Ecology, Empire, Emoji: The Bittersweet Story of the Ancient Plant That Originated the Heart Symbol

There we were: Three women — a neuroscientist, a mycologist, and me — talking about the perplexities of love when a cloud in the perfect shape of a broken heart appeared in the gloaming sky backlit by the sun setting over the Andes. Suddenly, we found ourselves wondering about the origin of the heart icon as the universal symbol of love. It doesn’t figure into the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or the Aztecs’ elaborate pictogram language of embodied emoji, and yet by the time of the Romantics, it had become a fixture of love letters and lockets, Queen Victoria’s favorite… read article