With Valentine's day rapidly approaching, it didn't seem out of the ordinary when my eldest daughter and fiance approached me to ask, "What is the origin of the traditional candy heart shape?"
They asked me, they said, because it seemed like "the sort of thing [I] would know", and to the esteemed credit of their collective powers of inference, they were correct: it is the sort of thing I would know. As such, I am at a loss to describe the respective shame and disappointment experienced by myself and my loved ones in that moment when as it turned out, I didn't have a clue.
Here I will attempt to remove this blemish from my personal record and restore honor to my family name. First stop: Google.com, search query: "origin of heart shape".
Ugggg, it's going to be one of those days--checking wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_%28symbol%29) and a hit from Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080123223720AACAYHL) for reference ideas, the consensus of the knowledgeable (never to be confused with those who possess knowledge) is that there is a great deal of controversy over the symbol's origins. This is the sort of thing that shakes my faith in the progress of humanity; by my kindergarten year in 1982 I had been promised flying cars, colonies on the moon, and robot servants in the coming millennium, and though I am not bitter, it is arguable that I have every reason to be so--but who among the authors of Omni, Discover, Popular Mechanics, or Weekly Reader would have predicted that in the age of the information superhighway, with scientists on the brink of quantum computing and artificial intelligence just around the corner, I would be unable to procure a definitive answer to a simple question of symbological history?
The Wikipedia article sources pointed to a promising text authored by one Dr Armin Dietz (http://www.heartsymbol.com/), but upon further investigation Dr. Dietz appears to be a doctor of cardiology, not symbology or semiotics. Also referenced is P.J. Vinken, who is ostensibly a neurologist (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.410010114/abstract); this illustrates a major flaw in the use of Wikipedia for research--even a well cited article is little more than useless if its sources are not credible experts in the field of study relevant to it.
Redefining my google searches first to "scholarly articles heart origin" and then "Dr of Symbology" yields nothing at all relevant. Narrowing it to "expert on symbols" (in the dim hope of starting with a credible expert and tracing it to an authoritative text on the subject) leads me only to the Japanese symbol for "expert" (http://www.japanese-symbols.org/japanese-symbol-for-expert). I can find plenty of encyclopedias of symbols, but no credentials for their authors.
The Wikipedia article and many other disappointing sites reference a Slate Magazine article (http://www.slate.com/id/2159800/), which references Dr Eric Jager (http://www.english.ucla.edu/index.php/Faculty/jager-eric), a professor of midieval literature at UCLA with an interest in literary theory. It appears as though he is the closest thing to an Dr of Symbology I'm going to find. The Slate article says the same thing as all of the others--the heart symbol may have originated in North Africa with the seed-pod of a contraceptive plant (silphium) in the 7th century B.C.E.. The Catholic church is purported to claim that the symbol first appeared as a vision of the sacred heart as seen by a saint in the 17th century C.E., and someone referenced only as a "leading scholar of heart iconography" contends that the symbol is derived from a crude (and failed ) attempt by Aristotle to draw the human heart.
I am far from satisfied. I am now qualified to parrot the beliefs and anecdotes of a knowledgeable English professor, but where are the PhD holders in history of symbology or iconography? The poor obsessed souls who have devoted their lives to unlocking the secret pasts of modern semiotics? Where is the scholar who can state plainly: the earliest physical evidence of this symbol's appearance is a parchment connected to (insert culture) around (insert year)?
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