History
References to hair fetish can be found in ancient empires. In Norse mythology reference to the fetish is in the story of Sif, Thor's wife and goddess of fertility, who is admired for having beautiful pure gold hair. There is also reference to hair fetishism and cutting in the biblical story of Samson, a judge and warrior whom God endowed with supernatural strength and whose power lay in his hair. Cutting his hair for the first time caused him to lose his divine power.
Hair has been a symbol of beauty, vanity and eroticism. In the story of Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm published in 1812, there is an analogy to the beauty of Rapunzel's hair with the story of a young woman with blond hair who is locked in a tower room, with the only way to reach her is to climb the tower on her long hair.
In religious societies like Christianity, tonsure was customary and involved the cutting or shaving the hair from the scalp (while leaving some parts uncut), as a mark of purity of body.
Proteans are unpredictable, subtle, often subconscious, flirting signals, such as a woman touching her hair when first meeting a man. Some people subconsciously play with the strands of their hair when they are nervous.
Read more about this topic: Hair Fetishism
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)