Mars — Words of the week

Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash.

The ‘cupid’ bit of this has probably given you a clue as to the meaning. And while it does relate to the chubby Roman god of sexy times, it’s a bit darker than that. If you’re suffering from cupidity then you have a very strong desire for something, usually wealth or possessions. The word’s been around in English since the 15th century, and comes from the Latin ‘cupere’ which means ‘to desire’.

Cupid facts: The Roman god of love started out in classical myth as a slender youth, but for reasons best known to themselves (maybe because when you’re in a new relationship you always get a bit fat?) painters during the Hellenistic period (323 BC to 31 BC – but I’m sure you already know that, clever reader) made him increasingly chubbier until he became the lard-arse with a bow and arrow we see today. He’s the son of Venus (goddess of love – yay!) and Mars (god of war – boo!). According to the usual in-depth research I did (which just means I read the Wikipedia page on Cupid), Isidore of Seville (a Spanish scholar and cleric born in the year 560), Cupid is depicted with wings because lovers are ‘flighty and likely to change their minds’, he’s a young boy because love is ‘irrational’, and he has a bow, arrows and a torch (I assume not the battery-powered kind) because love ‘wounds and inflames the heart’. Sounds to me like Isidore hadn’t been having much luck with the ladies (or the gents – no heteronormativity here) when he wrote that.

We’ve probably all experienced pareidolia to some extent. Don’t worry, it isn’t another world-ending pandemic. Pareidolia is the word for when we humans find shapes in abstract patterns or inanimate objects. So when you next see a face in the trunk of a tree or a penis in the clouds (come on, we’ve all done it. No? Just me?) you’ll be able to show off to whoever you’re with that you’re experiencing pareidolia. It also applies to sounds – so if you think you’re hearing a hidden message in a piece of music, you probably aren’t – it’s just that pesky pareidolia.

Etymology-wise, the word itself is unsurprisingly Greek: para means ‘beside, alongside, instead [of]’ and eidōlon means ‘image, form, shape’.

So why do we do it? Evolutionary psychologists reckon that pareidolia helped our ancestors survive. There are two reasons for this. One is that babies who couldn’t recognise faces smiled less, which meant their parents cared about them less (mean). So they evolved to recognise faces to make sure their ma and pa would love them and, ultimately, protect them. The second one is to do with predators – in (very) simple terms, you’re more likely to run away from something that has a face than something that doesn’t. So it makes sense to see a face in anything that’s potentially threatening and just peg it.

Pareidolia used to be considered a sign of madness. And studies do show that people suffering from neuroses are more likely to experience it, as are people who in a negative mood. That might be because when we’re pissed off we’re on higher alert for danger, so more likely to see things that aren’t there. Women are also more likely to experience pareidolia, which is possibly due to the fact that we’re generally better than men. Sorry, better than men at using facial expressions to recognise emotions.

One of the most famous examples of pareidolia is the face on Mars. Located in the Cydonia region of the planet, it was first photographed by the Viking 1 spacecraft on 25 July 1976.

And in 2004, a ten-year-old cheese sandwich which supposedly has the image of the Virgin Mary burned on it sold for $28,000 on eBay. Where there’s pareidolia there’s brass, apparently…