The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us

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by Sheril Kirshenbaum


  By the end of the Vedic period, we get an even more tantalizing clue about early Indian kissing, as the Satapatha Brahmana describes lovers “setting mouth to mouth.” An early text of Hindu law, meanwhile, reprimands a man for “drinking the moisture of the lips” of a slave woman. At this point, it appears we are approaching a recognizable description of kissing. And still more evidence appears: The vast Indian epic poem the Mahabharata, which reached its final form in the fourth century BC, describes affectionate kissing on the lips. For example, one line reads, “[She] set her mouth to my mouth and made a noise and that produced pleasure in me.”

  Latest of all came the famous Vatsyayana Kamasutra, better known as the Kama Sutra. (The word kama invokes “pleasure,” “desire,” “sex,” and “love” all at once, while sutra roughly means “rules” or “formulas.”) This extremely influential sex guide was composed sometime around the third century AD to set rules for pleasure, marriage, and love according to Hindu law, and it details all sorts of sexual behavior, including the kiss. An entire chapter is devoted to the topic of kissing a lover, with instructions on when and where to kiss the body, including “the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, the bosom, the breasts, the lips, and the interior of the mouth.” The text goes on to describe four methods of kissing—“moderate, contracted, pressed, and soft”—and lays out three kinds of kisses by a young girl or virgin:

  NOMINAL KISS: The girl touches lips with her lover but “does not herself do anything.”

  THROBBING KISS: The girl, “setting aside her bashfulness a little,” responds with her lower but not her upper lip.

  TOUCHING KISS: The girl “touches her lover’s lips with her tongue,” closes her eyes, and lays her hands on her lover’s hands.

  Clearly, people in India were kissing thousands of years ago, but it’s doubtful they were the only ones doing so. Consider the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation story whose text comes to us from a version recorded on stone tablets in the seventh century BC—though the legends that form its basis are much, much older. The creation story contains reference to several kisses, including a kiss of greeting and a kiss on the ground or feet in supplication.

  Much more famously, the Old Testament of the Bible, whose contents are estimated to have been assembled during the twelve centuries before the birth of Christ, abounds with kissing. Notably, in the book of Genesis, the story of Isaac’s twin sons Jacob and Esau contains multiple kisses, one of them deceptive.

  Esau is the firstborn son and his father’s favorite, but Jacob is the clever one. Disguised in his brother’s clothes, Jacob comes before the blind and ailing Isaac, who beseeches, “Come near now, and kiss me, my son.” Then Isaac sniffs Jacob for recognition, and the deception is complete, for the stolen clothes make his second son smell like Esau, who works outdoors. Isaac proclaims, “See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD hath blessed”—and so Jacob steals his father’s blessing from his twin brother, and with it the power to rule.

  That’s just one of several memorable examples of kissing in the Old Testament. Another comes in the second line of the highly sensual Song of Solomon, which reads, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.”

  The Greeks, too, have a long and curious history of kissing—one that seems far less focused on romantic or sexual kisses (at least in ancient times) and more on kisses intended to greet or show deference or even supplication. Take the ancient epic the Odyssey, composed by Homer (possibly close to three thousand years ago), and finally recorded in writing between the eighth and seventh centuries BC. In it, the hero Odysseus is described as being kissed by his slaves upon his return home as a demonstration of respect—but not on his lips, as they are his inferiors. Another example occurs in the Iliad: After Achilles kills Hector, King Priam kisses his enemy’s “terrible, man-slaying hands” to plead for the return of his deceased son’s body. But we do not find sexual or romantic kissing in Homer.

  The Histories of Herodotus, written in the fifth century BC, provides an additional cultural catalog of kissing in the classical world. Herodotus relates that among the Persians, where one kissed another person depended on social standing. Equals would greet one another with a kiss on the lips; a slight status inequality between two individuals resulted in a cheek-peck; and if there was a large distinction in the hierarchy, the “lower” person was expected to prostrate himself. (Similar kissing status distinctions were also present in other ancient cultures: Ethiopian kings were kissed on the foot, while Numidian kings were considered too supreme to be kissed at all.) Herodotus also remarked on a sentiment common throughout history: namely, the disdain of kissing certain peoples because of other activities their mouths might engage in. For example, he reported that cow-worshipping Egyptians wouldn’t mouth-kiss Greeks, because Greeks consumed their sacred animal.

  Around the turn of that century, the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, known for his comedies, had some fun at the expense of kissing. In his works there were kisses entitled the “Spread-outer,” the “Weaver,” the “Potkiss,” the “Doorbolt,” the “Limper,” the “Doorhinge,” and more.

  By the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great, the Greek conqueror and cosmopolitan, stirred up one of the biggest kissing debates of classical times. Among his conquests, Alexander famously incorporated elements of Persian culture into his court, including a type of symbolic kiss called proskunêsis that involves paying respect to a superior or monarch by bowing to the ground, and possibly also blowing a kiss. Many Greeks despised the practice, viewing it as the epitome of Eastern despotic decadence.

  Moving on to Roman times, and despite our limited records, historians suggest that here developed a strong and vibrant kissing culture—even though some prominent Roman writers and emperors turned up their noses at the practice. Perhaps the strongest Roman kissing proponent was the poet Catullus, as seen in the following famous passage to his love in poem 5:

  Let us live, my Lesbia, and love, and value at one farthing all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light has once set, remains to be slept the sleep of one unbroken night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.

  The Roman poet Ovid, too, had much to say about kissing, as in his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love): “Take heed that when upon her lips you seize / You press them not too hard lest it displease.”

  By turn-of-the-millennium Rome, members of the populace seem to have been avid mouth-to-mouth kissers. Imperial Rome apparently introduced the practice into other parts of the world via its military—one of the first instances of the kiss being spread along with European culture.

  According to classicist Donald Lateiner of Ohio Wesleyan University, historical accounts demonstrate the way Roman men seem to have developed a “mouth fixation,” but it’s a rare mouth that lived up to their high expectations. For example, in the first century AD, the Roman poet Martial depicted some particularly disgusting kissing encounters in his celebrated Epigrams. Here is his account of what happens to an unfortunate man who has returned to Rome after fifteen years:

  Every neighbor, every hairy-faced farmer, presses on you with a strongly-scented kiss. Here the weaver assails you, there the fuller and the cobbler, who has just been kissing leather; here the owner of a filthy beard, and a one-eyed gentleman; there one with bleared eyes, and fellows whose mouths are defiled with all manner of abominations. It was hardly worth the while to return.

  Martial wasn’t alone; the emperor Tiberius even sought to ban kissing because it helped spread disease. Meanwhile, the Roman statesman Cato advised that when returning home, husbands should kiss their wives—not out of affection but to determine if they had been dr
inking.

  Yet despite the criticisms and jeers, the Romans pressed on orally. They used not one but three different words for kissing, and although their meanings overlap and do not appear to have been perfectly fixed, this is the general breakdown:

  OSCULUM: the social or friendship kiss, or kiss out of respect.

  BASIUM: the affectionate kiss for family members, also sometimes erotic.

  SAVIUM: the sexual or erotic kiss.

  There were also several Roman laws on kissing, such as the osculum interveniens, which stated that if one member of a betrothed couple died before marriage, whether they had performed this kiss publicly determined how any gifts given between them would be distributed. The kiss demonstrated effectively their status as a committed couple. Afterwards, any gifts received would be split, with half going to the heirs of the deceased.

  THERE’S SOME EVIDENCE that one of the most popular kissing traditions we know of today—kissing under the mistletoe—also dates back to the pre-Christian era. In truth, we’re not really sure where this custom originated, but there are several possible theories.

  In Norse mythology we find the story of Loki, an evil shape-shifting god, who plots to kill Balder, a god of light. All plants and animals, all metals, even fire and water, had vowed to Balder’s mother, Frigga, not to hurt her son, with the exception of one plant that was not required to take the oath: the mistletoe. Loki, disguised as a woman, tricks Frigga into revealing this omission. Then he collects the mistletoe, makes it into an arrow or spear, and gives it to Balder’s brother Hodr, who fires it at Balder and kills him. This is a great tragedy, but in some versions of the story Balder later arises from the dead, and Frigga forgives the mistletoe and transforms it into a symbol of love, further proclaiming that any two people who walk beneath the plant must kiss.

  Another myth comes from the ancient Druids, priests of Celtic Europe who believed the oak tree was sacred. The mistletoe, growing as it did upon the oak, was also a subject of worship. As the Roman writer Pliny recorded:

  The Druids, for so they call their wizards, esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree on which it grows, provided only that the tree is an oak…. The mistletoe is very rarely to be met with; but when it is found, they gather it with solemn ceremony.

  The wizards would cut down the mistletoe, which could not be allowed to touch the ground. They believed the plant had near-miraculous powers: as an all-purpose medicine, as a female and animal fertility enhancer, and much more.

  A third story comes from the ancient Babylonian-Assyrian empire. Mylitta was their goddess of beauty and love, equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite or Roman Venus. At the Temple of Mylitta, young women would honor the goddess by standing beneath the mistletoe, and were required to give up their bodies and make love to the first man who approached them. It is unclear whether kissing was involved, however, because the custom does not seem to have been common in that era or part of the world.

  WITH THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY, big problems arose for kissing. To put it simply, there was the very valid fear that kissing would lead to other sinful activities of the flesh. Still, the Bible seemed to give kissing quite a lot of license and support in both the Old Testament and the New. Judas’s kiss notwithstanding, the apostles were big fans of the practice. Saint Peter referred to the “kiss of charity,” and in his Epistle to the Romans Saint Paul wrote, “Salute one another with a holy kiss.” Such were the foundations of the “kiss of peace,” which became a central part of Catholic church ceremony.

  Granted, such biblical exhortations to lock lips could be abused. Priests worried that the “kiss of peace” could serve as an opportunity for kissing among desirous lovers with the apparent blessing of the church. Thus the sexes had to be separated for in-church kissing, and in 397 the third Council of Carthage even sought to ban “religious” kissing between men and women.

  But not every kiss during the Middle Ages was a sexy one. Much as Herodotus had described long before, an individual’s social standing determined where to kiss another person in greeting. Kisses moved from the lips downward as kissers moved down the social hierarchy. Subjects would kiss the ring and robe of the king, or his hands, or even the ground before him. Similarly, in the church, one kissed the Bible, the priest’s robe, or the altar cloth. For the pope, it was proper to press one’s lips to his ring or slipper. Catholic priests also started allowing people to kiss illustrations of various saints for a fee known as “kiss money”—just the kind of practice that would later serve as kindling for the Protestant Reformation.

  Around this time, a kiss also served as a sign of trust between feudal lords and vassals. Knights would kiss at jousting tournaments, and they would receive a kiss from the person they protected (usually a queen or the wife of a lord) as thanks for a year of service. In fact, a kiss was viewed as an essential mark of gentility, and central to the training of any knight. Of course, as we’ll see in part 2, a simple kiss can foster feelings of attachment and more. So not surprisingly, legend has it that the kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere led to the fall of Camelot.

  It was also during the Middle Ages that a businesslike kiss was employed as a legal way to seal contracts and business agreements. Many men did not know how to read and write, so they would draw an “X” on the line and kiss it to make it legal. This carried over into the way we write “X” today to symbolize a kiss, as well as the expression “sealed with a kiss.” The kiss between a bride and groom was also viewed as marking a kind of legal business agreement, crystallizing all of the responsibilities marriage entailed.

  Meanwhile, the church was still wringing its hands about certain kinds of kissing behaviors, and where they might lead. More trouble ensued in the thirteenth century when an English priest came up with an innovation called the osculatorium, also known as the pax-board or simply the pax. It was, in essence, a decorative disk or board made of metal or wood, covered with religious imagery, that could be passed among adherents in church. Members of the congregation would give it a kiss of reverence in lieu of the person-to-person exchange that had marked the “kiss of peace.” Alas, the practice of “kissing the disk” created new problems: After a desirable young woman kissed the pax, men would clamor to plant their lips on precisely the same spot. The priests were not happy and sought to prohibit the practice; however, they still accepted kissing for strictly religious reasons if it occurred outside of church.

  All the bans and moralizing were only so powerful, though. By 1499, the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus could write of his travels to England, addressing his friend Faustus, as follows:

  There is a fashion which cannot be commended enough. Wherever you go, you are received on all hands with kisses. If you go back, your salutes are returned to you. When a visit is paid, the first act of hospitality is a kiss, and when guests depart, the same entertainment is repeated; wherever a meeting takes place there is kissing in abundance; in fact whatever way you turn, you are never without it. Oh Faustus, if you had once tasted how sweet and fragrant those kisses are, you would indeed wish to be a traveler, not for ten years, like Solon, but for your whole life, in England.

  A notable change came about due to the Great Plague in London around 1665. Kissing understandably lost its popularity, so instead people waved, curtseyed, bowed, or tipped their hats to avoid contracting disease. Still, it appears that social kissing went uninterrupted in seventeenth-century France.

  In Germany, meanwhile, a scholar named Martin von Kempe composed an encyclopedia of kisses ambitiously titled the Opus Polyhistoricum… de Osculis, spanning 1,040 pages in length and purporting to exhaust the topic—including a description of over twenty kissing types. In the same era, Germans also came up with categories for lawful and unlawful kisses. For example, women could actually sue men who accosted them with treacherous, lustful, or malicious kisses, although respectful gestures of love and reconciliation were welcome.

  By the Industrial Revolution, the hand kiss became popular in Engla
nd, and eventually evolved into the handshake. At this point in time—as we’ll see in the next chapter—kissing had begun to permeate much of the world. The beginnings of globalization integrated people and their social customs across oceans and other natural and man-made boundaries. Where it wasn’t already practiced, a European version of kissing would soon arrive thanks to adventurers, tradesmen, and modern technology.

  Kiss My Feet

  The custom of foot kissing has a long and colorful history, dating at least back to the Babylonian epic of creation. The Roman emperor Caligula had subjects kiss his feet, and this status-oriented kissing was also customary throughout the Middle Ages.

  Writing in 1861, Charles Dickens—a huge fan of kissing in general, but also of the little guy—found the practice completely abhorrent, calling it “slavish self-abasement.” Dickens found the foot kissing of the Catholic Church particularly revolting, memorably writing:

  Valentine the First made the custom permanent; and, ever since 827, the laity has crouched and crawled up to the steps of St. Peter’s chair to kiss the toes of the great fetish enshrined thereon. But, as the pope wears a slipper with an embroidered cross upon the upper leathers, by a pleasant fiction saving to pride, men assume that they kiss the sacred symbol and not the human toe: thus adding self-deception to degradation, and committing one unmanliness the more.

 

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