Spit

 

    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.