The famous Life Magazine photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt I'm weird, I admit it. Valentine's Day was over a month ago and I got to thinking about kissing now. So Idecided to Google "history of kissing"... 1,310,000 entries later... well not exactly. There were, 1,310,00 entries: I didn't read them all, just the first 100 or so promising ones. If was a fun way to spend a couple of hours. I'd like to share some of this stuff with you.
Most of what follows are direct quotes from various web sites. There's lots more where each comes from so click the link following the exerpt to get the whole story. Well here goes.
No one really knows where the first smooch came from. One less-than-romantic theory suggests it began with ancient mothers passing chewed-up food to babies, which is 1) not sexy, and 2) gross. And kissing isn’t universal: People in Japan and Siberia only started kissing relatively recently, and some sub-Saharan African societies still don’t do it.
The erotic significance of the kiss didn’t come dominant in Europe until the 17th century. Not coincidentally, that was around the same time that dentists in France first promoted the use of toothbrushes. (Yes, the French were on the cutting edge of dental hygiene!) Before toothbrushes, the average European mouth was such a grim place that 16th-century maids often carried clove-studded apples when courting, insisting their suitors take a bite before attempting a kiss.
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/03/09/k-i-s-s-i-n-g-tidbits-from-the-history-of-kissing/
The article above, from mental_floss’ book Scatterbrained. is published in Neatorama with permission.
[Wow! I quoted a quote. Ginger]
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References to kissing did not appear until 1500 B.C. when historians found four major texts in the Vedic Sanskrit literature of India that suggested an early form of kissing. "There are references to the custom of rubbing and pressing noses together. This practice, it is recorded, was a sign of affection, especially between lovers," Bryant said. "This is not kissing as we know it today, but we believe it may have been its earliest beginning."
About 500 to 1,000 years later, the epic Mahabharata, contained references suggesting that affection between people was expressed by lip kissing. Later, the Kama Sutra, a classic text on erotica, contained many examples of erotic kissing and kissing techniques.
With the conquering armies of Alexander the Great, the Greeks learned about kissing from the Indians, then helped spread the practice throughout Europe and Asia around 326 B.C.
However, Bryant says, the Romans should be credited for popularizing kissing. They had several forms of kissing, including the osculum, which was a kiss of friendship often delivered as a peck on the cheek as a form of affection, not passion. This was such a popular form of kissing that members of the Roman senate often exchanged this sign of affection at the opening of each session. Non-senators would kiss a senator's toga as a sign of respect for the person and his office.
http://giving.tamu.edu/libarts/content/newsandevents/headlinenews/news.php?get=212&area=1
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Kissing as symbolism
A symbolic kissWhen not an expression of affection, a kiss is a largely symbolic gesture in that the purpose of the kiss is to convey a meaning, such as salutations or subordination, rather than to experience the physical sensations associated with kissing.
Kisses on the cheek as salutations are traditional in many parts of continental Europe, and the number of kisses, alternating cheeks, depends on which region one comes from.
Kissing may also be used to signify reverence and subordination, as in kissing the ring of a queen or other figure. A kiss can also be rude or done for the sake of irritating or proving one's superiority.
[Like dominance humping by dogs? Ginger]
A more ominous use of the kiss is as a symbol of condemnation as may be observed when a crime lord kisses an underling, in effect imposing a death sentence upon that person, the ultimate "goodbye kiss" or the "kiss of death". Indeed, Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss.
Kissing is a complex behaviour that requires significant muscular coordination; in fact, a total of twenty muscles working cooperatively.
The 1896 short film The Kiss featured the first known screen kiss, a forty-seven second recreation of a stage kiss from the musical The Widow Jones. The movie was considered scandalous at the time of its release but has since entered film history as one of the most memorable early films. The longest onscreen kiss was performed by Gregory Smith and Stephanie Sherrin in the 2005 film Kids in America and lasted "just over six minutes."
The Romans distinguished three types of kiss: osculum, a friendship kiss on the cheek; basium, a kiss of affection on the lips; and suavium (also known as savium), a lovers' deep kiss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss
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Until 1528, the holy kiss was part of Catholic mass. In the 13th century, the Catholic Church substituted a pax board, which the congregation kissed instead of kissing one another. The Protestant Reformation in the 1500s removed the kiss from Protestant services entirely.
But not all kisses have been happy events. Works of literature like "Romeo and Juliet" have portrayed kisses as dangerous or deadly when shared between the wrong people. Some folklorists and literary critics view vampirism as symbolic of the physical and emotional dangers that can come from kissing the wrong person.
Kiss of Judas
One of the Western world's most famous kisses is the kiss
Judas Iscariot used to betray Jesus shortly before his crucifixion. This kiss had an influence on Christian spiritual practices. Early church sects omitted the holy kiss – or abstained from kissing entirely – on Maundy Thursday. Maundy Thursday is the Thursday before Easter and the day used to commemorate the Last Supper, after which Judas betrayed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
When you really think about it, kissing is pretty gross. It involves saliva and mucous membranes, and it may have historical roots in chewed-up food. Experts estimate that hundreds or even millions of bacterial colonies move from one mouth to another during a kiss. Doctors have also linked kissing to the spread of diseases like meningitis, herpes and mononucleosis.
Yet anthropologists report that 90 percent of the people in the world kiss. Most people look forward to their first romantic kiss and remember it for the rest of their lives. Parents kiss children, worshippers kiss religious artifacts and couples kiss each other. Some people even kiss the ground when they get off an airplane.
So how does one gesture come to signify affection, celebration, grief, comfort and respect, all over the world? No one knows for sure, but anthropologists think kissing might have originated with human mothers feeding their babies much the way birds do. Mothers would chew the food and then pass it from their mouths to their babies' mouths. After the babies learned to eat solid food, their mothers may have kissed them to comfort them or to show affection.
Do We Have to Hear the Kissing Part?
Modern research suggests that just about every culture on the planet kisses. However, anthropologists and ethnologists have described a few cultures in Asia, Africa and South America that do not kiss at all. Some of these cultures view kissing as disgusting or distasteful. However, other researchers point out that these societies may view kissing as too private to discuss with strangers. In other words, they might kiss but not talk about it.
Kissing the Blarney Stone
Tourists visiting Ireland often stop by Blarney Castle near Cork to kiss the Blarney Stone. It's said that kissing the stone bestows the kisser with the gift of blarney, or eloquence. Kissing the Blarney Stone takes a lot more than just lips. To reach it, people have to lie on their backs, hold a set of handrails and tip their heads backwards until they are essentially upside down.
Anyone who has ever been kissed knows that the sensations involved aren't confined to the mouth. Your facial nerve carries impulses between your brain and the muscles and skin in your face and tongue. While you kiss, it carries messages from your lips, tongue and face to your brain to tell it what's going on.
Your brain responds by ordering your body to produce:
Oxytocin, which helps people develop feelings of attachment, devotion and affection for one another
Dopamine, which plays a role in the brain's processing of emotions, pleasure and pain
Serotonin, which affects a person's mood and feelings
Adrenaline, which increases heart rate and plays a role in your body's fight-or-flight response
http://people.howstuffworks.com/kissing1.htm
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When parents kiss their children it means one thing, but when they kiss each other it means something entirely different. People will greet a total stranger with a kiss on the cheek, and then use an identical gesture to express their most intimate feelings to a lover. The mob kingpin gives the kiss of death, Catholics give the "kiss of peace," Jews kiss the Torah, nervous flyers kiss the ground, and the enraged sometimes demand that a kiss be applied to their hindquarters. Judas kissed Jesus, Madonna kissed Britney, a gambler kisses the dice for luck. Someone once even kissed a car for 54 hours straight.
The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss "making up for kisses that have been omitted."
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a
species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
Scientists have found evidence for both hypotheses. Other species engage in behavior that looks an awful lot like the smooch (though without its erotic overtones), which implies that kissing might be just as animalistic an impulse as it sometimes feels. Snails caress each other with their antennae, birds touch beaks, and many mammals lick each other's snouts. Chimpanzees even give platonic pecks on the lips. But only humans and our lascivious primate cousins the bonobos engage in full-fledged tongue-on-tongue tonsil- hockey.
All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.
Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale.
To this day, public kissing is still seen as indecent in many parts of the world. In 1990, the Beijing-based Workers' Daily advised its readers that "the invasive Europeans brought the kissing custom to China, but it is regarded as a vulgar practice which is all too suggestive of cannibalism."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/opinion/14foer.html?
ex=1297573200&en=64bad474e17f3713&ei=5088&
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Ooh la la! – The “French” Kiss
Smooching Culture
The Japanese have always been extremely bashful about kissing, as puckering up in public is considered taboo On the other hand, many Southern Europeans have a more liberal attitude toward sex, making PDAs (personal displays of affection) an acceptable practice In Belgium, respecting your elders is a primary concern during greetings. When someone is 10 years your senior, it is commonly-accepted to bestow them with three kisses
http://www.closeup.com/news/news_kisstory.asp
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In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ingrid Bergman -- playing a girl who's never been kissed before -- is about to be smooched by Gary Cooper, and she asks "Where do the noses go?"
Fess up -- that was the same thing you worried about on your first date, wasn't it?
Kissing Under the Mistletoe Derives From Norse Myths -
[I'm not going to quote parts of this great little story about kissing under the Mistletoe. But I bet you'll enjoy it. Ginger]
http://holidays.about.com/od/decorationscelebrations/a/mistletoe_2.htm
Here's a great little book for you or your sweetheart.
[Hmmm, I wonder how "sweetheart" came into favour as a term of endearment? Why not "sweetliver"? or sweetspleen? Ginger]
