Kiss day

Kiss day

A kiss is the touch or pressing of one's lips against another person or an object. Cultural connotations of kissing vary widely. Depending on the culture and context, a kiss can express sentiments of love, passion, romance, sexual attraction, sexual activity, sexual arousal,affection, respect, greeting, friendship, peace and good luck, among many others. In some situations a kiss is a ritual, formal or symbolic gesture indicating devotion, respect, or sacrament. The word came from Old English cyssan (“to kiss”), in turn from coss (“a kiss”).

Anthropologists are divided into two schools on the origins of kissing, one believing that it is instinctual and intuitive and the other that it evolved from what is known as kiss feeding, a process used by mothers to feed their infants by passing chewed food to their babies' mouths.^[1] Cesare Lombroso, Italian criminologist, physician and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, supported this idea.^[2]

The earliest reference to kissing-like behavior comes from the Vedas, Sanskrit scriptures that informed Hinduism, Buddhism and the Jain religion, around 3,500 years ago, according to Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who specializes in the history of the kiss.^[3]

During the later Classical period, affectionate mouth-to-mouth kissing was first described in the Hindu epic, the “Mahabharata”.^[4]

Academics who have studied it say kissing spread slowly to other parts of the world after Alexander the Great and his army conquered parts of Punjab in northern India in 326 B.C.^[5]

Both lip and tongue kissing are mentioned in Sumerian poetry:^[6]

My lips are too small, they know not to kiss.

My precious sweet, lying by my heart,

one by one "tonguemaking," one by one.

When my sweet precious, my heart, had lain down too,

each of them in turn kissing with the tongue, each in turn.^[7]

Kissing is described in the surviving Ancient Egyptian love poetry from the New Kingdom, found on papyri excavated at Deir el-Medina:

Finally I will drink life from your lips

and wake up from this ever lasting sleep.

The wisdom of the earth in a kiss

and everything else in your eyes.

I kiss her before everyone

that they all may see my love.^[8]

And when her lips are pressed to mine

I am made drunk and need not wine.

When we kiss, and her warm lips half open,

I fly cloud-high without beer!

His kisses on my lips, my breast, my hair...

...Come! Come! Come! And kiss me when I die,

For life, compelling life, is in thy breath;

And at that kiss, though in the tomb I lie,

I will arise and break the bands of Death.^[9]

The earliest reference to kissing in the Old Testament is in Genesis 27:26, when Jacob deceives his father to obtain his blessing:

And his father Isaac said unto him, Come near now, and kiss me, my son.

A little later, we have the first man-woman kiss in the Bible in Genesis 31:11, when Jacob flees from Esau and comes to the house of his uncle Laban:

And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept.

Much later, there is the oft-quoted verse from the Song of Songs:

May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,

for your love is better than wine.^[10][11]

In Cyropaedia (370 BC), Xenophon talks about the Persian custom of kissing in the lips upon departure while narrating the departure of Cyrus the Great (c. 600 BC) as a boy from his Median kinsmen.^[12] According to Herodotus (5th century BC), when two Persian meet, the greeting formula expresses their equal or inequal status. They do not speak; rather, equals kiss each other on the mouth, and in the case where one is a little inferior to the other, the kiss is given on the cheek.^[13][14]

The Romans helped to spread the habit to most of Europe and north Africa.^[15] The Romans were passionate about kissing and talked about several types of kissing. Kissing the hand or cheek was called a osculum. Kissing on the lips with mouth closed was called an basium, which was used between relatives. A kiss of passion was called a suavium.^[16]

Kissing was not always an indication of eros, or love, but also could show respect and rank as it was used in Medieval Europe.

The study of kissing started some time in the nineteenth century and is called Philematology, which has been studied by people including Cesare Lombroso, Ernest Crawley,Charles Darwin, Edward Burnett Tylor and modern scholars such as Elaine Hatfield.^[17][18]