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The Origin of Love" is from the play which premiere in 1998 turned movie in 2000, "Hedwig and the angry Inch" by the talented John Cameron Mitchell, and the music and lyrics are by Stephen Trask.

The beautifully written story is based on the real story of a prostitute woman who used to babysit for John Cameron Mitchell and on Mitchell's life as the son of a U.S. Army Major General who once commanded the U.S. sector of occupied West Berlin, Hedwig tells the story of a transsexual rocker from East Germany who ends living in a trailer in Kansas. 

Stephen Trask wrote the song, which is based on a story from Plato's Symposium in which a party is being held paying homage to Eros, the Greek god of love. "The Origin of Love" is taken from the speech given by the playwright Aristophanes.

According to the speech, long ago, humans were composed of two people stuck back-to-back, with two faces and eight limbs. Male-male humans came from the Sun, female-female humans from the Earth and male-female humans from the Moon. The gods, out of jealousy, split them in half. Now, throughout our lives, we are always trying to find our "other half", and sexual intercourse is the only means we have to put the two halves back together; this desire to be one person again is what we call "love". However, it is impossible to fully rejoin two people because it is our souls and not our bodies that most desire to be reunited.

When the earth was still flat,

And the clouds made of fire,

And mountains stretched up to the sky,

Sometimes higher,

Folks roamed the earth

Like big rolling kegs.

They had two sets of arms.

They had two sets of legs.

They had two faces peering

Out of one giant head

So they could watch all around them

As they talked; while they read.

And they never knew nothing of love.

It was before the origin of love.

The origin of love

And there were three sexes then,

One that looked like two men

Glued up back to back,

Called the children of the sun.

And similar in shape and girth

Were the children of the earth.

They looked like two girls

Rolled up in one.

And the children of the moon

Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.

They were part sun, part earth

Part daughter, part son.

The origin of love

Now the gods grew quite scared

Of our strength and defiance

And Thor said,

"I'm gonna kill them all

With my hammer,

Like I killed the giants."

And Zeus said, "No,

You better let me

Use my lightening, like scissors,

Like I cut the legs off the whales

And dinosaurs into lizards."

Then he grabbed up some bolts

And he let out a laugh,

Said, "I'll split them right down the middle.

Gonna cut them right up in half."

And then storm clouds gathered above

Into great balls of fire

And then fire shot down

From the sky in bolts

Like shining blades

Of a knife.

And it ripped

Right through the flesh

Of the children of the sun

And the moon

And the earth.

And some Indian god

Sewed the wound up into a hole,

Pulled it round to our belly

To remind us of the price we pay.

And Osiris and the gods of the Nile

Gathered up a big storm

To blow a hurricane,

To scatter us away,

In a flood of wind and rain,

And a sea of tidal waves,

To wash us all away,

And if we don't behave

They'll cut us down again

And we'll be hopping round on one foot

And looking through one eye.

Last time I saw you

We had just split in two.

You were looking at me.

I was looking at you.

You had a way so familiar,

But I could not recognize,

Cause you had blood on your face;

I had blood in my eyes.

But I could swear by your expression

That the pain down in your soul

Was the same as the one down in mine. 

That's the pain,

Cuts a straight line

Down through the heart;

We called it love.

So we wrapped our arms around each other,

Trying to shove ourselves back together.

We were making love,

Making love.

It was a cold dark evening,

Such a long time ago,

When by the mighty hand of Jove,

It was the sad story

How we became

Lonely two-legged creatures,

It's the story of

The origin of love.

That's the origin of love.