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Love Hearts: The Heart Symbol ♥In European traditional art and folklore, the heart is drawn in a stylised shape that does not particularly resemble the anatomical heart. It appears on playing cards as the pip of the suit of hearts.
The heart shape is particularly associated with love poetry, and is often seen on Valentine cards, candy boxes, and similar popular culture artifacts as a symbol of love and romance. For this reason, the traditional heart shape is sometimes referred to as a 'love-heart'. In the Bible, and in much later literature, the heart is used to refer to the moral core of a human being. This is true from 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 him. In Egyptian mythology, the heart was weighed in a balance against the feather of Maat, symbolising truth, in the judgment of the dead in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Similarly, in Jeremiah 17:9, we are told that the "heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked"; and that the LORD is the judge who "tries" the human heart. The Roman physician Galen considered the heart to be the seat of the emotions; the Stoics taught that the heart was the seat of the human soul. While Galen's identification with the heart and emotion were proposed as a part of his theory of the circulatory system, the Biblical text, this traditional Western medicine, and similar literary usages have caused the heart to be identified as the source of human emotions; and especially, the emotion of love.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia and from ShiningRise.com
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