“I know in my heart…” or “from the bottom of my heart…”. Western culture associates that particular organ with emotions. Did others cultures do the same, independently?
Were there any cultures that deviated significantly, thinking that love came from, say, the armpits?
I don’t offhand know of any - I mean, it’s the logical inference, isn’t it , given that accelerated heartbeat is a readily perceived sign of strong emotional states
See The Rivingtons Papa Oom Mow Mow
I think they are saying love/lust causes the heart to flutter, as does anger (when protecting a loved one) and stress with worry about a loved one.
There’s certainly proof other cultures SAY IT … For example, in Maori…
I’ve heard that the ancient Romans considered the liver to be the seat of emotions. Apparently, this is because it’s the organ that cools off most slowly after death.
Western society simultaneously seems to sometimes place some emotions in the intestines:
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” - Oliver Cromwell.
“Old Blood and Guts” - Nickname for General George Patton.
Current references to “nit having the guts to do that” or “gut instinct” or “I’ve got a feeling in my guts that he did it”.
So maybe just love & affection (and hate) come from the heart, while bravery, courage and also intuition come rom the intestines?
I believe that some Ancient Greeks thought that the seat of the intellect was in the stomach, and that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, while others felt the heart to be the center of intelligence. The Egyptians also thought the heart was the brain, so to speak.
A quick peek at Wiki confirms some of these vague recollections.
Yes, the heart actually is a relatively recent source of love. Do you have handy a time estimate/cite on when the liver began to be edged out?
So why didn’t they believe the obvious, that the genitalia was the seat of love?
Because they saw erotic love as just one small part of a much wider spectrum - eros, philos, agape, etc, as the Greeks put it.
Plus, many of these cultures had eunuchs, so they knew that people without genitals could and did feel and express love. Whereas the number of people without a liver or a heart who expressed love was quite small.
Yes. For example, the Sanskrit word hRd “heart” is used both anatomically to mean the interior of the chest region and metaphorically to mean the locus of emotion. For example, hRd-gata, literally “gone to the heart, in the heart”, means “beloved” or “cherished”, a usage that goes back at least to the Mahabharata maybe two thousand years ago.
“Independently” is the tricky part: it’s likely that the association of the heart with emotion goes back in time beyond the evolution of separate Indo-European languages from Proto-Indo-European. So Sanskrit literature and western literature both associate the heart with feelings, not because Sanskrit literature borrowed that concept from its western counterpart, but possibly because both literary traditions inherited the concept from a common ancestral tradition.
I’d be very surprised if there exists any human culture that doesn’t associate emotions with the heart. After all, when you experience strong emotion you feel your heart pound, or seem to momentarily jump or stop, etc. That’s basic human physiology, and I can’t imagine there’s any human society that hasn’t noticed it.
There was a distinction made between the seat of emotions (The Heart) and the seat of passions (the Liver) and the seat of intellect (the Brain) - at least, according to Galen
Always loved that Cromwell line.
Psalms has the line “create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels.” That’s just one line, though - don’t know what the rest of the Old Testament has to say on the matter.
Dodds wrote about the Homeric Greek view in The Greeks And The Irrational, but I seem to have misplaced my notes. IIRC they saw the organs as receptacles - as opposed to sources - of thought, emotion, ideas, impulses, drives, etc. What with the gods placing a triple portion of menos into the hero’s thumos, etc.
“Bowels” seems to be a King James Version (and contemporary) word choice. In the Old Testament, the word is racham (רָ֫חַם), meaning compassion or mercy, but cognate and derived from rechem (רָ֫חֶם), meaning “womb” or less specifically “innards”. This was translated into Koine Greek in the Septuagint as “splagchnon” (σπλάγχνα), which refers to any of the viscera. This is mostly the same word used in the New Testament as well, either for deeply-felt emotions (which are often perceived physiologically as visceral sensations) or the literal viscera… distinguishable by context. Implying that the non-literal usage was idiomatic and expected to be understood.
That makes sense, but I think that at some point the usage of the name of an organ (or the viscera in general) became a metonym for the thing the ancients believed to reside there: feelings reside in the heart, so we name the feelings for where they reside.