St Valentine's Day

St Valentine's Day (February 14th) is a christianized version of the ancient Roman festival of the Lupercalia, a fertility festival of the wolf goddess, Lupa (the mythical wolf-nurse of Romulus and Remus), combined with the Festival of Juno, the queen of the Roman pantheon. Juno's festival was held on Feb 14, the eve of the Lupercalia, which began on the 15th. Ancient days were reckoned from evening to evening rather than from midnight to midnight as we do now (hence the prominence of "eve's", as in Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, Halloween, etc). The festival featured orgiastic rites, typical of ancient matriarchial societies.

On the eve of the festival of Lupercalia, the names of Roman maidens were written down and placed into jars. Each youth would draw a girl's name from the jar and would then be partnered with her for the duration of the festival. Sometimes the pairing of the children lasted a whole year; sometimes they would fall in love and, in patriarchial times, marry (the goddess frowned on marriage).

During the festival, goats and dogs were sacrificed and the blood was smeared on the heads of the youths, then washed off with milk as a purificatory symbol of sacred rebirth. These youths were naked except for the animal skins and carried strips or thongs made from the sacrificial skins, which they used to strike the women as they rushed ecstatically through the streets around the Palantine Hill, where the cave of the Lupercal was located. This was fertility magic, concentrated through the creation of the magic circle around the hill. It is likely that, in the most ancient times, the girls would have been the pursuers and struck the boys, but like most myths, this has probably been altered to suit later preferences. In Christian times this feast was renamed the festival of the Purification of the Virgin.

Under the rule of Emperor Claudius II, Rome was involved in many bloody and unpopular campaigns. Claudius was finding it hard to get soldiers to join his military legions, for Roman men did not want to leave their lovers and families. Claudius therefore cancelled all marriages and engagements in Rome.

Now Saint Valentine was a priest at Rome, in the days of Claudius II. He and Saint Marius are said to have aided the Christian martyrs and secretly married couples; for this deed, Saint Valentine was dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and have his head cut off. He suffered his martyrdom on the 14th of February, around the year 270.

The fathers of the early Christian Church in Rome sought to do away with the pagan element in these feasts by substituting the names of saints for those of maidens. And as the Lupercalia began about the middle of February, the pastors chose Saint Valentine's Day for the celebration of this new feast, replacing that of Juno and Lupa. So it seems that the custom of young men choosing maidens for valentines, or saints as patrons for the coming year, arose in this way.

Interestingly enough, St Valentine's Day is traditionally the time when birds mate.

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