Leonardo's Foot

by Carol Ann Rinzler

  Insects get their olfactory message, including the messages from pheromones, through their antennae; animals get theirs through olfactory receptors (OR) located on the vomeronasal organ (VNO), two structures located on the lining of the nose or the roof of the mouth and found in all animals, from dogs to snakes to us. The first stage of the accessory olfactory system, the VNO contains sensory neurons that detect chemical stimuli such as pheromones, which play roles in reproductive and social behaviors.

  When we stood up on the dry African savannah or by the river as Alister Hardy insisted, our nose rose with us, our sense of sight replaced our sense of smell as our most important translator of information from the outside world, and like the rest of our body, our eyes adapted to our upright posture.

  Our eyes are set into our skull so that they look forward, not off to the sides as a fish’s or snake’s eyes do. As a result, we have binocular vision, the ability to form a single image by merging two different images, one from each eye. To see how this works, look straight ahead at an object, say a pen, on the desk in front of you. Now, while looking at the pen, close one eye, then open it, and close the other. As you do, the pen will seem to move to the left when you close your right eye and to the right when you close your left eye. But when both eyes are open, the two images become one, creating the stereoscopic effect, a perception of depth that enables you to judge the size of the pen and how far away it is.

  We are not the only ones with binocular stereoscopic vision. Many predators, who live in a world where the governing rule is “See, catch, eat,” also have forward-facing eyes with binocular stereoscopic vision. On land, lions are a good example. Their prey—think antelope—are at a disadvantage, relying on shadows or images glimpsed through eyes positioned on the sides of the head to avoid being captured and consumed. In the sky above us, raptors such as eagles and hawks also have eyes that look forward, and they see even better than we do. These killers of the air can spot a rabbit or rat several miles on the ground below and then dive with absolute accuracy to pick it up; nocturnal raptors such as owls can do it in the dark.

  Perhaps because of our evolutionary acute vision, our VNO became vestigial, meaning it was once useful, but no longer seems to be. This would not be the first such loss. The appendix that may once have played a role in our digestive system and the “wisdom teeth” that once nestled into a significantly larger hominin or early human jaw are also vestigial. The coccyx, a.k.a. our “tailbone,” may also seem vestigial. It isn’t because no human ever had a true tail. Early in pregnancy, all human embryos do have one, a reminder of our evolutionary development that recedes and disappears as our lower limbs develop. Very rarely, a baby is born with soft tissue that looks like a tail protruding from the base of his spine, but the structure, known as a caudal appendage, is either a failure of the lower limbs to develop properly or a neural tube birth defect that may occur alone or together with other problems such as a missing limb or cleft lip and/or palate. Like several other genetic defects, such as clubfoot, the caudal appendage may run in families, but the coccyx itself is a useful part of our anatomy, part of the boney frame on which we sit when we recline, as well as the site where muscles that support the pelvic floor and move the upper leg are anchored.

  As for the VNO, other mammals such as dogs have an organ that may comprise as much as sixty square inches covered with tiny hairs called cilia and hold as many as 300 million olfactory receptors along with nerves that send fibers from the VNO receptor sites straight to the brain which decodes the pheromone’s messages. By comparison, our human VNO covers only one square inch with as few as 5 million or so receptors, and we have no such nerve connectors. To paraphrase neuroscientist Michael Meredith of Florida State University in Tallahassee, the genes in the human VNO receptors are pretty much dead as dodos, defective pieces of DNA that look like genes, but do not transmit messages. In 2004, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the Weizmann Institute in Israel labeled about 60 percent of the genes in the human VNO (and 30 percent of those in the nonhuman primate VNO) as pseudogenes.

  However, even given our visual advantage and our dodo genes, it would be wrong to dismiss the influence of our less acute sense of smell and our sensitivity to pheromones on our lives and loves.

  Whole groups of other primates continue to attract their mates by rubbing testosterone-scented urine on their feet and hindquarters. Animals such as female cats and dogs release a scent attractive to the males when they (the females) are in heat. Among humans, there is the still-classic phenomenon first described in 1971 by researcher Martha McClintock of the University of Chicago, who while an undergraduate at Wellesley College, noticed that the menstrual cycles of the women living together in her dormitory were synchronizing. In her senior thesis and a paper later published in Nature, McClintock concluded that this was due to pheromones transmitted from woman to woman.

  More recently, cell biologist Claus Wedekind has demonstrated the influence of the major histocompatability complex (MHC), a group of genes whose primary job is to enable our immune system to recognize and rebuff foreign invaders. MHC also plays a role in creating body odor and setting our preference for one odor over another. In choosing their mates, mice prefer those with MHC different from their own. Several studies, including those run by Wedekind, appear to show the same effect in human beings.

  Wedekind begins his studies by defining the MHC profiles of his male and female volunteers. Then the males are asked to live as “odor neutral” as possible—no cologne, no perfumed soaps, no perfumes detergents, no odorous foods, no alcohol, no smoking—for forty-eight hours and to wear the same T-shirt to bed for the intervening two nights. After that, the female volunteers are asked to describe the odors left on the T-shirts. Clearly, opposites attract—perhaps Nature’s way of protecting the species from the problems experienced by the intermarried Egyptian pharaohs and European royals—because like the mice, the women were more attracted to the odors left by men whose MHC profiles were different from their own. The scent, they said, often reminded them of current or past partners. There seems to be a hormonal basis for the choice: The responses were reversed when women were using oral contraceptives.

  So who’s to say that the odor of our smelly feet is not also a sexual signal?

  Certainly not Sigmund Freud.

  Say what you will about his apparent problem with women, the man was not squeamish.

  Every dog and cat owner knows that animals find other animals’ nether parts seriously interesting, probably as a means of identifying friend or foe. As University of British Columbia psychologist Stanley Coren writes in How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind, a dog’s nose “not only dominates his face, it also dominates his brain [and] thus his picture of the world.”

  Freud declared that with our noses high above ground our natural animal “coprophilic instinctual components” became “incompatible with our aesthetic standards of culture.” But for some, the brain does not accept the message. Coprophilia, from kopros, the Greek word for feces, and philia which means love or attraction, retains a secure place in the catalogue of human erotic behavior. Freud invented a word—drekological from drek, the German term for mud or excrement—to describe the practice that one standard medical school text, Kaplan and Sadock’s Concise Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, defines as “sexual pleasure associated with the desire to defecate on a partner, to be defecated on, or to eat feces (coprophagia).”

  This is generally regarded as repellent, but human manners—Freud’s “aesthetic standards of culture”—are no match for human instinct. You can deny a child the tactile and olfactory pleasure of finger painting with his feces, but as an adult he (or she) will still be attracted to the sexy, smelly parts of another person’s body, sufficiently so, one hopes, to reliably ensure another generation. As French psychiatrist Dominique Arnoux writes in The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Freud concluded that “[r]epression of an olfactive cop
rophilic pleasure can determine the choice of a fetish.” To be more specific, in February 1910, Freud wrote to his colleague, Berlin psychiatrist Karl Abraham (1877–1925), “I regard coprophilic olfactory pleasure as being the chief factor in most cases of foot and shoe fetishism.”

  Do gods have feet?

  The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were polytheists, on friendly, sometimes intimate, terms with their gods. For example, Hercules is a demigod, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, the wife of Amphitryon, king of Thebes, conceived on an evening when the king was away on business. Zeus visited the sleeping queen and then magically extended the night long enough to allow Amphytrion to return and climb into bed with his wife who nine months later gave birth to two boys, one (Hercules) immortal and the other (Ipicles) not. Thanks to Zeus’ considerate time-shifting, the queen remained unaware and therefore not adulterous, thus avoiding a major royal mess in Thebes.

  A few of the early Mediterranean gods had unusual body parts, such as Pan’s goat legs and horns and the jackal head sported by Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead. But as a rule, while the Egyptians’ deities were taller and slimmer and the Greeks’ and Romans’ more muscled and voluptuous, they looked like you and me, or in the case of the Greeks’ and Romans’ like what you and I would look like if we had been sculpted by Praxiteles.

  The introduction of monotheism changed the picture by eliminating it. There was now only one God: no more major and minor deities. There was also a new prohibition against graven images, and most important, the God of the Old Testament was invisible. “No one,” He tells Moses on the mountain, “can see me and live.”* True, his shape was assumed to be human because, as it says right there in Genesis 1:27, “God created man in his own image.” And, yes, the author of Genesis must have meant “man” to signify “mankind,” that is, man and woman, because in Hebrew there are several names for God, some male, some female, and some plural, which, as you can imagine, would have further complicated the image issue. Even today, observant Jews do not draw pictures of their God, a prohibition also embraced by Islam. The only representations are symbolic such as the engraving of a hand sometimes found on a Jewish gravestone.1

  Christian monotheism re-introduced the pictures and statues, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile with and welcome polytheistic pagans via a familiar image. Leaf through the portraits of the Christian God, and you find that they all tend to look like the people living where the artist lived. Early on, that meant young, middle-age, or older Eastern men. As time passed and Christianity spread, the pictures began to look like Europeans, with skin lightened to please a Western sensibility, or at least a Western European one, leading inevitably to the obvious question from various converts: “When did Jesus become white?”

  The Bible does not leave us completely without guidelines. We do know that its God is a “dwelling place” underneath which “the everlasting arms” of Deuteronomy 33:27, stretch wide enough to encircle the world. We know that at the end of the arm there is a really big hand because, as the American spiritual assures us, “He’s got the whole world in his hands,” and that the hand of God, as celebrated by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, confers life and intelligence on man.

  We know, in short, that this God’s hands are open, welcoming, loving. But here’s the important part: His feet are not only invisible, they (and ours) are symbols of far more aggressive traits.

  Among the ancients, feet figure prominently in accounts of one deity, person, or nation establishing its authority over another. We never “see” the feet of God in the Bible, but we are frequently told what’s under them: The beautiful sapphire pavement (sky) Moses and the elders of Israel saw when they went to collect the Ten Commandments (Exodus 24:10), the not-so-beautiful storm clouds “like dust under God’s feet” (Nahum 1:3), and the definitely subservient earth as God’s footstool (Isaiah 66:1). To stamp man as his emissary, the monotheist God puts “all things under his [man’s] feet” (Psalm 8:6). In First Kings 5:3, King David cannot “build a house unto the name of the Lord his God for the wars which were about him on every side, until the Lord put them [the enemy] under the soles of his feet.”

  But if the authors of the various books of the Bible were shy about describing God’s feet, they are positively Chatty Cathy when it comes to ours, which, Old Testament and New, are obviously more than simply 10 toes, 52 bones and 66 muscles on which to stand.

  Early on, people rarely wore shoes indoors, especially indoors at a place of worship. Stepping forward to address the congregation, Jews and Christians went barefoot in accordance with the dictates of not one, but three, books of the Bible, Exodus 3:5s, Joshua 5:15, and Acts 7:33: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” This gesture of respect is also honored in Islam, among Hindus, and by Sikhs at their houses of worship, respectively, the mosque (from the Arabic masjid meaning place of worship), the mandir (from the Sanskrit mandira meaning dwelling, i.e., of the deity), and the gurdwara (Pakistani for “gateway through which the guru can be reached”).

  As for face-to-face human relationships, Biblical scholar Richard D. Patterson notes that records from ancient Mesopotamia show us that “the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal frequently speaks of the submission of his enemies as ‘kissing his feet.’ For example, he boasts that the Elamite king Tammaritu ‘kissed my royal feet and smoothed (brushed) the ground (before me) with his beard.’ A similar idea occurs in the texts of ancient Egypt. Thus, the victory hymn supposedly coming from the god Amon Re to Thutmose III declares, ‘I have felled the enemies beneath thy sandals.’ ”

  Biblical soldiers are said to have followed the example of these earlier warriors, drawing images of their enemies on the soles of their sandals so as to grind them into the ground with every step. Losers were to be made footstools for the victors (Psalm 110:1) or forced to bow “with their face toward the earth, and lick the dust” off the winners’ feet (Isaiah 49:23). After which, the winners would likely wash their feet and maybe their sandals too. Sooner or later that could easily become a ritual: Stomp the enemy, wash your feet.

  Certainly, foot washing (pedilavium in Latin) was more than a victory dance in the end zone. If you live in a desert, rinsing your feet before entering someone’s home is a common courtesy to keep from tracking sand and mud all over the floor or carpet. In Genesis, considerate hosts like Abraham and Lot provide water for the guest and even a servant to do the bathing. Once inside, a visitor was careful not to disrespect his host by showing the bottom of his foot, clean or otherwise. In many Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the shoe is also unclean. Tossing one at someone remains the ultimate insult as an Iraqi television correspondent made clear during a goodbye press conference in Baghdad on December 14, 2008, when he hurled not one, but two, shoes at then-President George W. Bush, accompanied by the eloquent curse: “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!”

  The Old Testament presents washing a visitor’s feet as a clear sign of respect. In First Samuel 25:41, King David’s soon-to-be second wife, Abigail, offers to wash the feet of her soon-to-be-second-and-seriously-influential husband’s servants. In The New Testament, the practice became a symbol of equality when, after washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus told them to do the same for each other “to prove that a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him,” as clear a statement of human rights as the one 1,743 years later that begins, “We hold these truths to be self evident …”

  This was all such good public relations that the Church adopted the alms and bathing idea, christening it “Maundy” from the Latin word mandatum meaning command, as in Jesus’ command to his disciples. And what the Pope did, the King of then-Catholic England could not ignore. In 1211, King John I took a pass on the bathing part, but handed out alms in an attempt to placate Britons angered by his having raised taxes to ransom his brother Richard the Lionheart who had got himself kidnapped at the end of the Third Crusade—and also to make nice to Pope Innocent
III who had excommunicated the king for seizing church property. Edward I, who ruled from 1271–1307, formally designated the day before Good Friday as Maundy Thursday. Both Roman Catholic Mary Stuart and her sister, Anglican Elizabeth I, also washed the feet of some deserving poor, after said feet had been thoroughly rinsed by Court officials. The last British ruler actually to splash water on impoverished feet was James II in 1689. The task of handing out alms was handled by Court flunkies until 1931, when George V decided to do it himself, awarding “Maundy money” each year to as many deserving men and women as he was old. His granddaughter, Elizabeth II, has continued the tradition; in 2012, age 86, she distributed two purses each to 86 men and 86 women, one red purse with coins representing such essentials as food and clothing and one white purse stuffed with commemorative coins.

  The British Royals may have abandoned bathing naked feet, but the Pope still performs the ritual in Rome, and in appropriate situations so do other Church officials seeking to demonstrate repentance and humility. In February 2012, at Saint Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston knelt to wash and dry the feet of eight men and women who as children had been victims of clerical abuse.

  Which brings us in a very roundabout manner to the moment—the act—where we all began.

  As anyone who has ever read the book can testify, the Bible is awash in the erotic. Not just the lush and liquid Song of Songs; the whole thing, cover to cover, with so many references to your feet as symbols that you can practically hear the chorus in the background muttering, “Dirty, smelly, hidden—sex!”