Why the heart is drawn differently than it is Digital Freedom

We all know that the real shape of a heart is different anatomically speaking from the way it is usually represented. In fact, it is believed that the traditional shape with which we symbolize the human heart comes from the morphology of the silphium, a plant highly valued in ancient times due to its properties as food and medicine.

From Libertad Digital we want to remember the origin of this symbology since it is really curious and there are hundreds of theories.

We must go back hundreds of thousands of years since the first civilization to graphically represent the heart was the Egyptians. They already knew the importance of the heart and its relationship with the rest of the human body due to the fact that in Egyptian culture it was considered that this part of the body concentrated the soul and mind of the human being. It was even believed that when someone died, their heart was weighed on a scale: on one side we had the heart and on the other the feather of the truth of the God Máat. If the person had led a good life, the heart would weigh the same as the feather and this person would enjoy eternal life.

However, there is another theory that may be the most logical about the origin of the current representation of the heart. This is that this symbology arises in the Greek colony of Cyrene where coins with the first representations of this symbol have been found.

What does the current heart symbol mean? It represents the leaf of the Silphium plant, a plant of North African origin and possibly extinct today, which was widely used since the 7th century BC, in cultures such as Egyptian, Greek and Roman, due to its extensive properties. However, where it became most popular was in Roman society, where it was highly prized for its abortifacient properties, giving young couples opportunities to fulfill their desires without suffering consequences.

This is reported in the chronicles of the historian Plinio "El Viejo", in which he explains that Silphium resin was used to soak cotton and make a kind of pill that, placed in the vagina, lowered the menstrual flow . So high was its effectiveness that it was commonly used as a kind of precursor to the morning after pill. Currently it is believed that the origin of this effectiveness was due to the fact that this plant had a very high estrogen composition.

However, it was already in the Middle Ages in Europe when the image of the red heart became popular and today fills thousands of greeting cards and notebooks of teenagers in love.

The problem is that there is no evidence that can confirm the relationship between the symbol used in Cyrene and the one used later in Europe in the Middle Ages, however, there are different historians who, in their numerous theories, believe that it is related to the female body.

Another theory about the Middle Ages mentions that the symbol is more like a cow's heart since they had much more access to them than to human hearts.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church explains the symbol as coming from a vision of Saint Margaret where it is said that she saw "the Sacred Heart of Jesus" surrounded by thorns. However, Santa Margarita does not have such a vision until the end of 1600, that is, many years after the first documents where the symbol appears.

Although if we are realistic, it is most likely that the representation of the heart that we know today is nothing more than the evolution over the centuries that the different illustrators have been doing. We can observe paintings and different works of art in which the heart is represented in a more or less detailed way but always more similar to a real heart.

The fact that the representation that we all use today became popular could be due to purely practical reasons, since drawing a heart in great detail could be inappropriate depending on the time or the reason for the representation, or simply because the artist could not or would not stop to represent it in such detail.