What could be more
familiar than spit which is always present for each of us though we may give it
little attention? Spit occupies a
curious borderline zone in many ways. It
both is and is not a part of one’s body.
It has been regarded as both a medicine and a poison and is employed in
magic to avert evil and attract good as well as to curse. Associated with identity and intimacy but
also filth and contempt, saliva, which has vital biological function, has been
assigned potent symbolic roles as well.
Animal life
emerged from the oceans through the stratagem of making the sea portable,
carried about in the cells and blood and lymph fluids of beasts who learned to
breath in open air. Estimates of the
water content of the human body vary, but are generally close to
two-thirds. If that vivifying moisture
is not renewed, death will occur in a matter of days, or at most, a week or
two. One function of water in the body is to carry
out waste in sweat and urine. Thus our
liquid content has a sort of liminal status, at once an essential part of the
body, and, at the same time, a temporary component just passing through. As incoming fresh water it is vital; as outgoing
waste, it is disagreeable and even toxic.
Thus spit may be
considered very dirty, and appropriate for potent insults, used like the sole
of one’s shoes in Islamic countries or excretions in maximum security prisons. The Deuteronomic Code provided that, if the brother-in-law
of a woman whose husband had died refused to take the widow as wife, she should
spit upon him in the presence of the elders.
In his suffering Job is considered so contemptible that he is spit upon
as is Christ in his passion. [1] Such a
gesture might evoke a forceful response such as that of Shylock who complained
to Antonio through gritted teeth, “Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last.”
[2]
Yet spit may also
be considered a healing balm. Christ
heals a deaf mute and a blind person with an application of his saliva. [3] Tacitus tells us that while in Egypt
Vespasian was asked to do as much for a blind petitioner and to cure the
paralyzed hand of another. [4] Though at
first ridiculing these requests, the emperor was prevailed upon to apply the
royal spittle and both were, according to reports, instantly cured. His suppliants, doubtless familiar with the
story of Thoth similarly curing Horus, [5] were perhaps unsurprised.
The ancients
believed in the efficacy of spittle in curing snakebites. This opinion is shared by Aristotle, Aelian,
Pliny, and others. [6] The use of saliva in treating a variety of
other conditions is prescribed in Celsus, Galen, Paulus Aegineta, and Oribasius.
[7] While these uses remain in the
category of folk medicine or the miraculous, science has confirmed that saliva
contains antifungal proteins, immune cells, antimicrobial compounds, and growth
factors that promote healing. Dogs, and
sometimes their owners as well, lick a wound instinctively.
The same belief
in the beneficent power of spit is evident in many old practices. Theokritos’ shepherd, to avert ill fortune
after seeing his reflection in the sea, spits three times “into my breast.”
[8] Persius records the custom of
spitting on an infant to protect against the evil eye. [9]
The extreme antiquity of this practice is suggested by its widespread
distribution. Three spits are considered
efficacious in averting evil yet today in Greece, India, and among Jews, though
only symbolic sounds of spitting have been considered sufficient in recent
times: in Greece saying “ftou ftou ftou,” in India "thoo-thoo-thoo,” and
among Jews “pooh-pooh-pooh.”
As the power of
spit is a double-edged, such spitting serves both to avert bad luck and tom
attract the good, just as Aristotle thought it could not only combat the venom
of snakes, but also kill the reptiles.
Modern science, while rejecting these particular claims, recognizes the
role of bodily fluids, including spittle, in both the spread of illnesses such
as tuberculosis and HIV and in protection against transmission of diseases such
as colds, covid and other flus, streptococcus, and hepatitis.
Yet our fluids
contain as well our identity in DNA, and, perhaps through some intuitive
caution, people have often feared that any cast-off portions of ourselves, like
spit and cut hair and fingernail parings, might be used in conjuring. Frazer provides examples of such malicious
use of spittle among Native South Americans, New Zealanders, Hawaiians, and
South and West Africans. [10]
In modern times a good deal of spitting is associated with the use of tobacco and betel, but attenuated versions of these superstitions survive in recent times. Such gestures include spitting into the hands
before setting to do a task or shaking hands on a bargain, or to seal an oath,
or in disgust. In the nineteenth century
“boys in the North of England have a custom amongst themselves of spitting
their faith (or, as they call it in the northern dialect, ‘their Saul,’ i.e.
Soul), when required to make asseverations in matters which they think of
consequence.” In the same region miners spit
together on a stone “by way of cementing their confederacy.” Parties to an agreement are said to “spit upon
the same stone.” [11]
Anthropologists
record a great many spitting customs. The
Maasai of Kenya are well-known for spitting on babies as a blessing, on a bride
to bless the marriage, and when greeting others as a sign of respect. In India some may spit in a toilet before
using it or to the side of a companion to guard against the evil eye (buri
nazar). Some Indian shopkeepers
think it prudent to spit on the cash from the first sale of the day. [12] Some of their fellow citizens consider it
prudent to spit in the corner of a toilet before using it. [13]
Spitting is sometimes, however, practiced
with no reference to magic or medicine, but simply as a natural activity of
everyday life like sweating or excretion.
To Erasmus it is “unmannerly,” not to spit, but, on the contrary, ”to
suck back saliva,” though a polite person will see that he does not spit on a
bystander. [14] Medieval poems advise
that proper etiquette requires spitting properly, avoiding the dining table or
the washbasin. [15] In a curious
mingling of the nasty and sexual associations of spit, Samuel Pepys reports
that he had been enjoying a play when “a lady spit backward upon me by a
mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was
not troubled at it at all.” [16] Still
in 1702 a French etiquette book advises that it is not spitting but swallowing
what one should spit which is revolting to others. Nonetheless the writer adds that one should
not spit unnecessarily or often. By
1859 a British volume flatly advises against spitting altogether, and shortly
before Frances Trollope had expressed her distaste at spitting as a crude
American habit. “The gentlemen spit,
talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again.” [17] In Germany Heine, wondering where he might
head, rejects America as a place where “they spit without a spittoon.” [18]
These writers may
have wished to demonstrate the barbarity of American society, but practices elsewhere
were similar even in what might be assumed to be refined settings. Indeed, there are accounts of members of
Parliament spitting during deliberations until the end of the nineteenth
century and British pubs were still being built in the nineteen-thirties with
spitting troughs for the accommodation of patrons. [19] The
Museum of the Georgia State Legislature in the Capitol Building exhibits a
spittoon of the type that was used in legislative sessions into the 1970s. To this day spittoons are provided on the
floor if the United States Senate and in the Supreme Court chambers, though
they are now considered simply a tradition and are used, if at all, merely as
trash cans. [20]
The Georgia
legislators may have been old-fashioned.
By 1910 a writer refers to open spitting as a relic of the past. [21]
The influenza epidemic of 1918 accelerated social disapproval of the
practice to the point that in America today routine spitting is ordinarily done
discreetly if at all, though Sears, which
once featured pages of cuspidors, offers yet today a modern version, the
“Don't Tread On Me Spit Bud Portable Spittoon with Can Opener: The Ultimate
Spill-Proof Spitter by Spitbud.” Casual
spitting survives, though often associated with the lower classes and with
men. Many visitors note with distaste
the spitting commonplace in some parts of the world, particularly in China,
India, Nepal, and Korea.
Even when
stripped of its supernatural qualities, spitting can retain considerable
symbolic power. Such culturally
constructed uses may be confined to a single artifact or to an era or moment in
history, while some symbolism seems all-but-ubiquitous.
In Montaigne’s
marvelous essay “Of the Cannibales,” describing the cruelty with which Tupinambá
people in Brazil treat sacrificial victims, notes that “those that paint them
dying, and that represent this action, when they are put to execution,
delineate the prisoners spitting in their executioners faces, and making mowes
[grimaces, i.e. making faces] at them” [22]
As Montaigne says, artists had chosen to depict the scene of defiant
spitting, he had made it a dramatic point of his account, and the passage has
remained among the best-known in his work. [23]
The notion that one might, though dying, turn the tables on a captor,
demonstrating contempt and casting an implied curse, while the very opposite of
the meek deaths told of the saints, has doubtless been reenacted numerous times
through the violent turns of history. As
a chilling image of fortitude such stories indicate the potency of spit even
for a person facing imminent and certain death.
The victim, in a kind if tragic acceptance, can retain dignity despite
helplessness.
A widespread
modern myth indicates that spitting has not altogether lost its magical
efficacy. Although organizations
opposing the Vietnam War regularly expressed support for soldiers, including
placing active-duty and returned service members at the head of protest parades
and seeking to organize inside the military, when the war ended in America’s
defeat in 1975 and President Carter then pardoned draft resisters two years later,
narratives began to surface claiming that anti-war protesters had spit upon
soldiers. Accounts multiplied after a
scene of protesters spitting on Army men appeared in the film Rambo in
1982. Such incidents became a
commonplace, mentioned as fact in countless news stories, though most likely nothing
of the kind had ever occurred. In 1998
Jerry Lembcke, a sociology professor and Vietnam veteran, published The
Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam which painstakingly
demonstrated the lack of evidence of such incidents; there is not a single news
account or photograph, no arrest or police complaint of such acts, no
references even in private correspondence. [24]
Though many such stories are third-person, there are also hundreds of
people who came to assert that they had themselves been spit upon, though none
mentioned such an insult until years after the end of the war. It seems clear that, though of course it is
impossible to prove absolutely that not a single spitting incident ever
happened, these “memories” are mythic, manufactured for a symbolic reason and
not an account of actual events.
In spite of a
long history of ambivalence, spit elicits predominately negative reactions
today. By gazing just a bit into what
might be an adjoining room in the Museum of Cultural Practices, though, the
inquirer will note a practice allied with spitting but universally appreciated
and likely as old as the species: kissing.
In many of the earliest references to kissing, the practice clearly occurs
as part of romantic love as in the Song of Songs (!:2) “Let him kiss me
with the kisses of his mouth--for thy love is better than wine.” The intensity of erotic kisses is associated
with spit since the wetness is an index of intimacy from a dry cheek-peck to a
lover’s deep kiss. Love kissing may be
considered as well a survival of the use of spit to certify oaths since a kiss
is often a pledge of fidelity. Kisses
may also signify fealty, or friendship, or may indicate spiritual fellowship. Indeed we know from Justin Martyr that in the
second century the “kiss of peace” was a regular part of the liturgy. [25] Though this usage has dwindled now to a
gesture during the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, it parallels the
practices of Jews kissing the Torah or a mezuzah and Muslims kissing the Koran
or the Ka’aba. Kisses of friendship or
respect or simply of greeting are common as well. The social kissing that used to be
characteristically European has become widespread in the United States.
In each of us
dwells a solipsistic infant whose most absorbing interests are bound by the
body itself: pain and pleasure, the passage of materials into and out from the
self. Pared to the essential, this
constitutes human life, though between the baby in a cradle and the aged and
failing sufferer in a hospital bed we have more than sufficient distractions to
focus attention elsewhere. The balance of trade in the regulation of the
corporeal economy deals in acts of feeding, excretion, secretion, bleeding,
vomiting, and spit. Around each of these
has accumulated vast stores of both practical and symbolic associations to aid
the individual in easing the passage through life by the wise management of
intake and output. Before the time that
all systems fail, spitting holds a place in such somatic regulation,
contributing to health as well as, through the sort of applied metaphor which lies
at the base of both magic and religion, aiding in making alliances, even love
relationships, avoiding misfortune, bringing woe to enemies, or lifting the
soul in the direction of the divine.
1. Deuteronomy
25:9, Job 30:10, Matthew 26:67, 27:30, Mark 10:34, 14:65,
and 15:19.
2. Merchant of
Venice I, iii.
3. Mark 7:33,
8:23. In the case of the deaf mute it
may be that Jesus spit on the ground before healing with his hand.
4. Tacitus, Histories,
LXXXI.
5. See Book of the
Dead, 17.
6. Aelian, De
Natura Animalium, I, 24; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, VII. 14 and
XXVIII, ; Aristotle, Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν, called Historia Animalum,
VIII, 29.
7. See G.
Chowdharay-Best, “Notes on the Healing Properties of Saliva,” Folklore, Vol.
86, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 1975), pp. 195-200.
8. Idyll VI, line 33.
9. Satire II, 31
10. The Golden
Bough (Macmillan abridged one-volume edition), p. 276. Other examples in the same book include practices
in Malaysia (15) and in the Marquesas (272).
11. John Brand, Observations
on the popular antiquities of Great Britain: chiefly illustrating the origin of
our vulgar and provincial customs, ceremonies, and superstitions (Volume
3), p. 26. The proverbial expression is
also included in Robert Christy’s Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages
(1887).
12. See Coomber, R.,
Moyle, L. and Pavlidis, A., “Public Spitting in ‘developing’ nations of the
global South: Harmless embedded practice or disgusting, harmful and deviant?”
in Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Máximo Sozzo (eds.), The
Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the
Global South, 2018. A contemporary
website provides practical instruction on combating the buri nazar: https://rgyan.com/blogs/easy-ways-to-remove-evil-eye-buri-nazar-nivarak-sujhav/.
13. “Spit and
Unpolish,” The Hindu Oct 11 2020.
14. De civilitate
morum puerilium.
15. Examples are
collected in Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939).
16. In his entry for
January 26, 1661.
17. Ch. 6, Domestic
Manners of the Americans.
18. “Jetzt Wohin?”
line 24.
19. Paula Cocozza,
“Spitting in public: disgusting and antisocial – or a great British
tradition?,” The Guardian, September 25, 2013.
20. See the Wikipedia
article on “spittoons”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon. Original references were Richard A. Baker’s Traditions
of the United States Senate and a web posting, "Advocate's
Lectern" from The Oyez Project of the Illinois Institute of Technology's
Chicago-Kent College of Law.
21. More examples from
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process
(1939). The French book is Jean-Baptiste
de la Salle’s Les Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrétienne
and the British one is The Habits of Good Society. The 1910 reference is in Moeurs intimes du
passé, attributed to Docteur Cabanès.
22. I quote from
Florio’s translation, but add the bracketed definition.
23. Three engravings
from the late sixteenth century on the theme are reproduced in Michèle H. Richman,
“Spitting Images in Montaigne and Bataille for a Heterological Counterhistory
of Sovereignty,” Diacritics vol. 35, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005), 46-61.
24. Lembke also
demonstrates the consistent support for GIs within the anti-war movement and
the government’s propaganda attempts to paint the protesters as hostile to the
troops.
25. See I Apology,
65.
