By Eben van Tonder & Christa Berger, 7 August 2025
Introduction
Few bodily substances have evoked as wide a range of responses across human cultures as saliva. Simultaneously sacred and profane, healing and contaminating, its use in ritual, medicine, and food preparation reveals an ancient logic that predates modern microbiology. Across time and geography—from the meat-houses of Victorian England to the shrines of Japan, from Balkan wedding customs to South Asian healing rites—spitting and the deliberate application of saliva have been employed to bless, to preserve, to heal, and to protect.
This investigation was prompted by an obscure but telling nineteenth-century meat-processing practice in which fat was “spouted” from the mouth onto pork carcasses to protect them from spoilage. While modern hygienists recoiled at the image, the method bears remarkable similarity to a vast array of pre-scientific practices in which the mouth and its fluids served as instruments of transformation. Whether as part of love charms in Styria, tree-healing spells in Hungary, or spit-offerings in Nigerian and Japanese shrines, these acts suggest that saliva was understood as more than just fluid. It was essence, vitality, and intentionality in liquid form.
This work explores the practice of spitting and the use of saliva and fat in cultural, spiritual, and technological contexts across regions, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Balkans, Russia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Northern Europe, and South America. Drawing on historical manuals, anthropological accounts, folk medicine, and religious rites, it considers saliva as a substance through which people connected with the sacred, preserved the perishable, and negotiated the boundaries between purity and danger, self and other, body and spirit.
In an age increasingly driven by sterility, this study returns us to a time when the human body, in all its fluid expressions, was the instrument and medium of care, transformation, and meaning. What emerges is a remarkable cross-cultural grammar of the mouth: a hidden language of spitting, blessing, anointing, and sealing, whose significance remains embedded in the margins of ritual, memory, and craft.memory, and craft.
United Kingdom
Spouting Fat and Folk Uses of Saliva
In nineteenth-century Britain, pork processors employed a preservation method known as “spouting” fat. A butcher would place melted fat in his mouth and spray it onto hanging meat in a fine coat. This was intended to seal the surface and repel flies. However, it is unlikely that keeping flies and insects at bay was the primary or original consideration, as far simpler methods were available. Complete immersion of the carcass in a bath of liquid fat, or sprinkling ash over the surface, would have been more practical and hygienic alternatives. The act of spouting fat from the mouth harkens back to something older and more fundamental. Mechanical sprayers replaced this method around 1901, when Douglas and Sons Ltd. described mouth-spouting as “in the highest degree objectionable and disgusting” due to the risk of diseasIn nineteenth-century Britain, pork processors employed a preservation method known as “spouting” fat. A butcher would place melted fat in his mouth and spray it onto hanging meat in a fine coat. This was intended to seal the surface and repel flies. However, it is unlikely that keeping flies and insects at bay was the primary or original consideration, as far simpler methods were available. Complete immersion of the carcass in a bath of liquid fat, or sprinkling ash over the surface, would have been more practical and hygienic alternatives. The act of spouting fat from the mouth harkens back to something older and more fundamental. Mechanical sprayers replaced this method around 1901, when Douglas and Sons Ltd. described mouth-spouting as “in the highest degree objectionable and disgusting” due to the risk of disease transmission (Douglas and Sons 1901).
In popular British folklore, saliva held strong protective and healing connotations. Fasting spittle, or the first saliva produced upon waking, was widely believed to cure warts and eye infections. Pliny the Elder claimed that human saliva could heal bloodshot eyes and was especially effective when produced by a woman (Naturalis Historia, Book XXVIII). Early modern folk cures in northern England instructed sufferers to apply fasting spittle to warts for nine consecutive mornings (Simpson and Roud 2000).
Spitting also served as a binding mechanism in oaths and contracts. In the mining communities of Northumberland and Durham, men sealed agreements by spitting on the same stone, symbolising the unification of intent and spirit (Opie and Tatem 1989). This notion of saliva as life-force reflects a pre-germ-theory view in which the body’s secretions carried mystical potency.
Germany and Austria
Saliva in Meat Curing and Love Rituals
Analysis of Alpine Hallstatt communities suggests that saliva may have contributed to the fermentation of meat in sealed pits. Modern biochemistry confirms that saliva contains nitrate-reducing bacteria capable of forming nitric oxide and stable curing pigments (Lund et al. 2007).
In love magic, saliva held symbolic weight. The Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens records that girls in Styria secretly mixed their saliva into a man’s drink or bread to ensure fidelity (Bächtold-Stäubli and Hoffmann-Krayer 1987). In Baden, young men placed a drop of saliva in their beloved’s wine as a form of binding (ibid.). The Church regarded the act as a serious offence, punishable by three years of penance. Saliva was treated as an extension of the self, embodying vitality and intent, and ingesting it was thought to establish a spiritual bond (Crombie 1913).
Hungary
Protective Spitting and Tree Rituals
Hungarian folk tradition includes many saliva rituals. One custom directed anyone hearing the first cuckoo of spring while lying down to spit three times into a hole bored in a tree to avoid bad luck (Jones 2005). To rid oneself of fever, one could spit thrice into an oak while reciting a charm to transfer the illness. Morning saliva treated warts and boils, believed to carry the essence of life (Pócs 1989).
The Balkans
Spitting Against the Evil Eye
Throughout the Balkans, spitting wards off the evil eye. In Bulgaria, elders simulate spitting on babies after compliments to deflect malevolent attention (Dundes 1992). Greeks utter “ftou, ftou, ftou” three times following praise (Herzfeld 1985). Among Orthodox Christian communities in Serbia and Macedonia, spitting occurs in wedding rituals as protection (Danforth 1982). In Albanian and Macedonian villages, a guest might lightly spit near or on shared bread as a blessing or oath (Elsie 2001).
Russia and Eastern Europe
Spitting to Avert Misfortune and Disease
Russians still simulate triple spitting—“tfu, tfu, tfu”—to avert misfortune (Ivanits 1989). Symbolic spitting over the left shoulder confuses evil spirits (Ryan 1999). Literal spitting on or near children protected them after praise (Tolstoy 1977; Murgoci 1927). Russian folk medicine used fasting spittle for burns and warts (Ivanits 1989). Mothers spat on a child’s forehead as informal baptism (Kononenko 2007). Spitting on coins before almsgiving sought agricultural success (Manning 2012). Hunters and sailors spat for luck or appeasement (Ryan 1999).
South Asia
Saliva, Spitting, and Ritual Power
In South Asia, spitting deflects the evil eye (nazar) and transmits vitality. Mothers may spit near children to deter jealousy (Banerjee 1994; Maloney 1976). Fasting spittle (subha ka thook) treats skin ailments (Nadkarni 1976). Chewing betel leaf produces red saliva used in offerings and purification rites (Parry 1994; White 2000). Healers chew herbs and spit the pulp onto patients, believing saliva carries both spirit and medicine (Sharma 1996). Reports from Odisha describe belief in the healing power of sacrificial victims’ saliva (Elwin 1950).
East Asia
Ritual Spitting and Sacred Fermentation
Ancient Japanese shrine maidens (miko) chewed rice and spat it out to create kuchikamizake, mouth-chewed sake used in Shinto ritual (Kasulis 2004; Kuroda 1996). The enzymes in saliva initiated fermentation, and the act symbolised divine transmission (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993). Sumo wrestlers rinse and spit before bouts to expel impurity (Bocking 1997). Folk Shinto associates spitting with warding off spirits (Nelson 2000).
Daoist texts describe circulating saliva as conserving jing, while expelling it releases harmful qi (Kohn 1993). Yao and Zhuang healers chew herbs and spit them onto wounds or ritual vessels, transferring healing force (Siu 2009). Symbolic triple spitting after frightening events persists among older Chinese and Japanese people.
Southeast Asia
Chewing, Spitting, and Transference in Ritual
Across Southeast Asia, betel chewing and spitting express spiritual energy. Betel quid—betel leaf, areca nut, lime, and spices—colours the mouth red and marks social and ritual identity (Reid 1985). Shamans in Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar chew and spit betel during exorcisms; Burmese nat mediums direct spit toward the possessed (Spiro 1967). In the Philippines, bolo-bolo healers spit chewed herbs into water and interpret the bubbles (Cannell 1999). Malay bomohs chew plants and spit the pulp while reciting verses, transferring spirit-energy (Benjamin 1986).
These rites share a consistent principle: chewing activates, and spitting transmits. Saliva becomes the carrier of breath, word, and life essence, turning bodily action into ritual authority.
Africa
Saliva, Blessing, and Vital Force in East and West Africa
Among the Maasai of Kenya and northern Tanzania, spitting is not an act of contempt but one of the highest expressions of blessing and social bond. The logic is consistent and explicit: saliva carries the self, the intention, and the vital force of the person who spits, and to direct it toward another is to confer that force upon them. When greeting, the Maasai spit in their palms before shaking hands, indicating endorsement and respect. Parents, family members, and friends spit on newborn babies to wish them long life. At weddings, a father blesses his daughter by spitting on her forehead and breasts before she leaves the family home (Face2Face Africa 2018). These are not marginal customs; they are central to the Maasai social and spiritual order, practised by a people whose entire economy and identity are built around nomadic cattle herding.
The Maasai case is significant for this study beyond its ethnographic interest. As nomadic pastoralists who live in close daily contact with cattle and other livestock, the Maasai represent a cultural form closely analogous to the ancient nomadic herding peoples of West Africa, including the Fulani and Sokoto Gudali communities whose cattle are processed at facilities such as the Agege Abattoir in Lagos today. Among such peoples, the relationship between human saliva and animal bodies would have been a daily observational reality: wounds were licked by both humans and animals, salted or fat-rubbed carcasses were handled by mouths as well as hands in a pre-tool processing environment, and the boundaries between the human body and the animal body were practically and symbolically porous. The Maasai blessing tradition suggests that this was not superstition surviving into modernity but an entirely coherent application of a pre-scientific theory of vital substance.
West African ethnographic sources document the use of saliva in both benediction and cursing contexts. Among Yoruba-speaking communities in Nigeria, spit directed at the ground before a spoken oath reinforces the binding force of the words, anchoring intention in the earth through the medium of the body’s fluid. Among Somali and other East African groups, comparative data from the Human Relations Area Files identify spitting as a medicinal and blessing act parallel to those documented across the Maasai and Bantu-speaking regions (HRAF 2010). The pattern is consistent across the continent: saliva marks transitions, seals bonds, and transfers vital force from the giver to the recipient.
Northern Europe and the Norse World
Kvasir and the Mythological Encoding of Salivary Fermentation
The Norse mythological corpus preserves what may be the most explicit ancient testimony to the transformative power of saliva in the entire European tradition. In the Skáldskaparmál, a section of Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Prose Edda, the two warring divine factions, the Æsir and the Vanir, seal their truce by spitting into a common vat. From this mingled saliva they fashion a being named Kvasir, the wisest of all living things, whose knowledge was without limit and whose counsel none could refuse. The myth encodes three distinct functions of saliva in a single narrative: it seals a peace agreement (the social-binding function), it creates a new being (the generative function), and it produces the raw material for the Mead of Poetry, whose drinker acquires wisdom and poetic power (the transformative-fermentative function).
The myth is not merely poetic. Scholars including Rudolf Simek have argued that Kvasir’s creation from communal spittle corresponds exactly to the actual practice of producing fermented berry juice by chewing and spitting into a vat, a technique documented across early Northern European communities. The name Kvasir is linguistically related to the Norwegian kvase and the Slavic kvas, both referring to fermented beverages produced through salivary action (Simek 2007). The customs of mixing spittle and the group drinking of intoxicating beverages are, as Simek observes, well rooted in traditional peacemaking and group-binding customs among various ancient peoples. Finnish folklore extends this tradition further, with references to the use of bear saliva and honey as a fermentation starter, suggesting that the salivary basis of early Northern European fermentation was known across a wide geographic zone.
There are also strong structural parallels between the Norse Kvasir myth and the Sanskrit tale of the theft of Soma, the sacred beverage of the gods, by Indra or an eagle (Simek 2007). These parallels point to a common Proto-Indo-European basis, suggesting that the sacred association between saliva, fermented drink, and wisdom or divine power is not a Norse invention but the survival of a much older shared tradition. Taken together, the Norse evidence demonstrates that the belief in salivary transformative power was not peripheral or anomalous in Northern Europe but was encoded at the deepest level of the mythological imagination.
South America
Chicha and the Virgins of the Sun: Salivary Fermentation in the Andes
Among the most thoroughly documented examples of salivary fermentation outside Asia is chicha, the ancient corn beer of the Andean peoples. Its origins have been traced to at least 5000 BCE, based on pottery evidence from the Andean region. The production method depended entirely on human saliva: brewers, almost exclusively women, chewed ground cornmeal until the amylase enzymes in their saliva converted the grain’s starches into fermentable sugars. The chewed mass was then spat into large earthenware vats, boiled, strained, and fermented over several days (Homebrewers Association 2014). The linguistic record is unambiguous: the Spanish word chicha derives from indigenous words for saliva or to spit, reflecting the centrality of the mouth to the entire process (Oxford Companion to Beer).
The ritual and social context of chicha production was as significant as its biochemistry. Among the Inca, the brewing was carried out by a group of chosen women known as aclla cuna, or Virgins of the Sun, whose ritual status elevated the act of chewing and spitting into a sacred office (Food Republic 2014). Chicha was not merely a beverage; it was an offering to the gods, a ritual medium, and a social cement at the centre of Andean communal life. The parallel with the Japanese miko who produced kuchikamizake for Shinto ritual is exact and striking: in both cultures, on opposite sides of the world, young women of sacred status chewed a starch-based food, spat it into a communal vessel, and produced a fermented drink understood as a connection between the human and the divine. The mechanism was identical; the symbolic logic was identical; the social framing was identical. These two traditions arose independently, separated by the full width of the Pacific Ocean, in cultures with no documented contact.
The technique extended beyond the Andes. In the Amazon basin, Indigenous peoples of Brazil produced cauim from chewed manioc root by the same method. In Panama and Colombia, the Kuna people produced inna, a mouth-fermented maize drink used in female initiation rites. Masato, a chewed yucca beer, continues to be produced by Amazonian communities today. What emerges from this distribution is not a single cultural tradition but a pattern of independent convergent discovery: wherever humans encountered a starchy food and wished to produce a fermented drink, the mouth and its enzymes provided the most immediate available tool, and the act of production was invariably elevated into ritual significance.
Why Was Spit Viewed as Powerful? The Evidence Beyond Hypothesis
The question of why saliva was universally understood as a powerful substance does not require a single explanatory pathway. The convergent evidence surveyed in this work points instead to several observable phenomena, each available to careful pre-scientific attention, that would independently and cumulatively have led ancient peoples to the same conclusion: that saliva carried something essential, something that transformed what it touched.
The most immediate and universal of these observations was wound licking. Every mammal licks its wounds; this is not cultural but biological. Humans share the instinct, and the instinct is biochemically justified. Saliva contains epidermal growth factor, histatins, opiorphin (a natural analgesic), tissue factor (which promotes clotting), and multiple antimicrobial peptides including lysozyme and lactoferrin. Wounds in the oral mucosa heal significantly faster than equivalent wounds elsewhere on the body, a fact noted by modern researchers and dimly but accurately perceived by ancient practitioners (PMC 2019). The ancient Greeks applied snake saliva to wounds; Pliny recorded the use of fasting spittle for eye infections and skin conditions; Roman Emperor Vespasian reportedly healed a blind man with his saliva. These are not the inventions of credulous minds. They are the accumulated record of observed outcomes from a practice that had genuine biochemical effect.
Any ancient person who lived with animals and managed wounds would have observed this pattern repeatedly. Dogs and cats lick wounds; livestock lick wounds; human mothers lick the injuries of their children. In ancient Egypt, temples of Asclepius kept dogs trained to lick the wounds of the sick; in Cynopolis, dogs were used in healing rites dedicated to Anubis for the same purpose. The connection between saliva and healing was not an abstraction; it was a daily empirical observation confirmed again and again across species, in humans and in the animals on whose health the survival of pastoral communities depended.
The second observable phenomenon was fermentation. As documented across Japan, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Northern Europe, and Taiwan, the chewing and spitting of starch-based foods into a vessel produced, over several days, a mildly alcoholic and nutritionally altered liquid. The mechanism, salivary amylase converting starch to fermentable sugar, was invisible to ancient observers; the outcome was not. Something happened when the mouth met the grain. The product that resulted was not merely food; it altered consciousness, preserved nutrients, and was perceived as more alive than the raw ingredient. It was exactly the kind of outcome that demanded a sacred explanation.
The third observable phenomenon, specific to meat processing, was the colour change that saliva could induce in fresh or cut meat. Saliva contains nitrate-reducing bacteria that generate nitric oxide, which reacts with the myoglobin in meat to form nitrosomyoglobin, the stable red pigment associated with cured meat. Anyone who licked a fresh cut surface of meat, or applied saliva to pallid or greyish flesh, might observe it brighten or recover colour. In a pre-scientific world in which the redness of meat was directly associated with its freshness, vitality, and fitness for consumption, such a visible transformation would have been remarkable. It would have appeared, quite literally, as the restoration of life (Lund et al. 2007).
These three pathways, wound healing, fermentation, and colour transformation in meat, are independent lines of empirical evidence converging on a single pre-scientific conclusion: that the mouth and its fluid were instruments of transformation, animation, and preservation. The near-universal attribution of power to saliva across cultures that had no contact with one another is not coincidence and not superstition. It is the independently repeated discovery of the same real phenomena, interpreted within each culture’s existing symbolic framework but rooted in genuine observation. The British butcher who spouted fat from his mouth onto hanging carcasses until 1901 was not practising magic. He was the last practitioner of a technology whose origins lay in something older and more fundamental than the trade manuals of the Victorian era.
Conclusion
Across civilisations and continents, saliva and spitting have served as tools of healing, preservation, and protection. From Victorian butchers to Shinto maidens, Balkan grandmothers, and Southeast Asian shamans, spitting—literal or symbolic—communicated vitality and intent.
Premodern cultures viewed saliva not as waste but as essence, projecting the spirit and sealing social or sacred bonds. Whether chewed into rice for sacred sake, sprayed onto meat, or expelled in maternal defence against envy, saliva embodied both symbolic and practical power.
These traditions show that distinctions between sacred and profane, clean and unclean, are culturally shaped. The body itself, through its fluids, was humanity’s earliest tool of science and meaning.
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