The Kiss: A treatise

By JP Malig

A long time ago, somewhere between the moment the first creature slithered out of the primordial ooze and the first primate mastered bipedal ambulation, a female ape strutted up to a male ape, looked him

straight in the eye and pressed her mouth against his. 

The heavens shook. The earth quaked. The kiss was born. 

Needless to say, this early kiss was never reported.In fact, the whole notion that smooching history predates human history lies in the behavior of present day primates. 

Most primates kiss, and the Bonobo Apes  -- a species that has been getting a lot of press for their particular brand of sexual liberation -- even use their tongues. 

However, there are as many different theories as to what purpose kissing served as there are theorists.

The most chaste among them proposes that kissing began as grooming. Anthropologist Desmond Morris theorizes that kissing came from the days before Simulac and eating utensils. 

Back then, mothers would chew food for their babies, then transfer it from mouth to mouth, rendering Mom a formula machine.

Breast-feeding is another example of mother-to-child lip service. Kissing authority Tomima Edmark sees suckling as the origin of the modern kiss. "Kissing is possibly a leftover yearning for nourishment," she writes. In the good old days those without the drive

didn't survive. 

Others propose that mouth-to-mouth intercourse was always purely sexual. There is evidence that the chemicals in saliva heighten attraction. Another anthropologist, Helen Fisher , believes that kissing created, "closer organismal units." 

In other words, it established intimacy by sharing bacteria. Fisher also points out that in societies where kissing wasn't the norm, "lovers patted, licked, rubbed, sucked, nipped or blew on each other's faces prior to copulation."

Still one more theory is that the initial instinct of the coital embrace was to grab the other person with every possible muscle. 

But no matter how instinctive kissing may be, as civilization progressed, such public displays of affection as the kiss were reserved for the marital bedroom, at least in theory. 

After all, we are not  animals, or so Medieval Europeans believed. A bishop of Worms once sentenced a sinner to three days of penance for, "[kissing] some woman due to foul desire and thus [polluting] yourself." 

If the act took place in a church, the penance was even more strict: 20 days of bread and water. Interestingly, non-sexual forms of kissing were deemed acceptable. It was a common custom to kiss paper -- kiss a signature and a contract became legit. 

Kissing the hand of a powerful official, kissing the host and kissing the opponent in a jousting match were all symbolically powerful and perfectly respectable acts. 

Perhaps Amy Vanderbilt , writing about "TheVictorian Gentleman" in 1963, best summed up Western Civilization 's long-held opinion on the subject: "It isn't the kiss, it's the too-obvious enjoyment or prolongation of it that should be avoided in public places. Love-making should be a private pursuit." 

Vanderbilt's admonishment seems to have had its genesis in antiquity . Kissing may be hot and heavy in The Kama Sutra , but in the Old Testament's "Song of Solomon," kissing is considered a strictly private affair. 

For several centuries, intimates would only shake hands in public, no matter how much they might lay on the lips in private, whether they were wed or not.

So pervasive was this taboo that romantic kissing was rarely portrayed positively in Western art until the nineteenth century, where it reached its apotheosis in Gustav Klimt 's "The Kiss," painted in turn-of-the-century Vienna and hanging as a poster in Libraries Near You. 

Whether it was art imitating life or vice versa, the  world was changed when Thomas Edison showed his short film of a kiss at the turn of the century.

Though scandalous at the time, within a few years, the kiss had become a linchpin scene in more movies than you could shake a stick at, and by the 1920s, young adults were admitting they learned how to kiss by watching actors do it on the silver screen. 

The kiss has traveled an extraordinary path. Once a simple form of grooming or feeding, it has become the universally recognizable symbol of love the world 'round.