continuous dimension (or multidimensional
space) of synesthesia-ness, with minimally synesthetic perception and behavior repre-
sented at the top and maximally synesthetic perception and behavior at the bottom.
7
In this respect, Hornbostel (1925) noted that the German‘hell,’or‘bright,’originally referred to high
pitch.
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Several explicitly or implicitly monistic views of synesthesia (e.g., Glicksohn et al.,
1992; Hunt, 2005) point to the centrality of physiognomic or affective properties in
perception (cf. Werner, 1957; Lindauer, 1986), and the experience of vivid
synesthesia may involve in an important way affective or emotional as well as sensory
qualia. Cytowic (1989) has indicated, for example, that one of the deﬁning charac-
teristics of synesthesia (viewed narrowly) is being laden with affect (see also Cytowic
and Eagleman, 2009). Recent research into what has been called mirror-touch
synesthesia, discussed earlier, points to its likely connection to empathy (Banissy
and Ward, 2007).
By way of contrast, both dualism and pluralism sharply distinguish synesthesia
from synesthetic tendencies, which bear some similarities to synesthesia but which
dualism and pluralism exclude from that category. But dualists and pluralists may
not agree as to what constitutes synesthesia and what does not. Dualism typically
limits synesthesia to perceptions that occur vividly, automatically, and consistently,
and thereby excludes cross-modal imagery, which sometimes is not vivid, sometimes
comes under voluntary control, and sometimes is inconstant.
8
Pluralism, however,
may (although it need not) include cross-modal imagery as a subcategory of
synesthesia. As to other putative forms of synesthesia, such as personiﬁcation,
number forms, and mirror-touch perception, dualists and pluralists alike must
apply appropriate theoretical criteria to decide which, if any, to include within the
global category of synesthesia. If a dualist classiﬁes both personiﬁcation and number
Monism Pluralism Dualism
least synesthetic
metaphor (e.g.,
cross-modal)
perceptual
similarity (e.g.,
cross-modal)
induced
imagery
induced
experience
(e.g., perceptual)
synesthesia
synesthesia
not synesthesia
not synesthesia
metaphor (e.g.,
cross-modal)
perceptual
similarity (e.g.,
cross-modal)
induced
imagery
induced
experience
(e.g., perceptual)
synesthesia
most synesthetic
Figure 1.1.Schematic representations of monism, which treats synesthesia as the end-point on
a continuous spectrum of perception; dualism, which distinguishes sharply between synesthetic
perception and nonsynesthetic perception; and pluralism, which, like dualism, distinguishes
between synesthetic perception and nonsynesthetic perception, but also distinguishes subcat-
egories within the broad category of synesthesia.
8
These distinctions too are not always sharp. Mulvenna (2012), for example, reported evidence of
voluntary control in grapheme-color synesthesia.
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SYNESTHESIA,THEN AND NOW

forms as synesthesia, then both would fall within that single category. If a pluralist
classiﬁes both as synesthesia, however, they could fall within different categories
of pluralism.
Clearly, the three perspectives on synesthesia need not translate in a simple or
straightforward fashion from one to another. Pluralism is not just an elaboration of
dualism, dividing synesthesia-as-a-dualist-sees-it into two or more subunits. Instead,
pluralists and dualists can disagree as to whether certain phenomena are examples of
synesthesia at all. Many contemporary researchers use consistency as a rule-of-thumb
criterion for assessing whether a particular person has‘genuine’synesthesia (e.g., Rich
et al., 2005; Simner et al., 2006; Barnett et al., 2008). The high level of test-retest
consistency shown by certain individuals, often over long periods of time, is remark-
able, and surely is suggestive; but, from a pluralistic point of view, it does not‘prove’
that those who fail to show this kind of consistency therefore lack synesthesia—
assuming that one has some other criteria to establish and deﬁne synesthesia.
1.14 Dualism’s common denominators
Distinguishing among monistic, pluralistic, and dualistic views leads, almost inexor-
ably, to the question: What are the criteria for deciding what constitutes synesthesia?
Synesthesia involves inducers and inductants, although these can be diverse and hard
to characterize—inducers can be external stimuli, such as sounds or words, but they
can also be stimuli that arise within the body, such as the sources of stimulation that
produce internal pain. Further, inducers can be abstract—for instance, conceptual-
ized or imagined stimuli. From the perspective of dualism, which pervades current
research in synesthesia, the search for criteria has been, to a great extent, a search for
still-elusivecommon denominators, the set of properties that could serve to deﬁne
and distinguish synesthesia.
This perspective is especially compatible with a reductionistic approach, which
seeks to discover the genetic, neuroanatomical, and neurophysiological mechanisms
responsible for idiopathic (developmental) synesthesia. The process of discovery, the
process of solving the puzzle of synesthesia, is a dynamic one: As we learn more about
the mechanisms, we better understand the common denominators, and thereby
sharpen the boundaries of synesthesia, better deﬁning it; at the same time, as we
better deﬁne synesthesia, we may better understand its mechanisms. Uncovering the
mechanisms, in turn, should help us decide what is and is not synesthesia. A deeper
understanding of the pertinent mechanisms will presumably make it possible to
answer the question why, for instance, inducers and inductants can vary so widely.
9
9
A deeper understanding may also help to answer one of the gnawing questions about synesthesia,
namely why it exists at all. Synesthesia does not confer an obvious Darwinian advantage, nor must it. Yet it
is possible that a biological advantage does emerge either from synesthesia itself or, more likely, from one of
the putative correlates of synesthesia, such as creative cognition (Mulvenna, 2007).
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There is already a large body of evidence, gleaned mainly from neuroimaging, that
points to neural substrates for certain forms of synesthesia, especially grapheme-
color (e.g., Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005; Hubbard et al., 2005). There is also
considerable evidence pointing to a genetic propensity to develop synesthesia (e.g.,
Barnett et al., 2008; Asher et al., 2009). We are still far, however, from identifying the
genes, the anatomical neural networks, and the neurophysiological processes that
may help deﬁne synesthesia.
What might we learn by uncovering the pertinent genetic, anatomical, and neuro-
physiological mechanisms? For one, discovering the mechanisms should help us
develop a plausible account of the diversity of inducers and inductants. Even if
there are speciﬁc biological propensities toward developing idiopathic synesthesia,
the forms of synesthesia that develop in a given individual may depend substantially
on experiential and environmental factors—broadly speaking, on gene-environment
(e.g., epigenetic) interactions, for example the activation of particular genes by
environmentally triggered biochemical events. Such a supposition is consistent
with the evidence at hand and suggests a possible basis for the diversity in the
forms of synesthesia among family members (e.g., Barnett et al., 2008). By implica-
tion, the same genetic predisposition may develop into any of several forms of
synesthesia. Consider the hypothetical case of children born with a genetic propen-
sity for synesthesia but raised in a non-literate society, with no opportunity to
develop grapheme-induced or word-induced synesthesia. If one potential outlet for
synesthesia is lacking, will synesthesia not appear? Or will it take on other forms?
Perhaps the different forms of synesthesia that arise over different timeframes or
periods in development are inﬂuenced, or determined, by timetables in the unfolding
of gene-environment interactions.
In this regard, recentﬁndings of Asher et al. (2009) suggest the existence of several
genes that confer susceptibility to developing synesthesia, as well as the possibility
that these genes may act in concert (oligogenic inheritance). Might these genes
combine their effects? If so, then one outcome could be gradations in the probability
that synesthesia will appear or, when it does appear, gradations in measures of its
strength (e.g., its vividness or consistency). The most vivid or highly consistent
instances of synesthesia—perhaps prototypical instances—may, therefore, be associ-
ated with the presence of multiple genes. These genes could affect neuroanatomy and
neurophysiology by inﬂuencing the degree and nature of neural connectivity (for a
recent review, see Cytowic and Eagleman, 2009).
Neuroanatomical and neurophysiological theories relate synesthetic experiences,
broadly speaking, to neural trafﬁc between brain regions that lack such neural trafﬁc
in nonsynesthetic experience. The difference between the experiences of synesthetes
and nonsynesthetes may reﬂect differences in neuroanatomy. It is possible that
grapheme-color synesthetes and nonsynesthetes differ because the synesthetes
have neural connections between ensembles of neurons responsible for processing
graphemes and ensembles processing color (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001).
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And synesthetes and nonsynesthetes may differ in their neuroanatomy because
synesthetes are born with, or are programmed to develop, hyperconnectivity,
whereas nonsynesthetes are not. Alternatively, it is possible that the neural connec-
tions between ensembles exist in synesthetes and nonsynesthetes alike, but the neural
trafﬁc between ensembles is (or comes to be) inhibited in nonsynesthetes but not
inhibited, or disinhibited, in synesthetes (Grossenbacher and Lovelace, 2001).
A third possibility is that all infants are born with hyperconnections between neural
ensembles, and during infancy and childhood these hyperconnections are pruned
or inhibited in nonsynesthetes, but persist in synesthetes (Maurer and Mondloch,
1996, 2005; for a thorough recent review andconsideration of the implications of
Maurer’s theory, see Spector and Maurer, 2009).
10
In principle, speciﬁcgenes
might be associated with any of these hypothesized neural mechanisms (for a
review of plausible genetic and neural mechanisms of synesthesia, see Bargary
and Mitchell, 2008).
11
1.15 Pluralism’s prototypes
Dualistic views of synesthesiaﬁt comfortably with the notion that synesthesia will
ultimately come to be characterized through a set of common denominators, likely to
be represented themselves through neural, genetic, and epigenetic structures and
mechanisms. This is to say that synesthesia would be deﬁned in terms of aconjunction
of properties, processes, or mechanisms. Pluralistic views of synesthesia, on the other
hand, characterize it in terms of a broad category containing several subcategories,
and therefore not in terms of a conjunction but adisjunctionof overlapping proper-
ties, processes, or mechanisms. Perhaps synesthesia has remained a puzzle for so long
because, at least in part, it is disjunctive rather than conjunctive.
12
10
Maurer’s theory could help to explain another puzzle: cross-modal similarity. Why, for example,
should high-pitched sounds resemble bright colors, while low-pitched sounds resemble dark or dim colors?
This puzzle has two parts: How does similarity transcend the difference in modalities? And why do high
and low pitch resemble bright and dark, respectively? Marks and Bornstein (1987) suggested an answer to
the second part in terms of common mechanisms for coding pitch and brightness. By hypothesizing inborn
connections across sensory modalities, Maurer’s theory can help answer theﬁrst as well.
11
As we come to understand more about the genetics, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology of
synesthesia, it should be possible to ask—and answer!—several important questions that, so far, have
only occasionally been asked or suggested (cf. Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001; Hubbard and
Ramachandran, 2005). Let me list a few of them. First, how much neural activation is necessary to have
a synesthetic experience? If synesthetic colors are experienced when the cross-activation of neural networks
includes responses in, say, area V4, what is the threshold for this experience? If synesthesia reﬂects
hyperconnectivity, how many‘additional’neural connections are needed? How much‘extra growth’or
‘reducing pruning’will sufﬁce to provide the necessary neural substrate? Or if synesthesia reﬂects disinhib-
ition of neural cross-activation, how much disinhibition sufﬁces? These questions obviously have broad
implications for the deep and long-standing issue that Fechner (1860) called inner psychophysics: the neural
substrate of consciousness.
12
Disjunctive categories have long been known to pose special cognitive demands. In their seminal
work on concept attainment, Bruner et al. (1956) showed the difﬁculty that people have in discovering
concepts that are deﬁned by disjunctions of features. In a nine-fold universe of blue, red, and green circles,
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From this pluralistic perspective, the broad category of synesthesia consists of one
or more prototypes, plus other subcategories that may fall near to or far from the
prototype, depending on the extent to which the other subcategories share the
pertinent properties, processes, or mechanisms that deﬁne the prototype. These
properties might include, for example, experience of perceptualqualiaand automa-
ticity in inducing them, but the properties themselves would be speciﬁed through an
explicit theory. Figure 1.2 sketches a scheme in which cross-modal perceptual
synesthesia constitutes a prototype. As in Figure 1.1, cross-modal similarity in both
perception and language (metaphor) falls outside the realm of synesthesia, whereas
cross-modal imagery falls within it, although relatively far from the prototype (visual
imagery and vivid forms of synesthesia may show substantial differences in neural
activation: Rich et al., 2006). As represented in Figure 1.2, the prototype embraces the
many forms of synesthesia in which both the inducer and inductant are perceptual
and heteromodal. Visual hearing, including both colored and patterned hearing, falls
Synesthesia Not Synesthesia
cross-modal
imagery
colored
graphemes
number forms
PROTOTYPE
cross-modal
synesthesia
(visual pain)
(visual hearing)
personification
mirror touch
cross-modal
similarity
(language)
cross-modal
similarity
(perception)
Figure 1.2.An example of a pluralistic model of synesthesia, in which cross-modal synesthesia
is prototypical, with other kinds of synesthesia falling close to the prototype (e.g., cross-
dimensional synesthesia, such as colored graphemes) or farther from the prototype (e.g.,
mirror touch, induced cross-modal imagery).
triangles, and squares, it is much easier to discover the conjunctive concept‘blue triangle’than the
disjunctive one‘blue or triangle.’Note, however, that in their discussion of conjunctive and disjunctive
concepts in science, Bruner et al. do not give very compelling examples of disjunction, pointing out instead
how disjunctions in science often give way, in the end, to the discovery of the conjunctions or common
denominators.
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within the prototype, as do colored touches, tastes, smells, and pains, as well as other
forms of perceptual synesthesia.
Figure 1.2 implicitly attributes three major, albeit not equally important, proper-
ties to the prototype for synesthesia: First of all is phenomenal experience. To
experience synesthesia is to experience inducedqualia. Lacking these experiences,
there is no synesthesia, which is why cross-modal similarity lies outside the realm.
Second, prototypical synesthesia is automatic (largely involuntary), reliable, and
consistent. Although phenomenal experiences (qualia) are present in induced
cross-modal imagery, cross-modal imagery is not always automatic, reliable, or
consistent (or presumably less so than prototypical synesthesia)—and, consequently,
cross-modal imagery falls relatively far from the prototype. And third, prototypical
synesthesia involves abstract and seemingly arbitrary relations between inducer and
inductant. Drawing an analogy to different kinds of memory, prototypical synesthesia
is akin to semantic memory rather than episodic memory (Tulving, 1972). It is
this property that largely distinguishes cross-modal imagery (semantic relations)
from memory images (episodic relations, as in the so-called‘Proust phenomenon,’in
which an external stimulus, commonly olfactory, evokes a strong, detailed memory
image of an earlier scene or experience: Chu and Downes, 2000), and that distinguishes
prototypical (semantic) synesthesia from mirror-touch (episodic) synesthesia.
To call prototypical synesthesia‘semantic’is to acknowledge the beneﬁtof
synesthesia to cognition. In a long tradition of research in synesthesia, Wheeler
and Cutsforth (1922a, 1922b), Karwoski and his colleagues (Karwoski and Odbert,
1938, Karwoski et al., 1942; Odbert et al., 1942), and Osgood and his colleagues (e.g.,
Osgood, 1960; Osgood et al., 1957) all concluded that synesthesia comprises a system
of meanings, operating much in the same way that semantic systems do in non-
synesthetes. Osgood in particular argued that the meanings inherent in auditory-
visual synesthesia (sound-induced colors, shapes, and patterns) are connotative, as
are the corresponding metaphorical meanings in language.
The example in Figure 1.2 brings us by acommodius vicusof recirculation back to
the notion that cross-modal synesthesia serves as a prototype (Marks, 1975, 1978b)—
despite the fact that cross-modal synesthesia is far from the most common form. To
assert that cross-modal synesthesia is prototypical is not to claim that most
synesthesia is cross-modal; instead, it is to posit that cross-modal processes play a
pivotal role in synesthesia’s development.
This version of pluralism is especially compatible with Maurer’s (Maurer and
Mondloch, 1996, 2005) hypothesis regarding the development of synesthesia,
recently elaborated by Spector and Maurer (2009), and the remaining discussion
derives largely from Maurer’s work. In brief, Maurer has hypothesized:ﬁrst, that
because of innate connections (hyperconnectivity) between and among sensory
centers, young infants essentially perceive the world synesthetically, or quasi-
synesthetically; second, that the neural apoptosis or pruning that occurs during
development in most infants and children eliminates (or inhibits) pathways that
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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content

monster—and we imagine Job looking at his wasted limbs—that the
Almighty must take precautions and send spies against me?
Then follows Bildad the Shuhite,—that is the ‘contentious,’ one of the
descendants of Keturah (Abraham’s concubine), traditionally supposed to
be inimical to the legitimate Abrahamic line, and at a later period identified
as the Turks. Bildad, with invective rather than argument, charges that Job’s
children had been slain for their sins, and otherwise makes a personal
application of Eliphaz’s theology.
Job declares that since God is so perfect, no man by such standard could be
proved just; that if he could prove himself just, the argument would be
settled by the stronger party in his own favour; and therefore, liberated from
all temptation to justify himself, he affirms that the innocent and the guilty
are dealt with much in the same way. If it is a trial of strength between God
and himself, he yields. If it is a matter of reasoning, let the terrors be
withdrawn, and he will then be able to answer calmly. For the present, even
if he were righteous, he dare not lift up his head to so assert, while the rod is
upon him.
Zophar ‘the impudent’ speaks. Here too, probably, is a disguise: he is (says
the LXX.) King of the Minæans, that is the Nomades, and his designation
‘the Naamathite,’ of unknown significance, bears a suspicious resemblance
to Naamah, a mythologic wife of Samaël and mother of several devils.
Zophar is cynical. He laughs at Job for even suggesting the notion of an
argument between himself and God, whose wisdom and ways are
unsearchable. He (God) sees man’s iniquity even when it looks as if he did
not. He is deeper than hell. What can a man do but pray and acknowledge
his sinfulness?
But Job, even in his extremity, is healthy-hearted enough to laugh too. He
tells his three ‘comforters’ that no doubt Wisdom will die with them.
Nevertheless, he has heard similar remarks before, and he is not prepared to
renounce his conscience and common-sense on such grounds. And now,
indeed, Job rises to a higher strain. He has made up his mind that after what
has come upon him, he cares not if more be added, and challenges the

universe to name his offence. So long as his transgression is ‘sealed up in a
bag,’ he has a right to consider it an invention.4
Temanite Orthodoxy is shocked at all this. Eliphaz declares that Job’s
assertion that innocent and guilty suffer alike makes the fear of God a vain
thing, and discourages prayer. ‘With us are the aged and hoary-headed.’
(Job is a neologist.) Eliphaz paints human nature in Calvinistic colours.
Behold, (God) putteth no trust in his ministering spirits,
And the heavens are not pure in his sight;
Much less abominable and polluted man,
Who drinketh iniquity as water!
The wise have related, and they got it from the fathers to whom the land
was given, and among whom no stranger was allowed to bring his strange
doctrines, that affliction is the sign and punishment of wickedness.
Job merely says he has heard enough of this, and finds no wise man among
them. He acknowledges that such reproaches add to his sorrows. He would
rather contend with God than with them, if he could. But he sees a slight
indication of divine favour in the remarkable unwisdom of his revilers, and
their failure to prove their point.
Bildad draws a picture of what he considers would be the proper
environment of a wicked man, and it closely resembles the situation of Job.
But Job reminds him that he, Bildad, is not God. It is God that has brought
him so low, but God has been satisfied with his flesh. He has not yet uttered
any complaint as to his conduct; and so he, Job, believes that his vindicator
will yet appear to confront his accusers—the men who are so glib when his
afflictor is silent.5
Zophar harps on the old string. Pretty much as some preachers go on
endlessly with their pictures of the terrors which haunted the deathbeds of
Voltaire and Paine, all the more because none are present to relate the facts.

Zophar recounts how men who seemed good, but were not, were overtaken
by asps and vipers and fires from heaven.
But Job, on the other hand, has a curious catalogue of examples in which
the notoriously wicked have lived in wealth and gaiety. And if it be said
God pays such off in their children, Job denies the justice of that. It is the
offender, and not his child, who ought to feel it. The prosperous and the
bitter in soul alike lie down in the dust at last, the good and the evil; and Job
is quite content to admit that he does not understand it. One thing he does
understand: ‘Your explanations are false.’
But Eliphaz insists on Job having a dogma. If the orthodox dogma is not
true, put something in its place! Why are you afflicted? What is, your
theory? Is it because God was afraid of your greatness? It must be as we
say, and you have been defrauding and injuring people in secret.
Job, having repeated his ardent desire to meet God face to face as to his
innocence, says he can only conclude that what befalls him and others is
what is ‘appointed’ for them. His terror indeed arises from that: the good
and the evil seem to be distributed without reference to human conduct.
How darkness conspires with the assassin! If God were only a man, things
might be different; but as it is, ‘what he desireth that he doeth,’ and ‘who
can turn him?’
Bildad falls back on his dogma of depravity. Man is a ‘worm,’ a ‘reptile.’
Job finds that for a worm Bildad is very familiar with the divine secrets. If
man is morally so weak he should be lowly in mind also. God by his spirit
hath garnished the heavens; his hand formed the ‘crooked serpent’—
Lo! these are but the borders of his works;
How faint the whisper we have heard of him!
But the thunder of his power who can understand?
Job takes up the position of the agnostic, and the three ‘Comforters’ are
silenced. The argument has ended where it had to end. Job then proceeds
with sublime eloquence. A man may lose all outward things, but no man or
god can make him utter a lie, or take from him his integrity, or his

consciousness of it. Friends may reproach him, but he can see that his own
heart does not. That one superiority to the wicked he can preserve. In
reviewing his arguments Job is careful to say that he does not maintain that
good and evil men are on an equality. For one thing, when the wicked man
is in trouble he cannot find resource in his innocence. ‘Can he delight
himself in the Almighty?’ When such die, their widows do not bewail them.
Men do not befriend oppressors when they come to want. Men hiss them.
And with guilt in their heart they feel their sorrows to be the arrows of God,
sent in anger. In all the realms of nature, therefore, amid its powers,
splendours, and precious things, man cannot find the wisdom which raises
him above misfortune, but only in his inward loyalty to the highest, and
freedom from moral evil.
Then enters a fifth character, Elihu, whose plan is to mediate between the
old dogma and the new agnostic philosophy. He is Orthodoxy rationalised.
Elihu’s name is suggestive of his ambiguity; it seems to mean one whose
‘God is He’ and he comes from the tribe of Buz, whose Hebrew meaning
might almost be represented in that English word which, with an added z,
would best convey the windiness of his remarks. Buz was the son of
Milkah, the Moon, and his descendant so came fairly by his theologic
‘moonshine’ of the kind which Carlyle has so well described in his account
of Coleridgean casuistry. Elihu means to be fair to both sides! Elihu sees
some truth in both sides! Eclectic Elihu! Job is perfectly right in thinking he
had not done anything to merit his sufferings, but he did not know what
snares were around him, and how he might have done something wicked
but for his affliction. Moreover, God ruins people now and then just to show
how he can lift them up again. Job ought to have taken this for granted, and
then to have expressed it in the old abject phraseology, saying, ‘I have
received chastisement; I will offend no more! What I see not, teach thou
me!’ (A truly Elihuic or ‘contemptible’ answer to Job’s sensible words,
‘Why is light given to a man whose way is hid?’ Why administer the rod
which enlightens as to the anger but not its cause, or as to the way of
amend?) In fact the casuistic Elihu casts no light whatever on the situation.
He simply overwhelms him with metaphors and generalities about the
divine justice and mercy, meant to hide this new and dangerous solution
which Job had discovered—namely, that the old dogmatic theories of evil

were proved false by experience, and that a good man amid sorrow should
admit his ignorance, but never allow terror to wring from him the voice of
guilt, nor the attempt to propitiate divine wrath.
When Jehovah appears on the scene, answering Job out of the whirlwind,
the tone is one of wrath, but the whole utterance is merely an amplification
of what Job had said—what we see and suffer are but fringes of a Whole we
cannot understand. The magnificence and wonder of the universe celebrated
in that voice of the whirlwind had to be given the lame and impotent
conclusion of Job ‘abhorring himself,’ and ‘repenting in dust and ashes.’
The conventional Cerberus must have his sop. But none the less does the
great heart of this poem reveal the soul that was not shaken or divided in
prosperity or adversity. The burnt-offering of his prosperous days, symbol
of a worship which refused to include the supposed powers of mischief, was
enjoined on Job’s Comforters. They must bend to him as nearer God than
they. And in his high philosophy Job found what is symbolised in the three
daughters born to him: Jemima (the Dove, the voice of the returning
Spring); Kezia (Cassia, the sweet incense); Kerenhappuch (the horn of
beautiful colour, or decoration).
From the Jewish point of view this triumph of Job represented a tremendous
heresy. The idea that afflictions could befall a man without any reference to
his conduct, and consequently not to be influenced by the normal rites and
sacrifices, is one fatal to a priesthood. If evil may be referred in one case to
what is going on far away among gods in obscurities of the universe, and to
some purpose beyond the ken of all sages, it may so be referred in all cases,
and though burnt-offerings may be resorted to formally, they must cease
when their powerlessness is proved. Hence the Rabbins have taken the side
of Job’s Comforters. They invented a legend that Job had been a great
magician in Egypt, and was one of those whose sorceries so long prevented
the escape of Israel. He was converted afterwards, but it is hinted that his
early wickedness required the retribution he suffered. His name was to them
the troubler troubled.
Heretical also was the theory that man could get along without any
Angelolatry or Demon-worship. Job in his singleness of service, fearing

1
2
3
4
God alone, defying the Seraphim and Cherubim from Samaël down to do
their worst, was a perilous figure. The priests got no part of any burnt-
offering. The sin-offering was of almost sumptuary importance. Hence the
rabbinical theory, already noticed, that it was through neglect of these
expiations to the God of Sin that the morally spotless Job came under the
power of his plagues.
But for precisely the same reasons the story of Job became representative to
the more spiritual class of minds of a genuine as contrasted with a nominal
monotheism, and the piety of the pure, the undivided heart. Its meaning is
so human that it is not necessary to discuss the question of its connection
with the story of Hariśchandra, or whether its accent was caught from or by
the legends of Zoroaster and of Buddha, who passed unscathed through the
ordeals of Ahriman and Mara. It was repeated in the encounters of the
infant Christ with Herod, and of the adult Christ with Satan. It was repeated
in the unswerving loyalty of the patient Griselda to her husband. It is indeed
the heroic theme of many races and ages, and it everywhere points to a
period when the virtues of endurance and patience rose up to match the
agonies which fear and weakness had tried to propitiate,—when man first
learned to suffer and be strong.
Noyes’ Translation.
Eisenmenger, Entd. Jud. i. 836.
Job. i. 22, the literal rendering of which is, ‘In all this Job sinned not, nor gave God
unsalted.’ This translation I first heard from Dr. A. P. Peabody, sometime President of
Harvard University, from whom I have a note in which he says:—‘The word which I have
rendered gave is appropriate to a sacrifice. The word I have rendered unsalted means so
literally; and is in Job vi. 6 rendered unsavory. It may, and sometimes does, denote folly,
by a not unnatural metaphor; but in that sense the word gave—an offertory word—is out of
place.’ Waltonus (Bib. Polyg.) translates ‘nec dedit insulsum Deo;’ had he rendered הָלְפִּת by
insalsum it would have been exact. The horror with which demons and devils are supposed
to regard salt is noticed, i. 288.
Gesenius so understands verse 17 of chap. xiv.

5The much misunderstood and mistranslated passage, xix. 25–27 (already quoted), is
certainly referable to the wide-spread belief that as against each man there was an Accusing
Spirit, so for each there was a Vindicating Spirit. These two stood respectively on the right
and left of the balances in which the good and evil actions of each soul were weighed
against each other, each trying to make his side as heavy as possible. But as the accusations
against him are made by living men, and on earth, Job is not prepared to consider a
celestial acquittal beyond the grave as adequate.

Chapter XV.

Satan.
Public Prosecutors—Satan as Accuser—English Devil-worshipper—Conversion
by Terror—Satan in the Old Testament—The trial of Joshua—Sender of Plagues
—Satan and Serpent—Portrait of Satan—Scapegoat of Christendom—Catholic
‘Sight of Hell’—The ally of Priesthoods.
There is nothing about the Satan of the Book of Job to indicate him as a
diabolical character. He appears as a respectable and powerful personage
among the sons of God who present themselves before Jehovah, and his
office is that of a public prosecutor. He goes to and fro in the earth attending
to his duties. He has received certificates of character from A. Schultens,
Herder, Eichorn, Dathe, Ilgen, who proposed a new word for Satan in the
prologue of Job, which would make him a faithful but too suspicious
servant of God.
Such indeed he was deemed originally; but it is easy to see how the
degradation of such a figure must have begun. There is often a clamour in
England for the creation of Public Prosecutors; yet no doubt there is good
ground for the hesitation which its judicial heads feel in advising such a
step. The experience of countries in which Prosecuting Attorneys exist is
not such as to prove the institution one of unmixed advantage. It is not in
human nature for an official person not to make the most of the duty
intrusted to him, and the tendency is to raise the interest he specially
represents above that of justice itself. A defeated prosecutor feels a certain
stigma upon his reputation as much as a defeated advocate, and it is
doubtful whether it be safe that the fame of any man should be in the least
identified with personal success where justice is trying to strike a true
balance. The recent performances of certain attorneys in England and
America retained by Societies for the Suppression of Vice strikingly
illustrate the dangers here alluded to. The necessity that such salaried social
detectives should perpetually parade before the community as purifiers of
society induces them to get up unreal cases where real ones cannot be easily
discovered. Thus they become Accusers, and from this it is an easy step to

become Slanderers; nor is it a very difficult one which may make them
instigators of the vices they profess to suppress.
The first representations of Satan show him holding in his hand the scales;
but the latter show him trying slyly with hand or foot to press down that
side of the balance in which the evil deeds of a soul are being weighed
against the good. We need not try to track archæologically this declension
of a Prosecutor, by increasing ardour in his office, through the stages of
Accuser, Adversary, Executioner, and at last Rival of the legitimate Rule,
and tempter of its subjects. The process is simple and familiar. I have before
me a little twopenny book,1 which is said to have a vast circulation, where
one may trace the whole mental evolution of Satan. The ancient Devil-
worshipper who has reappeared with such power in England tells us that he
was the reputed son of a farmer, who had to support a wife and eleven
children on from 7s. to 9s. per week, and who sent him for a short time to
school. ‘My schoolmistress reproved me for something wrong, telling me
that God Almighty took notice of children’s sins. This stuck to my
conscience a great while; and who this God Almighty could be I could not
conjecture; and how he could know my sins without asking my mother I
could not conceive. At that time there was a person named Godfrey, an
exciseman, in the town, a man of a stern and hard-favoured countenance,
whom I took notice of for having a stick covered with figures, and an ink-
bottle hanging at the button-hole of his coat. I imagined that man to be
employed by God Almighty to take notice and keep an account of children’s
sins; and once I got into the market-house and watched him very narrowly,
and found that he was always in a hurry, by his walking so fast; and I
thought he had need to hurry, as he must have a deal to do to find out all the
sins of children!’ This terror caused the little Huntington to say his prayers.
‘Punishment for sin I found was to be inflicted after death, therefore I hated
the churchyard, and would travel any distance round rather than drag my
guilty conscience over that enchanted spot.’
The child is father to the man. When Huntington, S.S., grew up, it was to
record for the thousands who listened to him as a prophet his many
encounters with the devil. The Satan he believes in is an exact counterpart
of the stern, hard-favoured exciseman whom he had regarded as God’s

employé. On one occasion he writes, ‘Satan began to tempt me violently
that there was no God, but I reasoned against the belief of that from my
own experience of his dreadful wrath, saying, How can I credit this
suggestion, when (God’s) wrath is already revealed in my heart, and every
curse in his book levelled at my head.’ (That seems his only evidence of
God’s existence—his wrath!) ‘The Devil answered that the Bible was false,
and only wrote by cunning men to puzzle and deceive people. ‘There is no
God,’ said the adversary, ‘nor is the Bible true.’ ... I asked, ‘Who, then,
made the world?’ He replied, ‘I did, and I made men too.’ Satan, perceiving
my rationality almost gone, followed me up with another temptation; that as
there was no God I must come back to his work again, else when he had
brought me to hell he would punish me more than all the rest. I cried out,
‘Oh, what will become of me! what will become of me!’ He answered that
there was no escape but by praying to him; and that he would show me
some lenity when he took me to hell. I went and sat in my tool-house
halting between two opinions; whether I should petition Satan, or whether I
should keep praying to God, until I could ascertain the consequences. While
I was thinking of bending my knees to such a cursed being as Satan, an
uncommon fear of God sprung up in my heart to keep me from it.’
In other words, Mr. Huntington wavered between the petitions ‘Good Lord!
Good Devil!’ The question whether it were more moral, more holy, to
worship the one than the other did not occur to him. He only considers
which is the strongest—which could do him the most mischief—which,
therefore, to fear the most; and when Satan has almost convinced him in his
own favour, he changes round to God. Why? Not because of any superior
goodness on God’s part. He says, ‘An uncommon fear of God sprung up in
my heart.’ The greater terror won the day; that is to say, of two demons he
yielded to the stronger. Such an experience, though that of one living in our
own time, represents a phase in the development of the relation between
God and Satan which would have appeared primitive to an Assyrian two
thousand years ago. The ethical antagonism of the two was then much more
clearly felt. But this bit of contemporary superstition may bring before us
the period when Satan, from having been a Nemesis or Retributive Agent of
the divine law, had become a mere personal rival of his superior.

Satan, among the Jews, was at first a generic term for an adversary lying in
wait. It is probably the furtive suggestion at the root of this Hebrew word
which aided in its selection as the name for the invisible adverse powers
when they were especially distinguished. But originally no special
personage, much less any antagonist of Jehovah, was signified by the word.
Thus we read: ‘And God’s anger was kindled because he (Balaam) went;
and the angel of the Lord stood in the way for a Satan against him.... And
the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way and his sword drawn
in his hand.’2 The eyes of Balaam are presently opened, and the angel says,
‘I went out to be a Satan to thee because the way is perverse before me.’
The Philistines fear to take David with them to battle lest he should prove a
Satan to them, that is, an underhand enemy or traitor.3 David called those
who wished to put Shimei to death Satans;4 but in this case the epithet
would have been more applicable to himself for affecting to protect the
honest man for whose murder he treacherously provided.5
That it was popularly used for adversary as distinct from evil appears in
Solomon’s words, ‘There is neither Satan nor evil occurrent.’6 Yet it is in
connection with Solomon that we may note the entrance of some of the
materials for the mythology which afterwards invested the name of Satan. It
is said that, in anger at his idolatries, ‘the Lord stirred up a Satan unto
Solomon, Hadad the Edomite: he was of the king’s seed in Edom.’7 Hadad,
‘the Sharp,’ bore a name next to that of Esau himself for the redness of his
wrath, and, as we have seen in a former chapter, Edom was to the Jews the
land of ‘bogeys.’ ‘Another Satan,’ whom the Lord ‘stirred up,’ was the
Devastator, Prince Rezon, founder of the kingdom of Damascus, of whom it
is said, ‘he was a Satan to Israel all the days of Solomon.’8 The human
characteristics of supposed ‘Scourges of God’ easily pass away. The name
that becomes traditionally associated with calamities whose agents were
‘stirred up’ by the Almighty is not allowed the glory of its desolations. The
word ‘Satan,’ twice used in this chapter concerning Solomon’s fall,
probably gained here a long step towards distinct personification as an
eminent national enemy, though there is no intimation of a power daring to
oppose the will of Jehovah. Nor, indeed, is there any such intimation
anywhere in the ‘canonical’ books of the Old Testament. The writer of

Psalm cix., imprecating for his adversaries, says: ‘Set thou a wicked man
over him; and let Satan stand at his right hand. When he shall be judged, let
him be condemned; and let his prayer become sin.’ In this there is an
indication of a special Satan, but he is supposed to be an agent of Jehovah.
In the catalogue of the curses invoked of the Lord, we find the evils which
were afterwards supposed to proceed only from Satan. The only instance in
the Old Testament in which there is even a faint suggestion of hostility
towards Satan on the part of Jehovah is in Zechariah. Here we find the
following remarkable words: ‘And he showed me Joshua the high priest
standing before the angel of Jehovah, and the Satan standing at his right
hand to oppose him. And Jehovah said unto Satan, Jehovah rebuke thee, O
Satan; even Jehovah, that hath chosen Jerusalem, rebuke thee: is not this a
brand plucked out of the fire? Now Joshua was clothed with filthy
garments, and stood before the angel. And he answered and spake to those
that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And
to him he said, Lo, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will
clothe thee with goodly raiment.’9
Here we have a very fair study and sketch of that judicial trial of the soul
for which mainly the dogma of a resurrection after death was invented. The
doctrine of future rewards and punishments is not one which a priesthood
would invent or care for, so long as they possessed unrestricted power to
administer such in this life. It is when an alien power steps in to supersede
the priesthood—the Gallio too indifferent whether ceremonial laws are
carried out to permit the full application of terrestrial cruelties—that the
priest requires a tribunal beyond the grave to execute his sentence. In this
picture of Zechariah we have this invisible Celestial Court. The Angel of
Judgment is in his seat. The Angel of Accusation is present to prosecute. A
poor filthy wretch appears for trial. What advocate can he command?
Where is Michael, the special advocate of Israel? He does not recognise one
of his clients in this poor Joshua in his rags. But lo! suddenly Jehovah
himself appears; reproves his own commissioned Accuser; declares Joshua
a brand plucked from the burning (Tophet); orders a change of raiment, and,
condoning his offences, takes him into his own service. But in all this there
is nothing to show general antagonism between Jehovah and Satan, but the
reverse.

When we look into the Book of Job we find a Satan sufficiently different
from any and all of those mentioned under that name in other parts of the
Old Testament to justify the belief that he has been mainly adapted from the
traditions of other regions. The plagues and afflictions which in Psalm cix.
are invoked from Jehovah, even while Satan is mentioned as near, are in the
Book of Job ascribed to Satan himself. Jehovah only permits Satan to inflict
them with a proviso against total destruction. Satan is here named as a
personality in a way not known elsewhere in the Old Testament, unless it be
in 1 Chron. xxi. 1, where Satan (the article being in this single case absent)
is said to have ‘stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number
Israel.’ But in this case the uniformity of the passage with the others
(excepting those in Job) is preserved by the same incident being recorded in
2 Sam. xxiv. 1, ‘The anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he
(Jehovah) moved David against them to say, Go number Israel and Judah.’
It is clear that, in the Old Testament, it is in the Book of Job alone that we
find Satan as the powerful prince of an empire which is distinct from that of
Jehovah,—an empire of tempest, plague, and fire,—though he presents
himself before Jehovah, and awaits permission to exert his power on a loyal
subject of Jehovah. The formality of a trial, so dear to the Semitic heart, is
omitted in this case. And these circumstances confirm the many other facts
which prove this drama to be largely of non-Semitic origin. It is tolerably
clear that the drama of Hariśchandra in India and that of Job were both
developed from the Sanskrit legends mentioned in our chapter on
Viswámitra; and it is certain that Aryan and Semitic elements are both
represented in the figure of Satan as he has passed into the theology of
Christendom.
Nor indeed has Satan since his importation into Jewish literature in this new
aspect, much as the Rabbins have made of him, ever been assigned the
same character among that people that has been assigned him in
Christendom. He has never replaced Samaël as their Archfiend. Rabbins
have, indeed, in later times associated him with the Serpent which seduced
Eve in Eden; but the absence of any important reference to that story in the
New Testament is significant of the slight place it had in the Jewish mind
long after the belief in Satan had become popular. In fact, that essentially

Aryan myth little accorded with the ideas of strife and immorality which the
Jews had gradually associated with Samaël. In the narrative, as it stands in
Genesis, it is by no means the Serpent that makes the worst appearance. It is
Jehovah, whose word—that death shall follow on the day the apple is eaten
—is falsified by the result; and while the Serpent is seen telling the truth,
and guiding man to knowledge, Jehovah is represented as animated by
jealousy or even fear of man’s attainments. All of which is natural enough
in an extremely primitive myth of a combat between rival gods, but by no
means possesses the moral accent of the time and conditions amid which
Jahvism certainly originated. It is in the same unmoral plane as the contest
of the Devas and Asuras for the Amrita, in Hindu mythology, a contest of
physical force and wits.

Fig. 5.—Gnçëtác Fáguêe (Ste. Genevieve Collection).
The real development of Satan among the Jews was from an accusing to an
opposing spirit, then to an agent of punishment—a hated executioner. The
fact that the figure here given (Fig. 5) was identified by one so familiar with

Semitic demonology as Calmet as a representation of him, is extremely
interesting. It was found among representations of Cherubim, and on the
back of one somewhat like it is a formula of invocation against demons.
The countenance is of that severe beauty which the Greeks ascribed to
Nemesis. Nemesis has at her feet the wheel and rudder, symbols of her
power to overtake the evil-doer by land or sea; the feet of this figure are
winged for pursuit. He has four hands. In one he bears the lamp which, like
Lucifer, brings light on the deed of darkness. As to others, he answers
Baruch’s description (Ep. 13, 14) of the Babylonian god, ‘He hath a sceptre
in his hand like a man, like a judge of the kingdom—he hath in his hand a
sword and an axe.’ He bears nicely-graduated implements of punishment,
from the lash that scourges to the axe that slays; and his retributive powers
are supplemented by the scorpion tail. At his knees are signets; whomsoever
he seals are sealed. He has the terrible eyes which were believed able to
read on every forehead a catalogue of sins invisible to mortals, a power that
made women careful of their veils, and gave meaning to the formula ‘Get
thee behind me!’10
Now this figure, which Calmet believed to be Satan, bears on its reverse,
‘The Everlasting Sun.’ He is a god made up of Egyptian and Magian forms,
the head-plumes belonging to the one, the multiplied wings to the other.
Matter (Hist. Crit. de Gnost.) reproduces it, and says that ‘it differs so much
from all else of the kind as to prove it the work of an impostor.’ But
Professor C. W. King has a (probably fifth century) gem in his collection
evidently a rude copy of this (reproduced in his ‘Gnostics,’ Pl. xi. 3), on the
back of which is ‘Light of Lights;’ and, in a note which I have from him, he
says that it sufficiently proves Matter wrong, and that this form was
primitive. In one gem of Professor King’s (Pl. v. 1) the lamp is also carried,
and means the ‘Light of Lights.’ The inscription beneath, within a coiled
serpent, is in corrupt cuneiform characters, long preserved by the Magi,
though without understanding them. There is little doubt, therefore, that the
instinct of Calmet was right, and that we have here an early form of the
detective and retributive Magian deity ultimately degraded to an accusing
spirit, or Satan.

Although the Jews did not identify Satan with their Scapegoat, yet he has
been veritably the Scapegoat among devils for two thousand years. All the
nightmares and phantasms that ever haunted the human imagination have
been packed upon him unto this day, when it is almost as common to hear
his name in India and China as in Europe and America. In thus passing
round the world, he has caught the varying features of many fossilised
demons: he has been horned, hoofed, reptilian, quadrupedal, anthropoid,
anthropomorphic, beautiful, ugly, male, female; the whites painted him
black, and the blacks, with more reason, painted him white. Thus has Satan
been made a miracle of incongruities. Yet through all these protean shapes
there has persisted the original characteristic mentioned. He is prosecutor
and executioner under the divine government, though his office has been
debased by that mental confusion which, in the East, abhors the burner of
corpses, and, in the West, regards the public hangman with contempt; the
abhorrence, in the case of Satan, being intensified by the supposition of an
overfondness for his work, carried to the extent of instigating the offences
which will bring him victims.
In a well-known English Roman Catholic book11 of recent times, there is
this account of St. Francis’ visit to hell in company with the Angel Gabriel:
—‘St. Francis saw that, on the other side of (a certain) soul, there was
another devil to mock at and reproach it. He said, Remember where you
are, and where you will be for ever; how short the sin was, how long the
punishment. It is your own fault; when you committed that mortal sin you
knew how you would be punished. What a good bargain you made to take
the pains of eternity in exchange for the sin of a day, an hour, a moment.
You cry now for your sin, but your crying comes too late. You liked bad
company; you will find bad company enough here. Your father was a
drunkard, look at him there drinking red-hot fire. You were too idle to go to
mass on Sundays; be as idle as you like now, for there is no mass to go to.
You disobeyed your father, but you dare not disobey him who is your father
in hell.’
This devil speaks as one carrying out the divine decrees. He preaches. He
utters from his chasuble of flame the sermons of Father Furniss. And, no
doubt, wherever belief in Satan is theological, this is pretty much the form

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
which he assumes before the mind (or what such believers would call their
mind, albeit really the mind of some Syrian dead these two thousand years).
But the Satan popularly personalised was man’s effort to imagine an
enthusiasm of inhumanity. He is the necessary appendage to a personalised
Omnipotence, whose thoughts are not as man’s thoughts, but claim to
coerce these. His degradation reflects the heartlessness and the ingenuity of
torture which must always represent personal government with its catalogue
of fictitious crimes. Offences against mere Majesty, against iniquities
framed in law, must be doubly punished, the thing to be secured being
doubly weak. Under any theocratic government law and punishment would
become the types of diabolism. Satan thus has a twofold significance. He
reports what powerful priesthoods found to be the obstacles to their
authority; and he reports the character of the priestly despotisms which
aimed to obstruct human development.
‘The Kingdom of Heaven Taken by Prayer.’ By William Huntington, S.S. This title is
explained to be ‘Sinner Saved,’ otherwise one might understand the letters to signify a
Surviving Syrian.
Num. xxii. 22.
1 Sam. xxix. 4.
2 Sam. xix. 22.
1 Kings ii. 9.
1 Kings v. 4.
1 Kings xi. 14.
1 Kings xi. 25.
Zech. iii.
Cf. Rev. vii. 3.
‘The Sight of Hell,’ prepared, as one of a ‘Series of Books for Children and Young
Persons,’ by the Rev. Father Furniss, C.S.S.R., by authority of his Superiors.

Chapter XVI.

Religious Despotism.
Pharaoh and Herod—Zoroaster’s mother—Ahriman’s emissaries—Kansa and
Krishna—Emissaries of Kansa—Astyages and Cyrus—Zohák—Bel and the
Christian.
The Jews had already, when Christ appeared, formed the theory that the
hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and his resistance to the departure of Israel
from Egypt, were due to diabolical sorcery. The belief afterwards matured;
that Edom (Esau or Samaël) was the instigator of Roman aggression was
steadily forming. The mental conditions were therefore favourable to the
growth of a belief in the Jewish followers of Christ that the hostility to the
religious movement of their time was another effort on the part of Samaël to
crush the kingdom of God. Herod was not, indeed, called Satan or Samaël,
nor was Pharaoh; but the splendour and grandeur of this Idumean (the realm
of Esau), notwithstanding his oppressions and crimes, had made him a fair
representative to the people of the supernatural power they dreaded. Under
these circumstances it was a powerful appeal to the sympathies of the
Jewish people to invent in connection with Herod a myth exactly similar to
that associated with Pharaoh,—namely, a conspiracy with sorcerers, and
consequent massacre of all new-born children.
The myths which tell of divine babes supernaturally saved from royal
hostility are veritable myths, even where they occur so late in time that
historic names and places are given; for, of course, it is impossible that by
any natural means either Pharaoh or Herod should be aware of the peculiar
nature of any particular infant born in their dominions. Such traditions,
when thus presented in historical guise, can only be explained by reference
to corresponding fables written out in simpler mythic form; while it is
especially necessary to remember that such corresponding narratives may
be of independent ethnical origin, and that the later in time may be more
primitive spiritually.

In the Legend of Zoroaster1 his mother Dogdo, previous to his birth, has a
dream in which she sees a black cloud, which, like the wing of some vast
bird, hides the sun, and brings on frightful darkness. This cloud rains down
on her house terrible beasts with sharp teeth,—tigers, lions, wolves,
rhinoceroses, serpents. One monster especially attacks her with great fury,
and her unborn babe speaks in reassuring terms. A great light rises and the
beasts fall. A beautiful youth appears, hurls a book at the Devas (Devils),
and they fly, with exception of three,—a wolf, a lion, and a tiger. These,
however, the youth drives away with a luminous horn. He then replaces the
holy infant in the womb, and says to the mother: ‘Fear nothing! The King of
Heaven protects this infant. The earth waits for him. He is the prophet
whom Ormuzd sends to his people: his law will fill the world with joy: he
will make the lion and the lamb drink in the same place. Fear not these
ferocious beasts; why should he whom Ormuzd preserves fear the enmity of
the whole world?’ With these words the youth vanished, and Dogdo awoke.
Repairing to an interpreter, she was told that the Horn meant the grandeur
of Ormuzd; the Book was the Avesta; the three Beasts betokened three
powerful enemies.
Zoroaster was born laughing. This prodigy being noised abroad, the
Magicians became alarmed, and sought to slay the child. One of them
raised a sword to strike him, but his arm fell to the ground. The Magicians
bore the child to the desert, kindled a fire and threw him into it, but his
mother afterwards found him sleeping tranquilly and unharmed in the
flames. Next he was thrown in front of a drove of cows and bulls, but the
fiercest of the bulls stood carefully over the child and protected him. The
Magicians killed all the young of a pack of wolves, and then cast the infant
Zoroaster to them that they might vent their rage upon him, but the mouths
of the wolves were shut. They abandoned the child on a lonely mountain,
but two ewes came and suckled him.
Zoroaster’s father respected the ministers of the Devas (Magi), but his child
rebuked him. Zoroaster walked on the water (crossing a great river where
was no bridge) on his way to Mount Iran where he was to receive the Law.
It was then he had the vision of the battle between the two serpent armies,

—the white and black adders, the former, from the South, conquering the
latter, which had come from the North to destroy him.
The Legend of the Infant Krishna is as follows:—The tyrant Kansa, having
given his sister Devaki in marriage to Vasudéva, as he was returning from
the wedding heard a voice declare, ‘The eighth son of Devaki is destined to
be thy destroyer.’ Alarmed at this, Kansa cast his sister and her husband into
a prison with seven iron doors, and whenever a son was born he caused it to
be instantly destroyed. When Devaki became pregnant the eighth time,
Brahma and Siva, with attending Devas, appeared and sang: ‘O favoured
among women! in thy delivery all nature shall have cause to exult! How
ardently we long to behold that face for the sake of which we have coursed
round three worlds!’ When Krishna was born a chorus of celestial spirits
saluted him; the room was illumined with supernatural light. While Devaki
was weeping at the fatal decree of Kansa that her son should be destroyed, a
voice was heard by Vasudéva saying: ‘Son of Yadu, carry this child to
Gokul, on the other side of the river Jumna, to Nauda, whose wife has just
given birth to a daughter. Leave him and bring the girl hither.’ At this the
seven doors swung open, deep sleep fell on the guards, and Vasudéva went
forth with the holy infant in his arms. The river Jumna was swollen, but the
waters, having kissed the feet of Krishna, retired on either side, opening a
pathway. The great serpent of Vishnu held its hood over this new
incarnation of its Lord. Beside sleeping Nauda and his wife the daughter
was replaced by the son, who was named Krishna, the Dark.
When all this had happened a voice came to Kansa saying: ‘The boy
destined to destroy thee is born, and is now living.’ Whereupon Kansa
ordered all the male children in his kingdom to be destroyed. This being
ineffectual, the whereabouts of Krishna were discovered; but the messenger
who was sent to destroy the child beheld its image in the water and adored
it. The Rakshasas worked in the interest of Kansa. One approached the
divine child in shape of a monstrous bull whose head he wrung off; and he
so burned in the stomach of a crocodile which had swallowed him that the
monster cast him from his mouth unharmed.

Finally, as a youth, Krishna, after living some time as a herdsman, attacked
the tyrant Kansa, tore the crown from his head, and dragged him by his hair
a long way; with the curious result that Kansa became liberated from the
three worlds, such virtue had long thinking about the incarnate one, even in
enmity!
The divine beings represented in these legends find their complement in the
fabulous history of Cyrus; and the hostile powers which sought their
destruction are represented in demonology by the Persian tyrant-devil
Zohák. The name of Astyages, the grandfather of Cyrus, has been
satisfactorily traced to Ashdahák, and Ajis Daháka, the ‘biting snake.’ The
word thus connects him with Vedic Ahi and with Iranian Zohák, the tyrant
out of whose shoulders a magician evoked two serpents which adhered to
him and became at once his familiars and the arms of his cruelty. As
Astyages, the last king of Media, he had a dream that the offspring of his
daughter Mandane would reign over Asia. He gave her in marriage to
Cambyses, and when she bore a child (Cyrus), committed it to his minister
Harpagus to be slain. Harpagus, however, moved with pity, gave it to a
herdsman of Astyages, who substituted for it a still-born child, and having
so satisfied the tyrant of its death, reared Cyrus as his own son.
The luminous Horn of the Zoroastrian legend and the diabolism of Zohák
are both recalled in the Book of Daniel (viii.) in the terrific struggle of the
ram and the he-goat. The he-goat, ancient symbol of hairy Esau, long
idealised into the Invisible Foe of Israel, had become associated also with
Babylon and with Nimrod its founder, the Semitic Zohák. But Bel,
conqueror of the Dragon, was the founder of Babylon, and to Jewish eyes
the Dragon was his familiar; to the Jews he represented the tyranny and
idolatry of Nimrod, the two serpents of Zohák. When Cyrus supplanted
Astyages, this was the idol he found the Babylonians worshipping until
Daniel destroyed it. And so, it would appear, came about the fact that to the
Jews the power of Christendom came to be represented as the Reign of Bel.
One can hardly wonder at that. If ever there were cruelty and oppression
passing beyond the limit of mere human capacities, it has been recorded in
the tragical history of Jewish sufferings. The disbeliever in præternatural
powers of evil can no less than others recognise in this ‘Bel and the

1
Christian,’ which the Jews substituted for ‘Bel and the Dragon,’ the real
archfiend—Superstition, turning human hearts to stone when to stony gods
they sacrifice their own humanity and the welfare of mankind.
M. Anquetil Du Perron’s ‘Zendavesta et Vie de Zoroastre.’

Chapter XVII.

The Prince of this World.
Temptations—Birth of Buddha—Mara—Temptation of power—Asceticism and
Luxury—Mara’s menaces—Appearance of the Buddha’s Vindicator—Ahriman
tempts Zoroaster—Satan and Christ—Criticism of Strauss—Jewish traditions—
Hunger—Variants.
The Devil, having shown Jesus all the kingdoms of this world, said, ‘All
this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto
me, and to whomsoever I will I give it,’ The theory thus announced is as a
vast formation underlying many religions. As every religion begins as an
ideal, it must find itself in antagonism to the world at large; and since the
social and political world are themselves, so long as they last, the outcome
of nature, it is inevitable that in primitive times the earth should be regarded
as a Satanic realm, and the divine world pictured elsewhere. A legitimate
result of this conclusion is asceticism, and belief in the wickedness of
earthly enjoyments. To men of great intellectual powers, generally
accompanied as they are with keen susceptibilities of enjoyment and strong
sympathies, the renunciation of this world must be as a living burial. To
men who, amid the corruptions of the world, feel within them the power to
strike in with effect, or who, seeing ‘with how little wisdom the world is
governed,’ are stirred by the sense of power, the struggle against the
temptation to lead in the kingdoms of this world is necessarily severe. Thus
simple is the sense of those temptations which make the almost invariable
ordeal of the traditional founders of religions. As in earlier times the god
won his spurs, so to say, by conquering some monstrous beast, the saint or
saviour must have overcome some potent many-headed world, with gems
for scales and double-tongue, coiling round the earth, and thence, like
Lilith’s golden hair, round the heart of all surrendered to its seductions.
It is remarkable to note the contrast between the visible and invisible worlds
which surrounded the spiritual pilgrimage of Sakya Muni to Buddhahood or
enlightenment. At his birth there is no trace of political hostility: the cruel
Kansa, Herod, Magicians seeking to destroy, are replaced by the

affectionate force of a king trying to retain his son. The universal traditions
reach their happy height in the ecstatic gospels of the Siamese.1 The
universe was illumined; all jewels shown with unwonted lustre; the air was
full of music; all pain ceased; the blind saw, the deaf heard; the birds paused
in their flight; all trees and plants burst into bloom, and lotus flowers
appeared in every place. Not under the dominion of Mara2 was this
beautiful world. But by turning from all its youth, health, and life, to think
only of its decrepitude, illness, and death, the Prince Sakya Muni
surrounded himself with another world in which Mara had his share of
power. I condense here the accounts of his encounters with the Prince, who
was on his way to be a hermit.
When the Prince passed out at the palace gates, the king Mara, knowing that
the youth was passing beyond his evil power, determined to prevent him.
Descending from his abode and floating in the air, Mara cried, ‘Lord, thou
art capable of such vast endurance, go not forth to adopt a religious life, but
return to thy kingdom, and in seven days thou shalt become an emperor of
the world, ruling over the four great continents.’ ‘Take heed, O Mara!’
replied the Prince; ‘I also know that in seven days I might gain universal
empire, but I have no desire for such possessions. I know that the pursuit of
religion is better than the empire of the world. See how the world is moved,
and quakes with praise of this my entry on a religious life! I shall attain the
glorious omniscience, and shall teach the wheel of the law, that all teachable
beings may free themselves from transmigratory existence. You, thinking
only of the lusts of the flesh, would force me to leave all beings to wander
without guide into your power. Avaunt! get thee away far from me!’
Mara withdrew, but only to watch for another opportunity. It came when the
Prince had reduced himself to emaciation and agony by the severest
austerities. Then Mara presented himself, and pretending compassion, said,
‘Beware, O grand Being! Your state is pitiable to look on; you are
attenuated beyond measure, and your skin, that was of the colour of gold, is
dark and discoloured. You are practising this mortification in vain. I can see
that you will not live through it. You, who are a Grand Being, had better
give up this course, for be assured you will derive much more advantage
from sacrifices of fire and flowers.’ Him the Grand Being indignantly

answered, ‘Hearken, thou vile and wicked Mara! Thy words suit not the
time. Think not to deceive me, for I heed thee not. Thou mayest mislead
those who have no understanding, but I, who have virtue, endurance, and
intelligence, who know what is good and what is evil, cannot be so misled.
Thou, O Mara! hast eight generals. Thy first is delight in the five lusts of
the flesh, which are the pleasures of appearance, sound, scent, flavour, and
touch. Thy second general is wrath, who takes the form of vexation,
indignation, and desire to injure. Thy third is concupiscence. Thy fourth is
desire. Thy fifth is impudence. Thy sixth is arrogance. Thy seventh is doubt.
And thine eighth is ingratitude. These are thy generals, who cannot be
escaped by those whose hearts are set on honour and wealth. But I know
that he who can contend with these thy generals shall escape beyond all
sorrow, and enjoy the most glorious happiness. Therefore I have not ceased
to practise mortification, knowing that even were I to die whilst thus
engaged, it would be a most excellent thing.’
It is added that Mara ‘fled in confusion,’ but the next incident seems to
show that his suggestion was not unheeded; for ‘after he had departed,’ the
Grand Being had his vision of the three-stringed guitar—one string drawn
too tightly, the second too loosely, the third moderately—which last,
somewhat in defiance of orchestral ideas, alone gave sweet music, and
taught him that moderation was better than excess or laxity. By eating
enough he gained that pristine strength and beauty which offended the five
Brahmans so that they left him. The third and final effort of Mara
immediately preceded the Prince’s attainment of the order of Buddha under
the Bo-tree. He now sent his three daughters, Raka (Love), Aradi (Anger),
Tanha (Desire). Beautifully bedecked they approached him, and Raka said,
‘Lord, fearest thou not death?’ But he drove her away. The two others also
he drove away as they had no charm of sufficient power to entice him. Then
Mara assembled his generals, and said, ‘Listen, ye Maras, that know not
sorrow! Now shall I make war on the Prince, that man without equal. I dare
not attack him in face, but I will circumvent him by approaching on the
north side. Assume then all manner of shapes, and use your mightiest
powers, that he may flee in terror.’

Having taken on fearful shapes, raising awful sounds, headed by Mara
himself, who had assumed immense size, and mounted his elephant
Girimaga, a thousand miles in height, they advanced; but they dare not
enter beneath the shade of the holy Bo-tree. They frightened away, however,
the Lord’s guardian angels, and he was left alone. Then seeing the army
approaching from the north, he reflected, ‘Long have I devoted myself to a
life of mortification, and now I am alone, without a friend to aid me in this
contest. Yet may I escape the Maras, for the virtue of my transcendent
merits will be my army.’ ‘Help me,’ he cried, ‘ye thirty Barami! ye powers
of accumulated merit, ye powers of Almsgiving, Morality, Relinquishment,
Wisdom, Fortitude, Patience, Truth, Determination, Charity, and
Equanimity, help me in my fight with Mara!’ The Lord was seated on his
jewelled throne (the same that had been formed of the grass on which he
sat), and Mara with his army exhausted every resource of terror—
monstrous beasts, rain of missiles and burning ashes, gales that blew down
mountain peaks—to inspire him with fear; but all in vain! Nay, the burning
ashes were changed to flowers as they fell.
‘Come down from thy throne,’ shouted the evil-formed one; ‘come down,
or I will cut thine heart into atoms!’ The Lord replied, ‘This jewelled throne
was created by the power of my merits, for I am he who will teach all men
the remedy for death, who will redeem all beings, and set them free from
the sorrows of circling existence.’
Mara then claimed that the throne belonged to himself, and had been
created by his own merits; and on this armed himself with the Chakkra, the
irresistible weapon of Indra, and Wheel of the Law. Yet Buddha answered,
‘By the thirty virtues of transcendent merits, and the five alms, I have
obtained the throne. Thou, in saying that this throne was created by thy
merits, tellest an untruth, for indeed there is no throne for a sinful, horrible
being such as thou art.’
Then furious Mara hurled the Chakkra, which clove mountains in its course,
but could not pass a canopy of flowers which rose over the Lord’s head.

And now the great Being asked Mara for the witnesses of his acts of merit
by virtue of which he claimed the throne. In response, Mara’s generals all
bore him witness. Then Mara challenged him, ‘Tell me now, where is the
man that can bear witness for thee?’ The Lord reflected, ‘Truly here is no
man to bear me witness, but I will call on the earth itself, though it has
neither spirit nor understanding, and it shall be my witness.’ Stretching forth
his hand, he thus invoked the earth: ‘O holy Earth! I who have attained the
thirty powers of virtue, and performed the five great alms, each time that I
have performed a great act have not failed to pour water on thee. Now that I
have no other witness, I call upon thee to give thy testimony!’
The angel of the earth appeared in shape of a lovely woman, and answered,
‘O Being more excellent than angels or men! it is true that, when you
performed your great works, you ever poured water on my hair.’ And with
these words she wrung her long hair, and from it issued a stream, a torrent,
a flood, in which Mara and his hosts were overturned, their insignia
destroyed, and King Mara put to flight, amid the loud rejoicings of angels.
Then the evil one and his generals were conquered not only in power but in
heart; and Mara, raising his thousand arms, paid reverence, saying,
‘Homage to the Lord, who has subdued his body even as a charioteer breaks
his horses to his use! The Lord will become the omniscient Buddha, the
Teacher of angels, and Brahmas, and Yakkhas (demons), and men. He will
confound all Maras, and rescue men from the whirl of transmigration!’
The menacing powers depicted as assailing Sakya Muni appear only around
the infancy of Zoroaster. The interview of the latter with Ahriman hardly
amounts to a severe trial, but still the accent of the chief temptation both of
Buddha and Christ is in it, namely, the promise of worldly empire. It was on
one of those midnight journeys through Heaven and Hell that Zoroaster saw
Ahriman, and delivered from his power ‘one who had done both good and
evil.’3 When Ahriman met Zoroaster’s gaze, he cried, ‘Quit thou the pure
law; cast it to the ground; thou wilt then be in the world all that thou canst
desire. Be not anxious about thy end. At least, do not destroy my subjects,
O pure Zoroaster, son of Poroscharp, who art born of her thou hast borne!’
Zoroaster answered, ‘Wicked Majesty! it is for thee and thy worshippers

that Hell is prepared, but by the mercy of God I shall bury your work with
shame and ignominy.’
Fig. 6.—Temétatáçn çf Chêáët (Lucas van Leyden).

In the account of Matthew, Satan begins his temptation of Jesus in the same
way and amid similar circumstances to those we find in the Siamese
legends of Buddha. It occurs in a wilderness, and the appeal is to hunger.
The temptation of Buddha, in which Mara promises the empire of the
world, is also repeated in the case of Satan and Jesus (Fig. 6). The menaces,
however, in this case, are relegated to the infancy, and the lustful temptation
is absent altogether. Mark has an allusion to his being in the wilderness
forty days ‘with the beasts,’ which may mean that Satan ‘drove’ him into a
region of danger to inspire fear. In Luke we have the remarkable claim of
Satan that the authority over the world has been delivered to himself, and he
gives it to whom he will; which Jesus does not deny, as Buddha did the
similar claim of Mara. As in the case of Buddha, the temptation of Jesus
ends his fasting; angels bring him food (διηκόνουν ἀυτῶ probably means
that), and thenceforth he eats and drinks, to the scandal of the ascetics.
The essential addition in the case of Jesus is the notable temptation to try
and perform a crucial act. Satan quotes an accredited messianic prophecy,
and invites Jesus to test his claim to be the predicted deliverer by casting
himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, and testing the promise that angels
should protect the true Son of God. Strauss,4 as it appears to me, has not
considered the importance of this in connection with the general situation.
‘Assent,’ he says, ‘cannot be withheld from the canon that, to be credible,
the narrative must ascribe nothing to the devil inconsistent with his
established cunning. Now, the first temptation, appealing to hunger, we
grant, is not ill-conceived; if this were ineffectual, the devil, as an artful
tactician, should have had a yet more alluring temptation at hand; but
instead of this, we find him, in Matthew, proposing to Jesus the neck-
breaking feat of casting himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple—a
far less inviting miracle than the metamorphosis of the stones. This
proposition finding no acceptance, there follows, as a crowning effort, a
suggestion which, whatever might be the bribe, every true Israelite would
instantly reject with abhorrence—to fall down and worship the devil.’
Not so! The scapegoat was a perpetual act of worship to the Devil. In this
story of the temptation of Christ there enter some characteristic elements of
the temptation of Job.5 Uz in the one case and the wilderness in the other

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