Laylarandleconde’s Weblog

Heartagram

I once went to a barbeque where where I saw a large ginger man drink red wine out of his own foreskin and then twist the corkscrew down his bell-end until only the handle remained. Welcome to Cheadle.Slightly more gob-smacking though was the album cover in the hand of one of the guests. The symbol on the front was a cross between a heart and a pentagram. I’d never heard of H.I.M or seen a heartagram before. I managed to tear my eyes away from JP’s “Goblet of Doom,” long enough to think “Whoooo, that’s cool!”
It’s head-slappingly obvious now, but in all my years of doodling girly-wirly occult symbols on maths books I never once came up with a Heartagram. Quite honestly, I could kick my fourteen year-old self.
I like this symbol. It’s deceptively simple yet endlessly complex. Bob Dylan reckons that his songs are all just waving around in the wind, waiting for someone, anyone to come and write them down. Maybe some symbols are like that too, waiting to be caught or uncovered.
Popularly attributed to mate-menecing skate-Viking Bam Margera and the subject of constant irritation to fans of the band, the symbol was actually first doodled down by Ville Valo of H.I.M.
Valo describes the symbol as a modern day Yin-Yang. The surface level of symbolism, the parallels with the ancient Chinese symbol of opposites entwined are fairly obvious. Love and hate, life and death, male and female and so on. This theme of opposites seems to epitomise the band’s philosophy, and their casually contrived clash of contraries is almost deliberatly a bit of a flick in the nutsack for certain sections of society.The question of whether the Heartagram is an evil symbol or not is debated in forums all over the interent. I don’t know if anyone else in the entire world has bothered to read almost all of it, but in between the text-talk slaggings and tedious pontification are some real corkers. One of the minor wonders of the Heartagram is that it unites clever people, stupid people, religious folk and atheists in a common cause. I defy you to name one human being that doesn’t enjoy a good old fashioned bicker. After reading all I could find in one night, I felt that this sentence summed up the pro-Heartagram arguments quite succinctly:“You guys are right. The symbol is NOT evil, it represents bunny rabbits at peace,”
Fat Tony at Ubersite.
Then is an extremely funny and highly offensive to just about everyone explaination of the symbol’s meaning on Encyclopedia Dramatica:http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Heartagram
But to answer the question howeled out by confused kids everywhere:
What does the Heartagram actually mean? We’ll have a closer look in part 2.