Some people claim that it actually depicts the heart of a cow, a more readily available sight to most people in past centuries than an actual human heart. It only vaguely resembles the human heart.

What the traditional 'heart shape' actually depicts is a matter of some controversy. Valentine's Day cards, candy boxes, and similar popular culture artifacts as a symbol of romantic love. The shape is particularly associated with romantic poetry it is often seen on St. It and diamonds are the two red suits in most playing card decks. This shape is typically colored red, suggesting both blood and, in many cultures, passion and strong emotion. In European traditional art and folklore, the heart symbol is drawn in a stylized shape. The Stoics taught that the heart was the seat of the human soul.Įuropean traditional heart symbol. While Galen's identification of the heart with emotion were proposed as a part of his theory of the circulatory system, the heart has continued to be used as a symbolic source of human emotions even after the rejection of such beliefs.

The Roman physician Galen located the seat of the passions in the liver, the seat of reason in the brain, and considered the heart to be the seat of the emotions. Many classical and medieval philosophers and scientists, including Aristotle, considered the heart the seat of thought, reason or emotion, often rejecting the value of the brain. However, if the heart was lighter than the feather, the owner of the heart was admitted to paradise (See also Egyptian soul). Should the heart be heavier than the feather, the judged person would suffer in hell, since his heart was weighed down with sins.

Similarly, in Egyptian mythology, the heart was weighed in a balance against the feather of Maàt, symbolizing truth, in the judgment of the dead in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In the Book of Jeremiah 17:9, it is written that the 'heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,' and that the Lord is the judge who 'tries' the human heart. In the Bible, this idea emerges in the earliest passages Genesis 6:5 situates the thoughts of evil men in their hearts, and Exodus 5 through 12 speak repeatedly of the Lord 'hardening Pharaoh's heart.' By this it is meant that God made Pharaoh resolve not to let the Israelite slaves leave Egypt, in order to bring judgment against Pharaoh and demonstrate his power: ''Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these miraculous signs of mine among them'' (Exodus 10:1). In religious texts such as the Bible, the heart has historically been ascribed much mystical significance, either as metaphor or as an organ genuinely believed to have spiritual or divine attributes. This discrepancy is a common source of dark humor. However, more realistic depictions of human hearts tend to have macabre connotations of death and violence, quite unlike the concepts associated with the poetic and symbolic heart. As the heart was once widely believed to be the seat of the human mind, the word heart continues to be used poetically to refer to the soul, and stylized depictions of hearts are extremely prevalent symbols representing love. The heart ( ) has long been used as a symbol to refer to the spiritual, emotional, moral, and in the past also intellectual core of a human being. The traditional 'heart shape' appears on a 1910 St.

Meaning of heartbeat necklace