The History of the Kiss!

The Birth of Popular Culture

M. Danesi

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137376855
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Anthropology

How and when did the kiss become a vital sign of romance and love? In this wide-ranging book, pop culture expert Marcel Danesi takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the history of the kiss, from poetry and painting to movies and popular songs, and argues that its romantic incarnation signaled the birth of popular culture.

CHAPTER 1

The Popular Origins of the Kiss

Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more, another thousand, and another hundred.

—Catullus (84–54 BCE)

Romantic love and the act of lip kissing are now so intertwined in the popular imagination that people hardly ever stop to think not only why we do it, but also why we have developed a worldwide culture of lovemaking revolving around that act. The German language has 30 words referring to different types of kisses, including Nachkuss, which means “making up for kisses that have not been given.” Some societies, on the other hand, have no words whatsoever for this act, indicating that it is not a part of their courtship rituals, or at least was not in the past. But wherever it is a part, kissing has an enduring and transformative effect, physically, psychologically, and socially, regardless of the age, social class, and educational background of the kissers. It has been estimated that, before marrying, the average American woman has kissed 79 men;¹ more than 92 percent of Americans have engaged in kissing before the age of 14; and husbands who kiss their wives on a regular basis apparently live five years longer on average than those who do not.²

Some kisses have become so iconic that they have come to emblemize significant episodes in the history of romance. These include the kiss between Romeo and Juliet, Guinevere and Lancelot, and a sailor and a nurse in downtown Manhattan captured in a 1945 Life magazine photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Many movies are memorable because of a particular kiss performed in them: Gone with the Wind (Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh), From Here to Eternity (Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr), Rear Window (James Stewart and Grace Kelly), An Officer and a Gentleman (Richard Gere and Debra Winger), and Titanic (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett), to mention but a few. Kissing is the theme in such classic pop songs as Kiss of Fire (Louis Armstrong and Georgia Gibb), Kiss Me Big (Tennessee Ernie Ford), Kisses Sweeter than Wine (Jimmy Rodgers), The Shoop Shoop Song (Betty Everett), Kisses of Fire (ABBA), Suck My Kiss (The Red Hot Chili Peppers), and Kiss from a Rose (Seal).

How and why did lip kissing become such an iconic symbol of romance? Is it part of ancient courtship practices, as Dan Brown intimates in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, where he suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalene kissed on the lips as a sign of their romantic involvement?³ Unlikely. The story of the romantic kiss starts in the medieval period, as I will claim in this book. It constitutes a fascinating narrative that coincides with the origins and rise of popular culture (or proto-popular culture), as distinct from traditional, religious, or folk culture. But finding evidence for the first kiss is, ironically, very much like a Dan Brown archeological mystery story. There are no photos or trace clues of that first kiss. The only way to hunt down its emergence is to consider the time frame when romantic kissing becomes a theme in poetic and prose texts. And that time frame, as we shall see, is the medieval period.

The forms and functions of kissing are not, of course, limited to courtship and romance. As a greeting sign it has ancient roots. The act of blowing kisses, for example, originated in Mesopotamia as a means to gain the favor of the gods. It is still around today, even though it has lost its divine connotations, having evolved simply into a form of greeting—blowing a kiss with the fingertips in the direction of the intended recipient conveys affection. As recorded by Herodotus, in Persia, a man of equal rank was greeted with a kiss on the lips and one of a slightly lower rank with a kiss on the cheek.⁴ Plainly, these kisses did not have romantic meaning; they were greeting rituals, plain and simple. Likewise, in Slavic cultures, kissing between two men on the lips was, and continues to be, part of salutation etiquette. The ancient Romans also kissed to greet each other. An individual’s social status dictated what part of the emperor’s body he or she was allowed to kiss, from the cheek down to the foot. The lower the part of the body kissed, the lower the rank of the kisser. Early Christians greeted one another with a “kiss of peace” (called the osculum pacis), which was believed to carry the soul of the kisser thus connecting him or her spiritually to the other. The osculum pacis became a ritualistic part of the Catholic Mass up until the thirteenth century, when the Church substituted it with a “pax (peace) board,” which the congregation kissed instead of kissing one another. The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century eliminated all forms of kissing from religious services, seeing it as a disgusting carnal act. However, in both Catholicism and Protestantism “breath kissing” was allowed to be a part of marriage ceremonies, symbolizing the spiritual union of the bride and groom. Coincidentally, in ancient Celtic love rituals, too, the breath kiss was seen as an exchange of the breath of life and an intrinsic part of courtship.

Kissing has played significant roles in various religious traditions. Kissing a holy book or icon to show reverence and adoration has ancient roots. Moses is portrayed in images as kissing the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. Catholics kiss the Pope’s toe to show reverence and obedience. In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, the sign of obedience at the time, distorted into an act of duplicity. Jews kiss the Western wall of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem during prayer; they also kiss the Torah. Eastern Orthodox Christians kiss the icons around a church and the priest’s hand during blessings. Hindus kiss the ground of a temple to acknowledge its sacredness and purity.

Research by anthropologists has shown that a significant percentage of humanity actually does not practice kissing rituals of any kind. In cultures across Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, kissing simply does not exist or, at least, was not known until contact with Europeans and the advent of global communications technologies, which have spread images of the kiss throughout the world. Even though kissing is now tolerated in many of these cultures, to do so in public is still seen as indecent or at least as uncalled for, given that it is an import from the West. In 1990, the Beijing Workers’ Daily warned its readers that the kissing custom imported to China from the West was a “vulgar practice” that was suggestive of “cannibalism.”⁵ Similar reactions can be found in other areas of the world. Anthropologist Leonore Tiefer comments on this situation as follows:

Sexual kissing is unknown in many societies, including the Balinese, Chamorro, Manus, and Tinguian of Oceania; the Chewa and Thonga of Africa; the Siriono of South America; and the Lepcha of Eurasia. In such cultures, the mouth-to-mouth kiss is considered dangerous, unhealthy, or disgusting, the way Westerners might regard a custom of sticking one’s tongue into a lover’s nose. When the Thonga first saw Europeans kissing, they laughed, remarking, “Look at them—they eat each other’s saliva and dirt.”⁶

Osculation in the Ancient World

Lip kissing is known technically as osculation. Osculation is not part of the courtship traditions of China or Japan, although it has now spread to those societies as well, thanks, as mentioned, to the influence of the images spread by the mass media and the Internet. In Inuit and Laplander societies romantic partners are more inclined to rub noses than to kiss—a practice found in other parts of the world. Early explorers of the Arctic dubbed this act “the Eskimo kiss.” Obviously, what is normal romantic behavior in one system of courtship practices is seen as bizarre or vulgar in another. Lip kissing is indeed a bizarre act, given that it involves an unhygienic exchange of saliva, as the young Stephen Dedalus intimated in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Why do people do that with their faces?”⁷

The scientific study of kissing is known as philematology. According to some scientists, osculation may have ancient roots, appearing in India as far back as the 1500s BCE. The Vedic writings of that period mention lovers “sniffing” each other with their mouths and “smelling each other.” As philematologist Sheril Kirshenbaum writes: “In the Vedic texts no word exists for ‘kiss,’ but the same word is employed to mean both ‘sniff’ and ‘smell,’ and also has connotations of touch.”⁸ From there, osculation is believed to have been exported westward by Alexander the Great after conquering the Punjab in 326 BCE.⁹ Representations of osculation have also been found on two thousand year-old Peruvian pots and vases and in various tribal African societies, as anthropologist Nicholas Perella writes.¹⁰ But did the lip kiss of these ancient cultures have the meaning that it does today, namely as a symbol of romantic love? The fact that a word for kiss did not exist, as Kirshenbaum points out, is strong indirect evidence that there was no consciousness of kissing as a romantic act. Subsequent Indian texts, moreover, suggest that osculation had a purely erogenous function from the outset. The fourth century BCE epic poem, the Mahabharata, describes lovers as salaciously setting “mouth to mouth” or “drinking the moisture of the lips.”¹¹ In the Kama Sutra, an early treatise on sexual techniques put together around the third century CE, osculation is, in fact, described as part of sexual fun and games. Kirshenbaum describes the relevant part of the text as follows:

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 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).¹²

These texts are highly suggestive that lip kissing was indeed an ancient practice, but that it was part of sex, given that the lips are sensitive erogenous organs. The same or parallel sexual portrayals of the kiss can be gleaned from other ancient works, such as the comedies of Aristophanes, where kissing and sex are connected constantly. As the greatest ancient Greek writer of comedy, Aristophanes’s plays are imbued with a rollicking wit, aiming to criticize social mores and political hypocrisy. The kissing that goes on in his plays is prurient, not romantic. Osculation also appears in ancient Egyptian art. But in this case, archeologists conjecture that it may have represented “giving or exchanging life,” in the same way that the osculum pacis did in later Western culture. The Romans also kissed passionately on the lips—an act they called savium. They contrasted this with osculum and basium, which meant respectively a “friendship kiss” and a “love kiss.” Roman couples would actually announce their marriage intentions by kissing mouth-to-mouth in front of their families. It was, thus, a kind of announcement gesture—informing everyone that the couple intended to be united physically. Of all the ancient practices involving osculation, this is probably the one that seems to come closest to the meaning of kissing as a romantic act.

The Romans also passed an unusual law punishing anyone caught perpetrating unwanted kisses among citizens of equal social standing. The Roman emperor Tiberius even issued a decree banning lip kissing, because he believed it was responsible for the spread of an unpleasant fungoid disease that disfigured the faces and bodies of Roman nobles.¹³ But, if lip kissing was so widespread, why did it not survive as a courtship or romantic gesture in any of these societies until its emergence (or reemergence) in the medieval period, as will be discussed? Interpreting ancient practices in modern terms is fraught with too many dangers of misconception. Indeed, tracing the origins of romantic kissing to the ancient world is an inferential process at best, a kind of “retrofitting” process at worst (i.e., an unconscious attempt to fit or impose contemporary views of the act onto the past). It may seem like an overly exacting point, but there is a difference between kissing the body, including the lips, for sexual excitement and kissing someone on the lips for romantic reasons.

In the Bible, one can find many descriptions of lip kissing, especially among people having affairs beyond their marriages. In the Second Book of Samuel there is the story of a woman tempting a man by kissing him: “With her flattering lips she forced him.” In the Song of Songs (or of Solomon) we come across passages such as, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine” (1:2). These seem to suggest tha...