photo by Edward Jenner via pexels.com
As the cold creeps in with darker days and the threat of winter snow, so do the germs that circulate around our schools and workplaces. Before long, our quiet moments are interrupted by an involuntary sneeze and a chorus of instinctual “Bless yous.”
“Bless you” isn’t always the appropriate response to a sneeze, but its origins indicate a much more interesting pattern in how humans perceive sneezing. The earliest written acknowledgement of a sneeze appeared in Xenophon’s Anabasis, an ancient Greek story written around 370 BC. The text shares:
“As he was saying this a man sneezed [πτάρνυταί], and when the soldiers heard it, they all with one impulse made obeisance to the god; And Xenophon said, ‘I move, gentlemen, since at the moment when we were talking about deliverance, an omen [οἰωνὸς] from Zeus the Saviour was revealed to us....’”
This provides some insight as to why sneezes garner a reaction from us at all. At least in ancient Greece, sneezes were recognized as a sudden, involuntary loss of control over one’s body. This was the mark of something spiritual, perhaps even divine. Xenophon’s writing shows that Zeus used a man sneezing as an omen, which affirmed Xenophon’s course of action.
As spirituality shaped science and medicine, people continued to ponder the strangeness of sneezing. Early attempts to characterize a person’s soul led people to believe that a spirit existed in the form of air and resided in one’s head. This meant that if someone sneezed, it was entirely possible for their spirit to escape their body. Similarly, people believed that the heart stopped when a person sneezed. Blessing them could revitalize the person and prevent evil spirits from possessing them.
Throughout history, there are other accounts of acknowledging sneezing. In 77 BC, Pliny the Elder wrote in Natural History that even the “most unsociable of men” knew to salute a man when he sneezed, though he could not explain why.
The phrase appeared in more texts during the 6th century, when Pope Gregory the Great encouraged people to say “God bless you” after someone sneezed. He believed that a sneeze was a warning sign of the plague that was later identified as an early version of the bubonic plague, which might have killed over 100 million Europeans during Pope Gregory’s lifetime.
As both Christianity and the plague overtook Europe, the phrase grew in popularity. To this day, it’s been shortened to simply “Bless you” and is most commonly heard in English speaking countries. Other countries and cultures have their own beliefs and responses to sneezing. In Spain, like ancient Greece, people believed that a sneeze could be a sign of beneficence. Instead of blessing a person, they respond with “salud,” meaning “health,” which is the same meaning as the German response “Gesundheit.” However, in East Asian cultures, there is no response to sneezing at all.
With modern science, most people understand that sneezing is a body’s way of expelling germs, yet people still say “Bless you.” The phrase is a powerful reminder of how hundreds of years of habit and internalized superstition continue to impact our everyday reactions.