I’ve been A minor for a heart of gold

In a July 19 post -- not to be confused with the present one! -- called "I've been a miner for a heart of gold," I connect the brown emmets and Ace of Hearts on the A page on Animalia with the Neil Young song "Heart of Gold," by way of Herodotus's story of brown gold-mining ants.

In yesterday's post "Inventory of the Animalia A page," I tried to list everything on that page that begins with A. One of these was a barely visible musical staff with Allegro written above it. Commenter Henri identified it as an A minor arpeggio -- that is to say, the notes A, C, and E played in succession rather than simultaneously. This of course spells out ACE, as in the Ace of Hearts, and my previous post about the Ace of Hearts on the A page included in its title "a miner" -- which, if the article is stressed, is pronounced the same as "A minor," the chord.

On July 25, six days after the "Heart of Gold" post, I read in Richard Bushman's book Joseph Smith's Gold Plates an excerpt from a poem that referred to the Plates as Cumorah's "heart of gold." The Plates as a heart of gold ties in with the Ace of Hearts playing card as a heart of gold since, as William Wright recently mentioned in his post "Penalties and Red Cards," the etymology of card is from Latin charta "a leaf of paper, a writing, tablet." (Hearts are "red cards," of course.)

I looked up the poem -- "Cumorah" by Theodore E. Curtis, who later wrote a very similar poem called "Hail, Cumorah! Silent Wonder" which includes the same "heart of gold" line -- and found this article by Louise Helps, who devotes a whole paragraph to Curtis's metaphor:

An interesting image in these two poems is that of the "story written on your heart of gold." Several different but compatible meanings come to mind. A "heart of gold" is commonly used to describe kindness and benevolence -- is the poet imbuing the hill, in its role as guardian of the records, with these characteristics? Scripturally, if something is written in our hearts, it becomes of paramount importance to us. In Jeremiah 31:33 the Lord says, "This shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people." And then of course, the hill's "heart of gold" just might refer to the golden plates hidden within its substance!

This connection between the Ace of Hearts and the golden record buried in the hill, waiting to be dug out, makes me think of the expression "ace in the hole" and the Paul Simon song that begins, "Some people say Jesus, that's the ace in the hole."

The miner/minor connection brings to mind the archaic expression "mine heart," which in both the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon exists alongside the more common variant "my heart." There are only two instances of "mine heart" in the Book of Mormon:

For it came to pass after I had desired to know the things that my father had seen, and believing that the Lord was able to make them known unto me, as I sat pondering in mine heart I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord, yea, into an exceedingly high mountain, which I never had before seen, and upon which I never had before set my foot (1 Ne. 11:1).

O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people! (Alma 29:1)

One of these verses refers to "an exceedingly high mountain"; the other, to an angel with a trumpet, which is how Moroni is typically portrayed. In the second Curtis poem, Moroni appears on what Joseph Smith called "a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood" to reveal its heart of gold:

And Moroni, clothed in glory

Crowns your visage old,

To reveal the ancient story

Written in your heart of gold.