Dating Articles
Monday 13 October, 2008Goats & leather, not hearts & flowers
Like so many other holidays, both major and minor, Valentine's Day seems to have been invented by the greeting card industry. That's not so far from the truth. Though the first valentine on record was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife, while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, it was an enterprising American woman named Esther Howland who produced the first commercial valentine cards in the 1840s. (She cleaned up, to the tune of $5,000 in sales, in her first year of business.) Nowadays, more than a billion valentines are sent each year in the US alone. Only Christmas is a bigger deal.
But if you look beyond the inspiring tale of Saint Valentine, the third century Christian martyr (actually, there were at least three—same name, same demise, different circumstances), you'll find that Valentine's Day as we know it was first concocted by the Church in the fifth century, in order to convert a much older pagan festival.
Lupercalia had been celebrated in Rome on February 15 for eight hundred years before Pope Gelasius I appropriated it in 494. Even then, no one was sure exactly which god it honored; the best guess may be Faunus, god of wild nature and fertility. Some think he was the Roman version of the very ancient Greek god Pan, and somewhere along the line he did acquire the same horns and hooves. When he was busy as the protector of herds, he was also called Lupercus ("he who wards off the wolf").
The celebration began each year at a cave called the Lupercal, at the foot of the Palatine hill. (This was where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome—you've probably seen pictures of the famous statue.) First, a bunch of priests, appropriately named Luperci, sacrificed goats, a dog, and cakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins. Then some of the priests smeared blood from the goats and dog on the foreheads of two young men from upper-class families, and other priests wiped the blood off again with wool soaked in milk. Then the young men were required to laugh uproariously. After everybody partied down on goat meat and wine, the priests cut the goat skins into strips, with which they covered their naked privates, each reserving one strip to carry in the hand. They then ran through the city, slapping all and sundry with their strips of goat skin. Women, especially newlyweds, really looked forward to this, because it was supposed to help them have lots of kids and easy labor.
One other ancient custom associated with the holiday was a lottery, in which young men would draw the names of local maidens. The girl thus assigned to each boy was then his sexual companion for the rest of the year.
You can see why the Romans had such a grand good time, can't you? Also why the Church didn't much like the whole idea and decided to dedicate the fourteenth to a martyr and the fifteenth to the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary.
Valentine's Day can be so depressing.
