Contemplating the irresistible, irrepressible implausibility of love while nibbling on her neck to the strains of “Isn’t It Romantic?”, Mickey opines that the heart “is an extremely flexible little muscle.”
Not to mention a protean metaphor. Indeed, has there ever been another organ, symbol or word that has been so written about, fought over and yearned for? (Especially the organ: Heart disease is still the number one killer worldwide.) After all, Tony Bennett didn’t leave his liver in San Francisco.
To the ancient Egyptians, the heart was the essence of the soul, and their “Book of the Dead” depicted the gods weighing each against the feather of truth at the final judgment. (So important was the heart to the afterlife that the Egyptians would not remove it along with the other vital organs during mummification.)
The Greeks, who explored the heart’s valves, also thought of it as the receptacle of reason and the emotions – a view that the Hindus and the Romans shared. The Romans may have been responsible for our conflating matters of the heart with the feast of St. Valentine, not one but two early Christian martyrs. The date of one of the Valentines’ executions, Feb. 14, coincided with the ancient Roman celebration Lupercalia, honoring Juno, Zeus’ long-suffering wife and thus the goddess of marriage and the family. Hunky guys would race around Rome with their well-oiled bodies on display, tapping women with leather straps in the hopes of increasing their chances of fertility or an easy pregnancy. (Shakespeare alludes to the custom in “Julius Caesar” when he has Caesar ask Marc Antony to remember his barren wife Calpurnia as he prepares to run the course.)
Lupercalia was also associated with young men pulling the names of young women to be courted from a hat, as it were. (In the 16th century, St. Francis de Sales tried to change the custom to have the guys draw the names of females saints, to whom they would pray. Yeah, right.)
Anyway, you can see how St. Valentine’s martyrdom, a classical feast about nooky and names of potential beloveds would get all balled up into what came to be known as Valentine’s Day. (Although the literary among you may prefer the story of how one of the St. Valentines, about to be executed, left a love note for the daughter of his jailer, signed, “From your Valentine.”)
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