Valentine’s wounded heart

"Romantic love in the European tradition begins with the troubadours of the twelfth century. Until then marriage between men and women was regarded primarily as an alliance between families and, as still practiced in our own cultures, marriages were arranged."

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by Dr. Nalin Swaris

(February 10, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) How did the physical heart, in the Western tradition, become pre-eminently a symbol of love? The ready answer would be that the heart beats faster at the magical moment of ‘the meeting of the eyes’. But the heart also palpitates at moments of deep fear and anxiety. So one still needs to explain how the heart became an exclusive signifier of romantic love. For an answer we must look to two of the most formative influences of Western civilisation, Christianity and Ancient Greek culture. The genesis of the heart as a symbol of male passion can be traced back to Ancient Greek myths. This is one of the themes explored by Philip Slater, the outstanding American psychoanalyst published in The Glory of Hera, Princeton University Press (1968). Slater was intrigued by the recurrence of certain images in the hallucinations and nightmares of his gynophobic (woman-fearing) male patients. These were remarkably similar to the images in ancient Greek myths, which display fierce antagonism towards women. Knowing that these myths have become part of the collective (Un)consciousness of West, Slater undertook a psychoanalytic investigation of Greek myths to understand why certain images recur in the dreams of men who have an obsessive fear and/or hatred of women as actual or symbolic mother. Slater argues that the behaviour of the Greek gods were neurotic and must have been reflections of neurotic conditions in the family life of the people who perpetuated these myths. These archetypal images recur when such conditions are reproduced from generation to generation. A parallel study can be done of male antagonism towards women in Brahmin myth and legislation. Fierce ‘brahmanic’ derogations of women have also entered the Buddhist canon and have, sadly enough, been placed on the mouth of the Compassionate Buddha.

The external soul

Male sexual fixations (manias and phobias) which in extreme cases translate into sexual violence against women are rooted in primitive and crude understandings of human reproductive processes. Based on this understanding the human generative organs have, in primitive myths, been vested with symbolic significations. Crucial to the understanding of the attraction/antagonism between the sexes in patriarchal cultures, Slater points out, is the symbolic representation in primitive myth of the essence or ‘soul’ of the male and female genitals. The soul of woman is represented either by water, or several symbols combined: inside of an egg, or a casket, at the bottom of some body of water, like a deep pool or a river. It is always hidden away in a secret place. The male soul is generally represented by something external: a bird, a branch, a sprig of mistletoe, a jewel, a lizard. In some cases the external soul is represented by something growing out of the body and therefore vulnerable: a single hair, or lock, in ancient myth and legends. The best known example is of course Samson’s hair. Stories of men whose strength lies in their hair and who are betrayed by women, who seduce them and discover their ‘secret’ are found in every part of the world, writes Slater. The ‘external soul’ is a mythic code for the phallus and external organ, whereas the woman keeps her ‘soul’ within her.

Shakthi of Maya and Eve

With the triumph of patriarchy, male conceit begins to imagine the male organ as a symbol of power. The notion of the ‘external soul’ as an active element entering the passive womb and producing consciousness, becomes the decisive factor in human reproduction (The Buddhist parallel is the myth of ‘the gandhabba’ which enters the womb at the moment of conception). But it also gives rise to deep anxiety in men. It is not without significance that male ability to perform is called ‘potency’, identifying the erectile organ with power, as implied by such terms as ‘rod’ or ‘sceptre’ of power. But ejaculation is followed by detumescence and lassitude—the ‘little death’. In symbolic terms, the woman drains the man of his substance. Compounding male anxiety is the primitive imagination of the female genital as a generative mouth which the man does not have. Psychoanalysts have noted that this image recurs (Slater quotes several case histories) in the nightmares of gynophobic men. This fantasy is paralleled by the near universal association of the Female with the Serpent (Slater p. 80 ff).The serpent with its yawning jaws is primarily a devouring and enveloping creature. One can see an animal which it has devoured, still visible as a lump, but gradually disappearing as the serpent digests it. The snake was seen as the mirror image of woman, with her distensible ‘mouth’. One can correspondingly see the manifest signs of an organism forming out of an apparent nothingness. The danger arises, because the serpent, like the female genital, is orally defined and the fear it evokes of being absorbed by the mother, or poisoned, or enveloped or strangled, are all common schizophrenic fantasies of men. The ability of the snake to penetrate dark holes and caves explains the (phallic) association of the snake with wisdom and knowledge. Slater’s decoding of the seemingly strange association of the Serpent with Woman illuminates the curious story of Adam and Eve. Derived from the Hebrew ‘hawwah’, the name ‘Eve’ means ‘Mother of all the Living’ and is clearly a Goddess title. The Serpent reminds Eve that she still has access to the Tree of (true) Knowledge. She takes its fruit (fruit of the womb), gives it to Adam and upstages Yahweh who has appropriated the Tree of Life, which originally belonged to the Goddesses of Chanaan. Since then Eve and all her daughters have become stamped as ‘wily seductresses of men’. In our own patriarchal myth, Woman is Maya ‘The Dangerous Illusion.’

The identification of the female genital as a dangerous mouth has evoked fears of castration in men as in the myth of Jason’s hallucination of ‘a toothed vagina’. Slater discusses several ancient Greek and Medieval Arab myths, where vengeful women rip open the breasts of men and devour their hearts. The equation of the heart with the phallus is understandable given the myth of the external soul and the imagination that women are in possession of a devouring mouth. The solution in the patriarchal myth, according to Slater was the displacement of the ‘soul’ not only inward but upward and in order to protect it from vengeful women. But in many myths, frenzied women are depicted as finding the hidden heart and destroying it (Slater pp. 230-284).

Romantic love

Romantic love in the European tradition begins with the troubadours of the twelfth century. Until then marriage between men and women was regarded primarily as an alliance between families and, as still practiced in our own cultures, marriages were arranged. The physical union of a husband and wife (their becoming ‘one flesh’) had no meaning in itself. According to the Church, it was a sacred sign (sacrament) signifying the union between Christ and his Church. The referent of carnal union was not itself but something which lay above and beyond it. The troubadours brought about a revolution in this tradition by glorifying human love, AMOR, for its own sake. Amor as celebrated by the troubadours was a deeply personal experience: the seizure that comes, as the troubadours put it ‘from the meeting of the eyes’. Amor subsumed Eros, which latter was seen primarily as impersonal erotic passion. Amor was experienced as a personal bond between two individuals which defied the conventions of family, society and above all of the Church. The most famous example in legend was the love between Tristan and Isolde. Isolde was engaged by her parents to marry King Harry. But she and Tristan were smitten with love for each other. Unwilling to live without each other, they defy social and ecclesiastical sanction and drink their love potion which turns out to be their death. The story of Tristan and Isolde was sung by wandering minstrels and captured the imagination of young men and women across Europe. It is the type of love celebrated by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. In the death of the lovers Shakespeare immortalizes the emotional richness of their love for each other which overcomes the hatred between the Montagues and Capulets. Amor which celebrates human love as a passion which is equal and reciprocal, abolishes the power differential established between the sexes under patriarchy. It assuages male anxiety and the ‘hidden heart’ can now be safely exposed and entrusted to the female lover. The ‘rose’ and the ‘heart’ resurface as symbols of passionate as well as spiritual love. With the re-validation of human love as a spiritual experience in itself, the ethereal symbolism of the union of Christ with his Church recedes to the background. Good Christian women begin to imagine longing for union with the divine as yearning for union with their Heavenly Bridegroom. The most famous example is Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French nun who lived towards the end of the eighteenth century. Initiated and guided step by step to divine union by the Jesuit priest Claude de la Columbiere, her entire being erupts into ecstasy during which she has a vision of the young Jesus who reveals his wounded heart to her and entrusts loving devotion to it into her safe hands. In the History of Sexuality (Vintage Books 1980, p.70), Michel Foucault observes that such phenomena of seizure and ecstasy were quite frequent in the Catholicism of the Counter Reformation: "In the search for spiritual union and the love of God, there was a whole series of methods that had much in common with an erotic art: guidance by the master along a path of initiation, and intensification of experiences down to their physical components and optimisation of effects by the whispered discourse that accompanied them" (op.cit.,p.70).

The celebration of Valentine’s Day has little or nothing to do with the grand celebration of human love by the medieval troubadours or its Christianised equivalent. It has become a commercialised festival. This has to be situated in the context of an advertising culture which incessantly and blatantly projects women as sexual creatures and objects of male lust. Thus there is, behind the intense pressure on young people to drop all social and cultural restraints and become lovers, a sexual scenario at play. In a hypocritical culture which extols the sanctity of marriage while tolerating shameless sexualisation and commercialisation of the female body but which refuses to educate young people about the facts of sexual reproduction, it is inevitably that young women will become the victims of sexual predators who use counterfeit symbols of love, to dupe na•ve or giddy girls bombarded with fantasies of true love. We can do without this alien institution, which exploits young love, reducing it to the level of a commercial transaction. The soul of this transaction, its exchange value, is not authentic love, but money. Money, as the ultimate aphrodisiac.