Matters of the Heart 2

2/12/23

February is heart month and the upcoming week should be filled with "matters of the heart", so I have gathered a few “mullings and musings” about the subject.

According to early Western philosophy, the human soul was located in the heart and, therefore, all human passions emanated from it. Cool logic flowed from the brain.

The Roman surgeon, Galen, explicitly used Plato's description of the corporeal soul to physical locations in the body. The logical (λογιστικός) in the brain, the spirited (θυμοειδές) in the heart, and the appetitive (ἐπιθυμητικόν) in the liver.

Vedic Philosophy also includes matters of the heart. The word chakra is derived from Sanskrit, meaning “wheel”, or “circle of life”. The system consists of seven main energy centers found in the body. In Hinduism, the continuous flow of energy throughout the chakras is referred to as “Shakti”.

The Heart Chakra is located at the center of the chest. Feelings associated with this location are love, compassion, emotional security, forgiveness and loving kindness.

Author Bill Bryson, in his book The Body, (2019) writes:

Most curious of all, perhaps, is that we make it [the heart] the emotional seat of our being, as when we declare that we love someone with all our heart or profess a broken heart when they abandon us…[the heart] is a wondrous organ and fully deserving of our praise and gratitude, but it is not invested even slightly in our emotional well-being…It has just one job to do, and it does it supremely well: it beats. Slightly more than once per second, about 10,000 times a day, as many as 3.5 billion times in a lifetime, it rhythmically pulses to push blood through your body-and these aren’t gentle thrusts. They are jolts powerful enough to send blood spurting up to three meters if the aorta is severed.

The term “hard-hearted” was first mentioned in print in English in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1374 translation of Consolation of Philosophy, the 6th century treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius.

Remember this 1920s popular Tin-Pan Alley song, Hard-Hearted Hannah?

They call her hard-hearted Hannah,

The vamp of Savannah,

The meanest gal in town;

Leather is tough, but Hannah’s heart is tougher,

She’s a gal who loves to see men suffer!

The familiar modern heart shape appears to have come on the scene from the Italian didactic poem Documenti d’amore by Francesco Barberino, a Florentine jurist, which went viral in the 14th-century. One of its illustrations — depicting a naked cupid standing on the back of a galloping horse throwing arrows and roses at bystanders — included hearts. Shortly after its publication, the scalloped heart began appearing in other works of visual art and in tapestries.