Love is in the air this calendar month , and range of a function of two - lobed hearts are all over everything : confect , cards , medal , you name it . That the ticker is symbolical of honey and passion is n’t surprising — ancient Greek and Roman Catholic thinkers , include Aristotle , thought the Hammond organ was the nerve center of all emotions . Why the heart symbol you see everywhere in February does n’t look anything like an actual human heart , though , is a lilliputian less clear .
The symbol goes at least as far back as the 1400s , when it appeared on European playing cards to set one of the red suits , though it may even be older than that . The conformation is passably much a mystery , though . There are a few different hypotheses to explain it , but none of them have been confirmed .
One suggested rootage for the symbol is that it add up from the ancient African city - state of Cyrene , whose merchants traded in the rarified , and now extinct , plantsilphium . The plant was used to flavor food , but doubled as a contraceptive . Asilphiumseedpod looks like a valentine ’s heart , so the shape became associated with sex , and then with love .
Another theory is that the bod is a crude representation of a pubic mound , the vulva , a pair of breast , seat , or a pair of testicles . It may even have come from a piteous attempt at drawing an factual heart . A lousy artist , an inaccurate description of the subject , or a misshapen model all could have led to that chassis .
The Catholic church building explains the symbol as coming from a visual sense that Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque had , where the " Sacred Heart of Jesus"—associated with love and devotion byCatholics — appeared in this build surrounded by thorns . But Alacoque did n’t have this vision until the late 1600s , well after the symbol was already documented . This makes it the unlikeliest of line stories , but the church ’s frequent use of goods and services of the cast was probably a driving factor in vulgarize it as a symbol of love .
This tale originally appeared in 2012 .
