As well as lovers, Saint Valentine is patron saint of bee-keeping, epilepsy, fainting, plague, teenagers and distant travels. We tend not to focus on these other items on February 14th (Valentine’s Day since the Fifth Century AD), but why not? February is named after a Roman festival of purification. Strips of grisly goat skin were called februa. The verb “to purify” was februare. Grisly goat skin? Valentine’s Day? Where’s Cupid in all this?
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| Cupid in various guises.... |
Imagine gathering at a sacred cave where you believe the baby boy twins Romulus and Remus were reared and suckled by wolves (wolves in Latin = lupi.) Imagine sacrificing a goat for fertility and a dog for purification. Imagine two naked youths taking bloody strips of the goat’s skin and wetly slapping the crops to make them grow. Imagine those nude teenagers then turning to local women and swatting them with the same bits of gory flesh hoping that the sacrifical blood would make the women fertile. Imagine at the end of the day all the young women placing their names in a big urn and the city’s bachelors coming along to choose a name; these matched pairs then staying together for a year – either resulting in marriage or the parting of the ways and another turn next year. (A bit like getting a partner through a raffle or tombola.) This was the beginning of Valentine's Day. This festival of Lupercalia was banned at the end of the Fifth Century by Pope Gelasius (great name, not a flavour of ice cream!) who declared February 14th would now be known as Saint Valentine’s Day and naked yoofs slapping crops and women with bloody goat hide would be banned
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| The joys of Lupercalia |
So, for Valentine’s Day in the 20th century, we send cheesy cards, boxes of chocolates and flowers today. No more sacrificing goats and dogs…. All the main Christian festivals are attached to pagan days, a consequence of the Church “Christianising” popular days but I think most people who send flowers on February 14th will never give a thought to bloody goats strips or purification. Most people imagine they are following the tradition of bringing sweets and flowers to Venus's altar, Venus being a female deity associated with love and her son Cupid being the god of love.
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| What's Saint Valentine got to do with it, if anything? |
As far as we can tell, Valentine was beheaded and buried around CE 270. Emperor Claudius II had executed him for performing marriages outside the rule of the clergy. Apparently whilst in prison Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s daughter (who may or may not have been blind) and his final letter to her before his death was signed “Your Valentine.” There are, as ever, several other variations of the Saint Valentine origin story. Chaucer himself may have invested the name of Valentine with courtly love through his satirical Parliament of Foules, written around 1382. Shakespeare certainly imprinted it forever with his portrayal of the faithful Valentine in Two Gentlement of Verona, a contrast to the more macho and devious Proteus, two best friends who fall for the same woman in one of literature’s archetypal triangles.
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| Proteus and Valentine, Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona |
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