Hearts Over Time: Romance Has Always Been With Us

The next book on the A-Z list, Part 4, is The Amorous Heart by Marilyn Yalom. The call number is 611.12, which means it belongs in the Applied Sciences section.

In truth, the book should probably be in the 300s--psychology, customs, and culture. Or even the 800s--literature. The 600s are supposed to be more about health. The book does discuss the heart as an organ but only very briefly.

On the other hand, Yalom makes the successful argument that since the beginning of writing and song and poetry, people have linked love directly to the organ, as in the physical heart, as in the feelings/reactions that people have when they are excited, lustful, passionate, uncertain, etc. etc. etc.

The connection to the heart icon 💕💕💕💕 came about much later as I discuss below.

Yalom's book makes several fascinating points:

1. Stories about beating, frantic, heavy, loving, jealous, committed hearts are very old, going all the way back to the Egyptians. And the expression of those emotions re: the heart is surprisingly consistent. That is, romance has been with us for a very long time; the ways we think about romance even longer. Probably the first cave-people occupied their evenings by talking about how Bob was felled by a mammoth AND about how Bob's wife was cozying up to Igor now.

2. In Christian medieval Europe, amorous feelings were naturally explored through poetry and songs. The amorous heart had a contender--the heart committed to Yahweh, Christ or, in Islam, to Allah. However, as in the Song of Songs, the terms used to described a religious passion for deity often borrowed from the amorous tradition (and vice versa: see Cohen's "Hallelujah").

Love, Medieval-Style

Yalom is a trustworthy historian and points out that despite the erotic nature of medieval religious poetry, it would be a mistake to get all Freudian about it: "[L]ove as experienced and expressed by medieval mystics should not be reduced to sublimated sexuality; they loved God in a style that was in keeping with the religious culture of their times."

I agree with Yalom. Still--having read some of the included passages, I can only conclude that people in the past were a lot less hung up on the physical aspects of devotion than people are now. I maintain elsewhere that the true split between the body and the mind happened in the nineteenth century, and the poetry of medieval clerics would back me up.

3. Yalom makes the fascinating point that the heart icon appeared early on in history but that does not mean it represented love. It was a shape in nature and therefore a decorative shape in paintings where it clearly meant nothing more than "hey, I'm a decorative shape" (like paisley).

In other words--attaching the emotion of love to the physical location of the heart took place entirely separately (and earlier) from attaching the emotion of love to the decorate symbol of  💟.

So if you've ever thought there was no connection cause, well, just look at the real thing...hey, you were right! After all, the icon itself has been explained as being anything other than a human organ: it represents buttocks or fruit or flowers, etc. etc. The connection to love and therefore to the physical heart itself didn't happen until late in the medieval era.

And the icon didn't truly take off until the nineteenth century. In our current culture, it may be hard to believe that the heart symbol was once merely one of several symbols of love and passion and marriage (human beings tend to reason backwards from their own experience and assume that what is now always has been). The truth is the heart symbol has not always been the prevalent image it is today.

The location of the heart within the body and its connection to the physical reactions of love HAS. So maybe that is why the book is in the 600s--physiology eclipses greeting cards.