Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

So you can sic Ice-T on the bleeding hearts?

Or,

Your bleeding heart club needs a mascot?

I'm stumped. ;)
 

And Frenzied wins!

'Cause they're called bleeding heart tetras. I just now learned of 'em. I think they're cool. I think they'd be a great fishy mascot for the ER household!


Quick: What's the etymology of "bleeding heart"? Who had the original bleeding heart?? :-)
 

I believe that would our Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, would it not? He took the "bullet," so to speak, for us all. Specifically he suffered for our sins in the Garden of Gethsemane, bleeding from every pore.

So, it IS for the bleeding hearts club, eh? ;)
 

Also, they're preeeeettttyy.
 

Frenzied, Indeed! :-)


Belle, aren't they, tho? :-)
 

Belle skipped thru several of my posts, leaving thoughtful, feeling comments. Thanks, you. You are welcome any time.
 

Looks like expensive cat food to me.
 

I have bleeding heart flowers all over my porch front. When I tell someone they represent my political views, they just stare at me, and I have to waste all their time explaiining.
 

I always learn a lot from this blog. Mainly because it sends me off on quest for other or more information. Oh, yeah, sometimes good stuff is actually posted as well. So I went looking for the origins of "bleeding heart" this is what I found (other then the fish and flower):
"Bleeding heart in the sense of "person excessively sympathetic" (esp. toward those the writer deems not to deserve it) is first attested 1958 according to OED, but said by many to have been popularized with ref. to liberals (esp. Eleanor Roosevelt) in 1930s by newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), though quotations are wanting. Bleeding in a fig. sense of "generous" is from late 16c., but the exact image here may be of the "bleeding heart of Jesus." "

I would have thought the usage to have been much older. Still looking.
 

Well one reference that preceeds 1930 for sure is the "bleeding heart" tomahawks sold/traded by the French and Brittish traders to Indians as early as the 1700s. So the icon must preceed that as well.
 

It's gotta be a Jesus reference.
 

Well, yes and no.
I've dug pretty deep on the web anyway. In English is just isn't there before 1930. but in French and Spanish it goes back to the 13th Century. But take a look at this:

"The Corazón sangrante exhibition curated by Olivier Debroise, Elisabeth Sussman and Matthew Teitelbaum at the Institute of Contemporary Art (1991-1993) juxtaposed a series of sacred images from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries with the kitsch-inspired inventions of Mexican and Chicano artists of the 1980’s and 90’s. (3) The contemporary artists’ adaptive and often cannibalistic re-use of sacred religious and cultural symbols reveals so-called Mexican culture as the product of a series of copulative images, whose capacity to morph and multiply can be poetically manipulated to expose the repressive ideologies that underlie them. Specifically, the curators suggest, the bleeding heart of Mexican discourse need not constitute the "crushing" symbol identified by Paz and other post-1968 diagnosticians, but rather, can be used to reveal and subvert the mechanisms of oppression.

The Mexican Bleeding Heart is a syncretic image with roots in both Christian and Náhua (as in Aztec sacrifices:mine) tradition. The adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus began as a popular cult in thirteenth-century Europe, probably inspired by the popular Medieval cult of Christ’s wound, and burgeoned into a full-blown devotion in seventeenth-century France following the mystical crises of the soon-to-be saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. The Society of Jesus (aka Jesuites: mine) propagated the cult in the New World, along with the equally syncretic devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the imagery of the Mexican Baroque, the bleeding heart turned out to be a particularly evocative symbol for the imminence of Heaven, the infinite love of Christ, and the rewards of sacrifice. (4) The Heart was originally depicted alone, but at times reincorporated into the breast of Christ. Juan Correa’s Allegory of the Sacrament (1690, CS fig. 5) shows a grapevine springing from Christ’s wound in the region of the heart, from which his blood flows into the Bishop’s plate. Christ is depicted kneeling on a globe in the fountain or chalice from which the seven lambs of Revelations are waiting to drink. In the anonymous nineteenth-century Pascal Lamb (CS fig. 6), the Heart is Christ, complete with rib wound and crown of thorns. The lambs of God are drinking from the chalice that receives the blood.

In his essay on the iconography of the bleeding heart in Mexico, Olivier Debroise focuses on both the lowly origins and the sexual manifestations of the devotion. He describes the development of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus among humble women who were most likely frustrated in love. The miracle followed the same basic trajectory with all these women: a rejection (amorous or otherwise), followed by a mystical crisis in which Christ appeared; and the conjoining, or carnal union of two hearts: "In similar narratives, the visionary literally penetrates into the interior of Christ’s body, where there occurs a complex mystical operation known as the "Interchange of Hearts’" (15). The quasi-sexual aspect of the revelation was seen in the case of the 13th-century Saint Gertrude the Great (also popular in colonial Mexico, according to Jacques Lafaye), whose heart was penetrated by a ray of light emanating from Christ’s wound. (5) The persistence of the cult of the bleeding heart into the twentieth century is well documented in Mexican popular culture as well as contemporary art: Frida Kahlo famously adopted the bleeding heart as a symbol of her suffering in Two Fridas (1939) and other paintings, later alluded to by artists like videographer Ximena Cuevas (Corazón sangrante, 1993).

In both Catholic and Mexica traditions, the bleeding heart symbolizes submission."
http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v11/braham.html

Neat huh?
 

Awesome. Seems like I bruished up against some of this in my limited medieval, and more involved Reformation-Renaissance, studies.

I kept expecting Catherine of Sienna to pop up in that narrative. Didn't she see her herself as the literal bride of Christ or something? Man, the Catholic Church was a lot more interesting before it started ignoring its own mystics.
 

This is what I was thinking of regarding Saint Catherine:

"The emblems by which she is known in Christian art are the lily and book, the crown of thorns, or sometimes a heart--referring to the legend of her having changed hearts with Christ."


And this:

"In about 1366, she experienced what she described in her letters as a 'Mystical Marriage' with Jesus, after which she began to tend the sick and serve the poor."


She is most definitely my favorite Catholic saint.
 

"I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at."
William Shakespeare, "Othello"


Wonder if this has anything to do with the bleeden heart thing?
 

Daws? What'a a daw?
 

Brewer's Dictionary:
"A bloody heart. Since the time of Good Lord James the Douglases have carried upon their shields a bloody heart with a crown upon it, in memory of the expedition of Lord James to Spain with the heart of King Robert Bruce. King Robert commissioned his friend to carry his heart to the Holy Land, and Lord James had it enclosed in a silver casket, which he wore round his neck. On his way to the Holy Land, he stopped to aid Alphonso of Castile against Osmyn the Moor, and was slain. Sir Simon Lockhard of Lee was commissioned to carry the heart back to Scotland. (Tales of a Grandfather, xi.)"
 

A Eur-Asian bird of the corvid family,, like a Jay or a Crow.
A Jack-Daw bird; a fool.
 

A follow up thought on Saint Catherine. She exchanged hearts with Christ? Does that mean that she died with Christ heart within her? Did they save it as a relic? Could you DNA type it? Could you then check on Ancestors.org or some such to see if you were a Scion? Didn't want to overlook the obvious.
 

Now that we are in overkill on the subject.
A Dirk Hamilton song:

WITH YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE

Did they tell ya' honesty's its own reward
Honesty won't float you up when you fall overboard
And it is no lie when your body washes up on shore
Nothing in the physical world's achieved
With Your Heart On Your Sleeve

Tell the truth
They'll just ignore you
Unless fashion swings your way
Then they'll adore you
But don't come cry to me
When it absorbs you
Your will come to know brutality
With Your Heart On Your Sleeve

No one will remember that
You're the one that stood up
When the rest sat pat
Help someone find their coat
get back, they've stole your hat
Walk around all day backwards
Never get a pat on the back
Every little cut ya' get will bleed
With Your Heart On Your Sleeve
Your heart on your sleeve

Get a motorcycle you can kick to start
This is only for the pure of heart
Be true to yourself
And you have done your part
There's no better way to be
Than livin' With Your Heart Upon Your Sleeve

May the flame of innocence and anger guide you
May you always listen to the child inside you
The myth of human power won't survive you
May you always leave
Your Heart On Your Sleeve
Your Heart On Your Sleeve
Livin' With Your Heart On Your Sleeve
 

Thanks, anon. That sounds like the origins of "wearing your heart on your sleeve," which Drlobojo so readily picked up on.

Leave it to Drlobojo to reduce the Catherine-Christ's-heart legend to somethin' you might buy in a junque store!
 

ER, you're so cruel to a heart that's true.
 

Ah Ha! A body part of St. Catherine is much closer than we thought!
http://www.haltonrc.edu.on.ca/schools/catherine/whoweare.htm
Might it be a nip off of the heart?
 

Wrong Catherine. I speak of Catherine of Sienna. You link of Catherine of Alexandia. :-)

Details are a beeotch. :-)
 

Details, details, details, be Damn! Well heck fire and gird my loins. I guess I'm still on a quest for the true heart of Christ relic. Salley forth Esmerelda!
 

OK, OK, OK, devil's in the details:...... Salley forth Rocinante.
 

Not the relic heart but the relic head:
"Many of the listings in the Vatican relics library, however, are single items for which some kind of authentication is provided in the files. These include, for example, the right arm and head of Saint John, the head of Saint Catherine of Sienna, the full bodies of Saint Lucia, Saint Maximus, Saint Urio, Saint Felicity the Virgin and Saint Julian. Saint Julian himself brought a huge number of relics from Jerusalem, including a part of Saint Matthew's leg, a tooth from Saint Mark the Evangelist, the skull of Saint James the Less, the Holy Sponge which was offered to Christ's lips, some of the Virgin Mary's hair, a jar full of earth from Golgotha (soaked with the blood of Christ), and the jawbone of Saint Anthony, to mention some of the eminent ones. The jawbone lies in a bejewelled case in the Basilica of Saint Anthony, and what invariably astonished visitors from abroad is how Italian worshippers behave in its presence: many people push and shove to kiss the case, rub their babies against it, caress it with their hands and rub lottery tickets over it."
 

Whoa. I don't *get* relics. The Babtist churhc I gew up in didn't even have stained glass for fear of idolatry! The Congregational Church I go to now is pretty plain, too, but I think it's just because of the Puritan habit.
 

Well I do know of two Baptist relics that used to exist. You see a "Good Catholic" alter should have at least two relics in it. Well once upon a time when I went to Oklahoma Baptist University for my Freshman year of college(back before dirt), the pulpit in the big Chapel there, the John Raley Chapel, had two bricks in a little lighted niche in the base. One was from John Raley's mother's home and one was from John Raley's father's home.
My room-mate, who had be raised in Cuba among the Catholics, refered to them as the only Baptist "Relics" in the world. Once in a state of stupidity we tried to steal the bricks without success. They are no longer there. In fact they have now even made the pulpit where it could be moved off of the stage, amazing.
I wonder where the bricks went?