Divinity Atlas
In Egypt, China and Islam, the Heart Does the Thinking
Modern habit puts feeling in the heart and thinking in the head. Three older traditions, unconnected to one another, disagree, and they disagree in the same direction.
The Same Organ, Three Vocabularies
In ancient Egypt the ib, the heart, is weighed against the feather of Maat at judgement, and it is the one organ deliberately left inside the body during embalming, because it carries the record of a life that the rest of the body does not need to survive. In traditional Chinese medicine, the heart, xin, houses the shen, the spirit, so a disorder of thought is read as a disorder of the heart rather than of the head. In the Quran, the qalb is described as the organ of understanding rather than of feeling, a heart that may be sound, sealed, or diseased in exactly the way a mind can be.
One Word, Six Filing Cabinets
The atlas also has to file the word heart six separate times, once for the physical organ, and again for the chakra, the meridian, the tarot adjacent Lenormand card, the enneagram triad and the astrological body part, because none of those six subjects is really the same kind of thing as the others even though English hands them one word. The convergence above is not a trick of vocabulary. It survives being asked in three different languages about three unconnected systems of medicine and law.
Where To Read More
- HeartThe heart as a bodily organ, where all three readings below are recorded