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Sealed with a kiss

What's in a kiss? Charlotte Coleman-Smith looks into the history of snogging

From our earliest days, we're told that kisses have magical powers. They can turn frogs into princes, virgins into pliant lovers and - according to Celtic legend - represent the very breath of life. A kiss is never just a kiss: it's a symbol of love, lust, friendship, duty and betrayal; a ritual laden with significance, which can conceal wildly different motives. Politicians kiss babies, Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, and the Pope's first act on reaching Ireland in 1979 was to kiss the ground at Dublin airport. A bad kiss can sound the death knell for a relationship, while a good kiss - well, it can put shiny happy bells on everything.

The first kiss
Listen to the academics, and you may well wonder why we bother. Some claim that the act of kissing began with prehistoric mothers chewing up food, then pushing it into their children's mouths with their tongues. Others believe kissing evolved from the smelling of a companion's face as an act of greeting. Whatever the truth, for millions of years, lips and mouths have played a crucial part in our survival. The brain contains a huge amount of receptors devoted to picking up sensations from the lips. They direct a baby towards milk, and they helped our ancestors to discern whether their food was poisonous or not. Freud, typically, goes back in time to our childhood, describing the kiss as 'an unconscious repetition of infantile delight in feeding', and - just to kill off any trace of romance - as the 'sexual use of the mucous membranes of the lips and mouth'.

An apple a day
The kiss has been at the centre of any number of coy courtship rituals. In 16th-century England, young girls would present a clove-studded apple to someone they wanted to kiss. The chap in question would chew on one of the cloves - they are supposed to freshen the breath - before puckering up. After that, the man took possession of the apple and the game continued. But while the Elizabethans were passing the apple, the government of Naples was banning the practice of kissing entirely, making it punishable by death. Such killjoys still exist. In the US state of Indiana, there is a law on the books making it illegal for a man with a moustache to 'habitually kiss human beings'.

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