Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Wednesday Search Challenge (March 23, 2011): Winged heart?

While walking through the vets section of a cemetery recently, I walked past a marker that had the following unusual symbol: 




I was curious about it (as I am about most things) and couldn't wait until I could look it up to figure this out.  


It's clearly a religious symbol of some kind (nearby were markers with crosses, stars of David, eastern Christian crosses, and even the occasional wheel of Buddhism.  But this one baffled me. 


I figured it out in about 1 minute.  How long will it take you? 


What religion does this symbol denote? 


Search on! 





6 comments:

  1. SUFISM REORIENTED

    I tried the obvious searches of [winged heart symbol] [religious heart wings] and found that the Sufi Movement symbol http://www.sufimovement.org/mes_symb.htm was close but not exactly the symbol.

    Backed up, took a breath and reread the post. Next search [tombstone veteran symbols] gave me exactly what I needed to find #21 the list for the answer http://www.cem.va.gov/hm/hmemb.asp

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  2. Arlington National Cemetary website also lists it as Sufism Reoriented but did not provide an image.The description was: "Sufism Reoriented — the heart and wings in outline, and "I" within the heart."

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  3. About 30 seconds -- searched [veterans cemetery religious symbols]; the third link was Wikipedia, which pointed me to http://www.cem.va.gov/hm/hmemb.asp (which was the fourth hit on the Google page anyway), which had the picture.

    Sufism Reoriented, btw.

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  4. You don't even need a click.

    [flying heart symbol] returns a number of good results on Sufism and text from the page that includes statements like "The symbol of the Sufi Movement is a heart with wings." or "The winged heart is an old Sufi symbol, and was chosen by Inayat Khan as the ...."

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  5. It's true, but I think it's a good idea to click through those links to verify that the snippet is telling you what you *think* it's telling you. And, in particular, it was relevant to know that the symbol was on a gravestone in vets cemetery. The symbol might not be the same as the grave marker sign. Check those links!

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  6. It's a One, btw, not an I. FYI

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