The kiss: How an ancient animal impulse became a defining human ritual

“ I can hear her voice, press her hand, and touch her person, and kiss her lips. Her indisposition need be no impediment to this."
When Menelaus told this to me, I exclaimed, that I would sooner die than have Leucippe bestow her lips upon another. "A kiss," I said, "is the best part of love; the moment of actual enjoyment is soon over, and brings with it satiety, [9] and is indeed worth nothing if we take away the kissing. A kiss need have no limit to its duration; it never cloys, it is always new. ”

“ I think you kiss him too much.
My dear, we have in our hands the most terrible power in the world: LOVE.
Man is gifted with physical strength, and he exercises force. Woman is gifted with charm, and she rules with caresses. It is our weapon, formidable and invincible, but we should know how to use it.
Know well that we are the mistresses of the world! To tell the history of Love from the beginning of the world would be to tell the history of man himself: Everything springs from it, the arts, great events, customs, wars, the overthrow of empires.
In the Bible you find Delila, Judith ”

“ Kissing is an extremely ancient habit of mankind coming to us from far beyond the range of history, and undoubtedly practised by the remote animal-like ancestors of the human race. Poets have exalted it, and in these hygienic days doctors have condemned it. ”

“ In nothing, perhaps, has civilization so changed us as in our mental attitude toward animals. It has fixed a great gulf between us and them--a gulf far greater than that which divided them from our first ancestors. In the early ages of the world, when men lived by the chase, and gnawed the raw flesh of their prey, and slept in lairs amid the jungle, the purely animal virtues were the only ones they knew and exercised. ”

“ Where would be the dignity of life if we did not believe in a great last judgment, with a stern reckoning with sin? We should sink to the level of the animals if there were no judgment. It proves that man has an immortal spirit. What does it matter, with the animals, what they do? But God must reckon with man, and He would not be reigning if man had not to reckon on an awful judgment-day for every spirit. It is a proof to me that I am of moment, and that my human spirit has dignity; it makes clear to me my place in the universe, and my claim to immortality ”

“ These slight anatomical changes derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in comparison all that had been achieved in the process of evolution down to the time of our half-human ancestor’s first appearance. ”

“ For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast. ”

“ Yet it is the general feeling of anthropologists that man was evolved in the Tertiary Era. On the one hand, the anthropoid apes were highly developed by the Miocene period, and it would be almost incredible that the future human stock should linger hundreds of thousands of years behind them. On the other hand, when we find the first traces of man in the Pleistocene, this development has already proceeded so far that its earlier phase evidently goes back into the Tertiary. ”

“ It is still fresh in the mind how the Darwinian hypothesis was utterly misconceived by the popular mind, the suggestion that man was descended from the apes being generally quoted as a correct expression of Darwin's theory, whereas he never suggested any such thing, but that man and the apes had a common ancestor, which makes of the ape rather a degenerate lemur than a human ancestor. ”

“ Many people used to get extremely upset at the ill-formed notion that “man descended from the apes.” Such words were much more likely to start fights or “monkey trials” than the correct notion that all living animals, including man, ascended or evolved from a single-celled organism which lived in the primeval seas hundreds of millions of years ago. ”

“ Some imagine that a sudden and mysterious rise in intelligence lifted the progenitor of man above its fellows. The facts very quickly dispel this illusion. We may at least assume that the ancestor of man was on a level with the anthropoid ape in the Miocene period, and we know from their skulls that the apes were as advanced then as they are now. But from the early Miocene to the Pleistocene is a stretch of about a million years on the very lowest estimate. ”

“ The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene times and the anthropoid apes in the Miocene, probably five millions of years ago. The form which may have been in our line of descent, the Dryopithecus, later appears to have become extinct. Did our fate hang upon the success of any of these forms? The monkeys and anthropoid apes appeared at the same time in different countries. Nature seems to have been making preliminary studies of man in these various forms, but when and where she hit upon the form that she perfected in man, who knows? ”

“ The conclusion which we reach, then, is that not only all man's distinctively human qualities came to him by inheritance, but also all his purely animal qualities. The former came from human ancestors, the latter from animal ancestors. ”

“ We humans often feel that there is not enough food to go round. We find it hard to make both ends meet. We have to defend ourselves or run from our enemies. So it was with the Longtails, who were always hungry, hard up, and bound to fight or run. To put it roughly, some tribes of the Longtails took to hunting, and became the ancestors of all beasts of prey, some took to the trees as a refuge and feeding place, and so became the ancestors of apes and men. ”

“ What is only an incipient tendency among the apes probably became an habitual practice with the ancestor of man. The superiority of the human being may thus be said to have consisted in the acquisition of qualities and the occupation of an environment which enabled him to widen the range of his food-choice. ”

“ A great anatomist, Gratiolet, maintains that the anthropomorphous apes do not form a natural sub-group; but that the orang is a highly developed gibbon or semnopithecus, the chimpanzee a highly developed macacus, and the gorilla a highly developed mandrill. If this conclusion, which rests almost exclusively on brain-characters, be admitted, we should have a case of convergence at least in external characters, for the anthropomorphous apes are certainly more like each other in many points, than they are to other apes. ”

“ In his splendid work, fifty years in advance of his time, the Philosophie Zoologique (1809) , he clearly traced the modifications and advances that must have taken place in the transformation of the man-like apes (the primate forms similar to the orang and the chimpanzee) ; the adaptation to walking upright, the consequent modification of the hands and feet, and later, the formation of speech and the attainment of a higher degree of intelligence. ”

“ There is, therefore, a vast difference, from the sexual standpoint, between man and the great apes, his anatomic neighbours. Man even in the humblest species has mastered love and made it his daily slave, at the same time that he has varied the accomplishments of his desire and made possible its renewal after brief interval. ”

“ Some, indeed, have urged the holy kiss; but then, I have asked them why they make balks? why they did salute the most handsome and let the ill favored ones go.”
In an old book called “The Ladies Dictionary,” speaking of kissing in Scotland, the author says: “But kissing and drinking are now both grown to a greater custom among us than in those days with the Romans.” And to what extent kissing was carried on in Rome, Martial has stated in his “Epigrams.” “Every neighbor,” he says, “every hairy-faced farmer presses on you with a strongly scented kiss. ”

“ If a man kissed his betrothed, she gained thereby the half of his effects in the event of his dying before the celebration of the marriage; and if the lady herself died, under the same circumstances, her heirs or nearest of kin took the half due to her, a kiss among the ancients being a sign of plighted faith. So seriously, indeed, was a kiss regarded by the ancient Romans, that a husband would not even kiss his wife in presence of his daughters. ”

“ Persons were treated as atheists who would not kiss their hands when they entered a temple. When Apuleius mentions Psyche, [62] he says she was so beautiful that they adored her as Venus, in kissing the right hand.
“This ceremonial action rendered respectable the earliest institutions of Christianity. It was a custom with the primeval bishops to give their hands to be kissed by the ministers who served at the altar.
“This custom, however, as a religious rite, declined with paganism.
“In society our ingenious Academician considers the custom of kissing hands as essential to its welfare. ”

“ Even as regards the great ones of this world the kiss used to serve in various ways as a mark of humility and reverence. Its use in ancient times was remarkably widespread; people threw themselves down on the ground before their rulers, kissed their footprints, literally "licked the dust," as it is termed. In the Psalms, Solomon sings of the promised King: "They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him ”

“ The kiss of the hand is undoubtedly ancient, and therefore is not derived from that of the lips, but probably the converse is true. The hand-kiss is loosely asserted to be developed from servile obeisances in which the earth, the foot, and the garments were kissed, the hand and cheek succeeding in order of time and approach to equality of rank. ”

“ A kiss to or from a woman we love is a far too delicate pledge of affection to bear the gaze of strangers.
How many engaged couples would, do you suppose, find favour in Cato's eyes? How often do they not by their behaviour offend the commonest notions of decency? Their kisses and caresses, which ought to be their secret possession, they expose quite unconcernedly to the sight of all. One evening at a large party I saw a young girl ostentatiously kiss on the mouth the gentleman to whom she was engaged. ”

“ If it is disagreeable for a young and pretty mouth to stick itself out of courtesy to an old and ugly mouth, there was a great danger between fresh, red mouths of twenty to twenty-five years old; and that is what finally brought about the abolition of the ceremony of kissing in the mysteries and the agapæ. It is what caused women to be confined among the Orientals, so that they might kiss only their fathers and their brothers ”

“ As long as a man may become a suitor for the hand of his cousin he should, both for the sake of his own love-drama and in justice to a possible rival, be debarred from this privilege. Imagine the feelings of a lover who knows that his rival has been permitted to steal the virgin kiss from the lips of his adored one simply because his father happens to be her uncle! Family kisses should, therefore, be allowed only within that degree of relationship which precludes the idea of Love and marriage. ”

“ Among the English the custom has become obsolete. As for women kissing each other, the modern rhymster says:
Men scorn to kiss among themselves,
And scarce will kiss a brother;
Women often want to kiss so much,
They smack and kiss each other. As to the custom of kissing the Pope’s toe, Matthew of Westminster writes that it was customary at one time to kiss the hand of His Holiness, but that a certain woman in the eighth century not only kissed the Pope’s hand, but squeezed it. ”

“ I am inclined to think that Miss Garrow was right in saying that the world is changed as touching mistletoe boughs. Kissing, I fear, is less innocent now than it used to be when our grand-mothers were alive, and we have become more fastidious in our amusements. ”

“ I do not pretend to know whether man was evolved from ape, or ape from man; whether they are congenetic products of a common authorship, or the masterpieces of two rival authors; but I cannot see in what respect man's identity would be affected, whatever may be the case. If it be shown that man descended from the ape, it does not change the facts which have existed from the beginning, nor does it change the destiny to which he is assigned. If it can be shown that apes descended from man, it does not leave upon man the censure for this degeneracy. ”

“ The early civilization of man points to his creation, not his evolution. Evolution requires many centers of civilization; creation, only one. Of course, if man is descended from an ancient ape-like form, and from the Primates and their brute progeny, he must have been as uncivilized and brutish as any baboon or gorilla today, or the apes, which, last year, horribly mangled the children at Sierra Leone. ”

“ Man only can sink so low; the beast which tears itself is gentle and innocent; a spark of ancient heaven shines still brighter in its savage state than in our more degenerate nature. There are tales for children in which a timid girl is made to kiss a scaly dragon in order to disenchant him; but I could caress the tiger, extend my hand and offer my lips to the hideous hyena, rather than polute myself by being friendly towards you, for I should fear from a woman to be transformed into a dragon. ”

“ How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words "justice" and "kindness," how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces takes pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them? And who are these frightful assassins? They are men like ourselves, who study and read as we do, who have brothers, friends, a wife or a sweetheart ”

“ We shall find a close resemblance in the courtship customs and the sexual and familial associations to those we have seen to be practised by our pre-human ancestors. The same resemblance will persist when, lastly, we come to investigate the same institutions among civilised races, up to our own. Indeed, we may have to admit that, in some directions, love is not even yet as [114] finely developed with us humans as it is among birds. It is in the loves of birds, as I believe, that we must seek hints to that evolution in fineness, which has still to come in our love. ”

“ Suddenly, the peoples of the world found themselves with a place to stand in dignity, a forum in which to express the concerns that most deeply affected them, and the faint beginnings of a role in deciding their own future and that of humanity in general. A corner had been turned that left behind six or more millennia of history. ”

“ Since, then, the human mind has not the power to remain entirely empty, and unoccupied with the love of something, it is girt around with a wall of the virtues.
“In this way, then, our mind begins to be at rest in its Author and to taste the sweetness of that intimacy. At once it rejects whatever it deems contrary to the divine law, shrinks from what does not agree with the rule of supernal righteousness. Hence true mortification is born; hence it comes that man kissing the Cross of his Redeemer seems dead to the world. ”