The Amorous Heart Read online

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  Copyright © 2018 by Marilyn Yalom

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  Basic Books

  Hachette Book Group

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  www.basicbooks.com

  First Edition: January 2018

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Yalom, Marilyn

  Title: The amorous heart : an unconventional history of love / Marilyn Yalom.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037772| ISBN 9780465094707 (hardback) | ISBN 978046509471-4 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Heart--Symbolic aspects. | Love symbols. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / General. | ART / History / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General.

  Classification: LCC GT498.H45 Y35 2018 | DDC 611/.12--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037772

  ISBNs: 978-0-465-09470-7 (hardcover), 978-0-465-09471-4 (electronic book)

  E3-20171123-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One The Amorous Heart in Antiquity

  Chapter Two Arabic Songs from the Heart

  Chapter Three The Heart Icon’s First Ancestors

  Chapter Four French and German Songs from the Heart

  Chapter Five Romances of the Heart

  Chapter Six Exchanging Hearts with Jesus

  Chapter Seven Caritas, or the Italianized Heart

  Chapter Eight Birth of an Icon

  Chapter Nine A Separate Burial for the Heart

  Chapter Ten The Independent Heart

  Chapter Eleven The Return of Cupid

  Chapter Twelve The Reformation and Counter-Reformation

  Chapter Thirteen How Shakespeare Probed the Heart’s Secrets

  Chapter Fourteen Heart and Brain

  Chapter Fifteen Exposing the Female Heart

  Chapter Sixteen The Heart in Popular Culture

  Chapter Seventeen Hearts and Hands

  Chapter Eighteen Romanticism, or the Reign of the Heart

  Chapter Nineteen Valentines

  Chapter Twenty I ♥ U

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Marilyn Yalom

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  For my big-hearted husband

  Introduction

  FIGURE 1. Artist unknown, Brooch from the Fishpool Hoard, 1400–1464. British Museum, London, England.

  A EUREKA MOMENT AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM IN 2011 GAVE birth to this book. I was attending an exhibition of medieval artifacts, including gold coins and pieces of jewelry that were part of the Fishpool treasure hoard discovered in Nottinghamshire in 1966. Many of the items had been made in France and carried French inscriptions—for example, a small gold padlock with the words de tout (with all) on one side and mon cuer (my heart) on the other.

  Suddenly an exquisite heart-shaped brooch seized my attention: I noticed the heart’s two lobes at the top and its V-shaped point at the bottom as if I were seeing them for the first time. Then, for a brief moment, all the hearts I had grown up with—on valentine cards and candy boxes, posters and balloons, bracelets and perfume ads—flashed into my mind. It quickly dawned on me that the perfectly bi-lobed symmetrical “heart” is a far cry from the ungainly lumpish organ we carry inside us. How had the human heart become transformed into such a whimsical icon?

  From then on, that mystery has pursued me, and inevitably it drew me back into the subject of love, an inexhaustible domain for which the heart has served as a kind of compass.

  It is not surprising that the heart is associated with love. Anyone who has ever been in love knows that your heart beats faster when you catch a glimpse of the person who stars in your romantic imagination. And if you have the misfortune of losing that person, you feel an ache in your chest. “I have a heavy heart” or “My heart is broken” are the words we use when love turns against us.

  How long has the heart been coupled with love? When was the heart icon created? How did it spread across the globe? What does it tell us about the meaning of love in different eras and places? How have various religions dealt with the amorous heart? These are some of the questions I grapple with in this book.

  ANCIENT EGYPTIANS BELIEVED THE HEART WAS THE SEAT of the soul, to be weighed on a scale at the time of one’s death (Figure 2). According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, if the heart was pure enough and weighed less than the feather of truth called Maat, the deceased would gain entry into the afterlife. However, if the heart was impure and heavy with evil deeds, it would sink lower on the scale than the feather and cause the dead man or woman to be devoured by a grotesque beast. Obviously this scenario of the heart on trial prefigured the Christian Last Judgment.

  FIGURE 2. The Singer of Amun Nany, Funerary Papyrus (detail), ca. 1050 BC. Papyrus, paint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1930.

  But ancient Egyptians also saw the heart as the home of a person’s amorous feelings. One Egyptian poet visualized his heart as a “slave” to the woman he desired, and another poet felt his heart surge with love as he went about his daily tasks: “How wonderful to go to the fields when one’s heart is consumed by love!” Despite the distance of more than three thousand years, we immediately recognize these sentiments as identical with our own.

  In general the religions that subsequently arose in the Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have been wary of the amorous heart. Aside from the Song of Songs and a few stories in the Hebrew Bible, the sacred books of these religions do not extol sensual love between human beings. Indeed, the birth of monotheism ushered in a rivalry between secular and religious claims to the heart—a rivalry that took different forms during the first millennium and became overtly contentious during the Middle Ages.

  WHEN TWELFTH-CENTURY TROUBADOURS FROM THE SOUTH of France took up their lyres to sing of love, they believed their songs would have little value unless they sprang from an amorous heart. Then, following the lead of Occitane troubadours, northern French minstrels and storytellers pledged their hearts to an idealized woman and aspired to “exchange” their hearts as tokens of fidelity. It is true that this lofty mode of behavior was intended primarily for members of the nobility and that even they could not live up to such high standards. And yet this doctrine of refined love issuing from regional courts in France, Germany, and Italy proved to be remarkably persistent: over the centuries it evolved into the small and large courtesies that Western men and women expect of each other, and it created a romantic ethos that has endured to this day.

  At the same time Christianity contributed, though in different ways, to the renewed prominence of the heart. Starting with the Bible, the heart was understood to be the chief organ for receiving and
storing the word of God. Among the Church fathers, the one most associated with the heart was Saint Augustine (354–430), who mentioned it more than two hundred times in his Confessions, frequently as a term for his innermost self. As Augustine put it in an oft-quoted affirmation of his faith: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Perhaps more than any other Church figure, Saint Augustine was responsible for claiming the chaste heart for Christianity and for discrediting the lustful heart associated with secular love.

  During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the revival of religious life in monasteries and convents presided over by such towering figures as Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), and Saint Francis (1181–1226) placed a new emphasis on one’s inner life, represented by the pure heart dedicated to Jesus. The Church promoted the love of God and all His creatures, conceptualized in the virtue of caritas, as a superior rival to erotic love.

  Yet despite the Church’s official opposition to earthly love, Eros found its way into cloistered retreats, where some men and women of the cloth adopted the language of lovers for conversations with each other and with God. Mystical thinkers, such as Gertrude the Great of Helfta, had visions of intimate bodily encounters with Jesus that sound as if they could have come off the pages of French and German romances.

  The heart icon as a symbol of love first appeared during this medieval period of cultural renewal. It was created simultaneously for secular and religious works of art and flourished most notably in courtly circles. Once born, the amorous heart motif found its way into thousands of items—such as jewelry, tapestries, ivory carvings, and wooden chests—all produced for the enjoyment of the upper classes. This symbol of love, at first known only to elite members of society, has by now become the property of everyone who can see.

  The appeal of the heart icon lends itself to aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological interpretations. Its perfect symmetry and bold color speak to our sense of beauty. Its two equal halves merged into one convey the philosophical idea, dear to Plato, that each person seeks to be joined with his or her soulmate. And on an unconscious level the round lobes evoke sexual images of breasts and buttocks. For all these reasons and more, this medieval symbol has embodied different ideas about love meaningful to different groups of people in different times and places.

  Although this book focuses on Western culture, I shall also consider the Arabic world from the period between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages and, to a lesser extent, some examples from contemporary Asia. These forays outside the Western sphere suggest that the association between heart and love is prevalent in certain other parts of the world as well. For example, I was not surprised to discover that the Japanese character for love contains within it the character for heart.

  heart →

  love →

  Tracing the connection between the heart and love has led me into trails I would never have anticipated in advance: how philosophers and physicians disputed the functions of the heart, how the heart was sometimes buried separately from the body, and how both Catholics and Protestants utilized the heart for religious ends. The way the heart has been discussed and portrayed by authors and artists in myriad cultures is obviously more than one person can explore in a lifetime. Yet even a selection of these topics brings us closer to that mysterious, multifaceted phenomenon we encapsulate within the word “love.”

  Chapter 1

  The Amorous Heart in Antiquity

  LONG BEFORE THE AMOROUS HEART FIRST APPEARED VISUALLY, a connection between the heart and love had been firmly established in speech and writing. As far back as the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry already identified the heart with love in verbal conceits that would not find their visual equivalents for almost two thousand years. Among the earliest known Greek examples the poet Sappho agonized over her own “mad heart” quaking with love. Sappho lived during the seventh century BCE on the island of Lesbos surrounded by female disciples for whom she wrote passionate poems, now known only in fragments, like the following:

  Love shook my heart,

  Like the wind on the mountain

  Troubling the oak-trees.

  Sappho’s heart was never still. It was constantly agitated against her will by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She pleaded with Aphrodite: “Don’t shatter my heart with fierce pain.” Yet in old age Sappho bemoaned her “heavy heart,” no longer vulnerable to the transports caused by youthful love.

  Sappho’s voice echoes down through the ages, as generation upon generation of men and women experienced love as a sort of divine madness invading their hearts. The Greek biographer Plutarch, some six hundred years after Sappho, recognized this malady in the person of King Antiochus. When Antiochus fell in love with his stepmother, Stratonice, he manifested “all Sappho’s famous symptoms—his voice faltered, his face flushed up, his eyes glanced stealthily, a sudden sweat broke out on his skin, the beatings of his heart were irregular and violent.” Love was understood to be a bodily experience lodged primarily in the heart and affecting the entire soma. It was often portrayed as a painful affliction, visited upon mortals by capricious gods.

  THE STORY OF JASON AND MEDEA, AS TOLD BY APOLLONIUS of Rhodes around 250 BCE in his Voyage of the Argo, gives a good example of how the Greek gods imposed love upon humans. Prompted by the goddesses Hera and Athena, Aphrodite prevailed upon her young son Eros to make Medea fall in love with Jason so as to enable him to capture the Golden Fleece.

  … drawing wide

  apart with both hands he [Eros] shot at Medea;…

  And the bolt burnt deep

  down in the maiden’s heart, like a flame.

  Eros with his bow and arrow was hardly a benign figure as he would become much later in the cuddly form of Cupid. Here he is clearly a dangerous, inhuman force, inflicting sexual desire upon an innocent maid and filling her heart with fierce passion that will ultimately prove destructive.

  Ancient Greek philosophers agreed, more or less, that the heart was somehow linked to our strongest emotions, including love. Plato argued not only for the dominant role of the chest in the experience of love but also for the negative emotions of fear, anger, rage, and pain. In his Timaeus he established the reign of the heart over the body’s entire emotional life.

  Aristotle expanded the role of the heart even further and granted it supremacy in all human processes. Not only was it the source of pleasure and pain, but it was also the central location for the immortal soul, the psuchê, or psyche. Aristotle’s differences with Plato and, afterward, with the Greek physician Galen (130 CE–circa 200) would be debated endlessly by successive philosophers and scientists into the seventeenth century.

  BY THE TIME OF THE ROMANS THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN the heart and love was already commonplace. Venus, the goddess of love, was credited—or blamed—for setting hearts on fire with the aid of her son Cupid, whose love darts aimed at the human heart were always overpowering. Hearts enflamed by Venus or pierced by Cupid’s arrows regularly appeared in the works of such poets as Catullus (87–54 BCE), Horace (65–8 BCE), Propertius (circa 50–15 BCE), and Ovid (43–17/18 BCE).

  These poets commonly employed a pseudonym for the loved one—“Lesbia” for Catullus, “Cynthia” for Propertius, “Corinna” for Ovid—but we cannot be sure there was always a living counterpart behind the name. Still, they wrote convincingly of their love experiences centered on the figure of the domina—the woman who had taken hold of their hearts, obsessed their thoughts, and forced them into emotional servitude.

  FIGURE 3. Artist unknown, Drachm depicting a silphium seed pod, ca. 510–490 BC. Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, Cyrene, catalogue number 14.

  In Catullus’s case, at least, Lesbia is known to have been a pseudonym for Clodia, the wife of a Roman politician. The other poets’ mistresses were probably either married women or demimondaines—free women (as opposed to slaves) who attended private dinners in mixed company and circula
ted in public venues like the circus and races. It was to a woman of this sort that the poet dedicated his heart, despite her reputed unfaithfulness.

  Catullus also has a curious connection to the visual image of the heart shape on the ancient coin pictured in Figure 3. This coin, stamped with the outline of the seed from the silphium plant, a now-extinct species of giant fennel, looks exactly like our present-day heart icon , which has symbolized love since the Middle Ages. In one of his poems Catullus specifically mentioned Cyrene in ancient Libya as the city producing silphium—a city that had, in fact, grown so rich from the export of silphium that Cyrenians put it on their coins.

  You ask, Lesbia, how many kisses should

  You give to satisfy me…

  Greater than the number of African sands that

  Lie in silphium-bearing Cyrene.

  Why would Catullus mention silphium in a love poem? The most common explanation today is that silphium was highly prized in the ancient world as a form of contraception. Another Cyrenian coin even carried the image of a woman touching a silphium plant with one hand and pointing to her genitals with the other. The second-century Greek physician Soranus suggested that taking a small dose of silphium once a month would not only prevent conception but also, when necessary, induce abortion.

  It is unlikely that the shape of the silphium seed had anything to do with the heart icon created in Europe more than a millennium later. Still, Catullus’s reference to silphium in a love poem does remind us that women have always had to worry about the possible consequences of their sexual relationships; pregnancy was not something to be wished for by Catullus or his mistress. He ends the poem deriding the evil-tongued “busybodies” who are outraged by Lesbia’s kisses, more numerous than the sands from silphium-bearing Africa.

  Whatever the significance of silphium for Catullus, the fact remains that its seed pod, as pictured in Figure 3, is the oldest known image of the shape that will become, in time, the world’s most ubiquitous symbol of love.