"How did yesterday's exercise go? Did you fall into your own reflection?"
from Lesson Twelve
It's Gemma Brockis' birthday today, which is an excellent reason to continue sharing her latest click-and-scroll adventures from The Kiss, Certificate II. Possible spoilers ahead...
The Ninth Lesson emerges from immersiveness to recall, at a respectful second hand, the discovery in India three or four thousand years ago of smelling with the mouth via a misplaced sniff – literature's first recorded kiss. Alexander the Great, it is said, knew nothing of kissing until he came to India.
The Tenth Lesson throws immediate doubt on this claim however, noting the introduction of the kiss to what would later call itself "The West" over a hundred years before Alexander's campaign, by Aspasia of Miletus, the Persian girlfriend of Pericles of Athens, as an a-romantic symbol of that couple's parity. There was also a kiss in Homer's Iliad – just the one though – a symbol of submission from the Trojan King Priam to Achilles as he begged the Greeks for the return of his son's corpse, even less romantically.
The Eleventh and Twelfth Lessons travel with Aeneas from Troy to Rome, where the kissing of doorposts was instituted as encouragement to protect one's threshold. Other kisses would eventually be available: the Persian-style, aromantic but still unhygienic and consequently outlawed Oculum; the Indian-style taste sensation, the Savium; and the still unsourced but by now irrefutably romantic Basium, of which the poet Catullus begged loads, and then another load. Ovid's myth of Narcissus meanwhile provides the homework. (I didn't know when I first read this lesson that Narcissus had faded away and turned into a daffodil. I wonder if Marie Curie knew this. I'm not sure it would shed new light on their "Day of Reflection" either way.)
Finally, the Thirteenth Lesson presents the first ever recorded image of a kiss: a kiss of life, passing from the hands of the sun, to the nose of the revoultionarily monotheistic Pharoah Akhenaten, and to his wife Nefertiti, and from them to the mouths of their children; a short-lived, city-founding tenderness inextricably tied to – and ultimately doomed by – the religious repression orchestrated by the man archeologist James Henry Breasted would later dub "the first individual in human history". (Well, look at him.)
IMAGES
Metamorphosis of Narcissus : Salvador Dali 1937
Representation of Cow and Family : Artist Unknown
Priam Asking Achilles for the Body of Hector : Théobald Chartran 1876
Narcissus : Caravaggio 1597-99
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three daughters : the Armana Period c. 1345 BCE
And thanks to Extra Credits for being the only source I could find attributing Breasted's quote.
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