The sensual is spiritual
"I gave thee the sensual pleasures, and thou shalt enjoy them!" thunders the Goddess, in one of Her major commands. Not all of us, however, agree on what constitutes "sensual pleasure." The article Put Your Sweet Lips... begins with an astute observation, made by the African Tsonga in 1927, upon viewing their first European kiss: "Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other's saliva and dirt!"
Next, Put Your Sweet Lips... treats us to a bit of kissing esoterica:
"In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing.
"He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas...." MORE >>>
4 comments:
an astute observation, made by the African Tsonga in 1927, upon viewing their first European kiss: "Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other's saliva and dirt!"
LOLOL! I forgot about that! That's my favorite paradox or conundrum or whatever regarding European racism against Africans because they are supposedly so base and sexual and animalistic...
There was another tribe that had no concept of "other". They didn't know where one person ended and another began, so they would do things like moisten a piece of food with saliva and feed it to someone else. It is amazing what a vast range of human perception exists.
When my friend went to Mali a few years ago to visit her daughter in the Peace Corps, the villagers said to the daughter (who was young and blond), "Your mother is more beautiful than you. She has black hair, a big nose, and she is old."
LMAO!!! HA HA HA HA! That is priceless!!
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