233 Svevo D’Onofrio Savouring the inefable. Metaphors of Taste in Mystical Experience Across Religions Since the inception of systematic philosophical thought, the Western sensorium has ostensibly been dominated by sight. Te opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, possibly one of the most famous incipits in world literature, contains an enthusias- tic praise of the sense of sight, based on its superior cognitive function: »All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost everything else. Te reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many diferences between things.« 1 Arguing for the need to overcome »the visual […] bias of the Western episteme« in order to make sense of the other cultures’s diferent modalities of perception, the anthropologist David Howes maintains that »plunging into the realm of non-visual senses […] can help to liberate us from the hegemony which sight has for so long exercised over our own culture’s social, intellectual, and aesthetic life«. 2 In his highly infuential and controversial Te Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLu- han argued instead that the cultural primacy of the visual over the aural/oral in the Western sensorium was brought about only through Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type and the establishment of print culture. He further maintained that the new electronic media would eventually restore the predominance of the aural/oral dimension within the »global village«, thus envisaging a diachronic suc- 1 Aristotle, Metaphysics I 980a, 21 f. (Aristotle, Te Works of Aristotle. Volume VIII: Meta- physica, transl. by W. D. Ross, Oxford 1908). See also Plato, Timaeus 47a-b: »Vision, in my view, is the cause of the greatest beneft to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heaven. […] From these we have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals. Tis I afrm to be the greatest good of eyesight«; (Platon, Timaeus, Critian, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles. With an English Translation by R. G. Bury, Cambridge 1929). 2 Howes, David (ed.), Te Varieties of Sensory Experience, Toronto 1991, 3–4 (emphasis by the author). A similar preeminence of sight has been claimed for Indian culture as well, which Diana Eck has defned as »a visual and visionary culture« (Eck, Diana, Seeing the Divine Image in India, New York 3 1998, 10). Her contention has been criticised by Sylvain Pinard within the context of a reappraisal of the role of gustation in the Hindu sensorium, see Pinard, Sylvain, A Taste of India. On the Role of Gustation in the Hindu Sensorium, in: Howes (ed.), Varieties, 1991, 221–230.