The kiss is the key to paradise — From the custom of rubbing nose against nose to the modern kiss

Smell me = kiss me!

The ancient poets of Greece described the kiss as the key to paradise. A contemporary poet has said that the kiss was created to be felt and sensed, and not created merely to be sung about. Rarely do we find a poet, from the age of Homer down to our own day, who has not sung of the kiss and described its sweetness, its warmth, and its delight at least once in

his verse.

The kiss has passed through many stages, and many developments have come over it in history among the various peoples of the earth... It comes in several kinds: among them the kiss of lust, or unbridled passion, which Faust pressed upon the lips of Marguerite as they burned for kisses; and among them the kiss of deceit, which Judas Iscariot pressed upon the face of his master, Christ the Lord. And whatever the kiss may be, its sound, in the eyes of lovers and the inspired, remains strikingly like the breaking of waves on the small pebbles of the shore.

The ancient Romans divided kisses into three classes: the kiss of friendship, pressed on the cheek; the kiss of tenderness and affection, pressed on the mouth; and the kiss of love and desire, which is the interplay of two mouths in a long, ardent kiss.

In fact, all people have agreed that a kiss pressed on the forehead denotes respect, and one pressed on the cheek bespeaks friendship and affection. Kissing the hand is a mark of veneration and honor, and kissing the foot a mark of submission. And there remains the

kiss of love, sincere and insincere alike — the kiss that is exchanged by the lips.

It is reckoned that the modern kiss developed from the custom of rubbing face against face, that custom which the earliest peoples knew and which some of them keep up even today.

Rubbing nose against nose

There is no doubt that the custom of rubbing nose against nose, which we find among some inhabitants of the South Sea islands, and which is the only kind of kissing they have, is derived from rubbing face against face. Eskimo lovers have long practiced this kind of kissing.

The history of kissing by rubbing noses goes back to the year 1950 before Christ. The kissing familiar today did not appear until much later. The Indian kiss traveled, it seems, from India eastward to China, and westward to Persia, Assyria, Syria, Greece, Italy, and the rest of the countries of Europe. We know no reason why this kind of kissing did not enter Egypt; and if the ancient Egyptians did know it, they did not keep it up for long.