The heart has long been attributed with mystical significance, either as an organ or symbol, which manifests spiritually with divine attributes. One of the earliest appearances of the heart symbol comes from the ancient Egyptians who viewed the heart as symbolic of the soul. The feather of Ma'at (Muh-aht) was the Egyptian goddess of truth, balance, justice, law and mortality. The heart would be removed after death and be weighed to see if it was lighter than a feather. A person of light heart was deemed deserving of the journey to paradise.
The Heart has been ascribed with the virtues of love, joy, charity, and compassion. It is the emblem of truth in Christianity, the “Sacred Heart”, the symbol of the Lord’s love. In Buddhism, the Buddha heart is also referred to as "the awakened heart of compassion" and has a very good meaning in China and Buddhism.
The classical philosophers and scientists, including Aristotle, considered the heart the seat of thought, reason and emotion often rejecting the value of the brain.
The Stoics taught that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The Roman physician Galen located the seat of the passions in the liver, the seat of reason in the brain, and considered the heart to be the seat of the emotions. While Galen's identification of the heart with emotion were proposed as a part of his theory of the circulatory system, the heart has continued to be used as a symbolic source of human emotions even after the rejection of such beliefs.
Though the symbolic Heart vaguely depicts the human heart, it more accurately depicts a bovine heart; it is still attributed as the seat of emotions. Passionate, happy, joyful, youthful, sorrowful, and heavy of Heart, the emotions central to our human existence.
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