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The Lupercalia: Forerunner of Valentine’s Day?



Well, it’s that time of year again: flowers, chocolates, champagne, seafood dinners, naughty lingerie .... And, of course, the usual crowded restaurants (and possibly crowded theaters showing the latest must-see movie). If you’re single, you may be ready to grab a six-pack, fire up Netflix and call it a weekend. But hard on the heels of Valentine’s Day, the following day in fact, is the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, which many find much more intriguing.



The Lupercalia may be the longest-lasting of the Roman pagan festivals. Some modern Christian festivals, such as Christmas and Easter, may have assumed elements of earlier pagan religions, but they are not essentially Roman. There are scholars who believe Lupercalia dates to the founding of Rome – traditionally 753 BC – or even earlier. It ended some 1200 years later at the end of the 5th century AD, at least in the West, though it continued in the East for a few more centuries. There are likely many reasons for the Lupercalia’s longevity, but the primary reason some celebrations last for centuries is because of their wide appeal.



If all you know about the Lupercalia is that it was the background for Mark Antony’s offering the crown to Caesar in Act I of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, you probably don’t know it has associations with Valentine’s Day. Other than the Lupercalia, the major calendar event in Shakespeare’s tragedy is the Ides of March (March 15). Scholars have argued that Shakespeare did not intend to portray the Lupercalia as the day before Caesar’s assassination, but it sure seems that way. According to J.A. North, Cicero points to the danger to the Republic Caesar presented on this Lupercalia, a danger the assassins addressed on that Ides. “It was also that day on which, sodden with wine, smothered with perfumes and naked [Antony] dared to urge the groaning people of Rome into slavery by offering Caesar the diadem that symbolized the kingship,” Cicero proclaimed. Chronologically, Lupercalia was a full month before the Ides of March, i.e., February 15 or February 13-15, a period either proximate to, or covering, modern Valentine’s Day. Still, sharing a date is not enough to closely connect Lupercalia and Valentine’s Day.



Rites and Rituals of the Lupercalia. The cavorting Sodales Luperci performed an annual purification of the city during the month of purification – February. March was the beginning of the Roman new year, so February was a time to get rid of the old and prepare for the new. There were two stages to the events associated with the Lupercalia. The first was at the site where the twins Romulus and Remus were said to have been discovered being suckled by the she-wolf. This is the Lupercal. Priests sacrificed a goat and dog, the blood of which was smeared on the foreheads of young men who would soon go prancing naked around the Palatine (or sacred way), aka the Luperci. The hide of the sacrificial animals was cut into strips to be used as lashes by the Luperci following the feasting and drinking.



After the feast, the second stage began, with the Luperci running about naked, joking and hitting people with their goatskin thongs. Why the Luperci were naked is unknown. (If, during their run, the Luperci circled the Palatine Hill, it would have been impossible for Caesar, who was at the rostra, to have witnessed the entire proceedings from a single location. He could, however, have seen the end.) Striking women is believed to have been a fertility measure and this was obviously the opinion of Shakespeare’s Caesar, who reminds Antony to strike Calpurnia, saying:



Forget not, in your speed, Antonio,

To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say,

The barren, touched in this holy chase,

Shake off their sterile curse.



However, there is also a decided sexual component and the women may have bared their backs to the thongs, inviting the Luperci to strike them.





Goat: Symbol of Sexuality and Fertility. (Amalthea’s goat horn brimming with milk became the cornucopia.) One of the most lascivious of the gods was Pan/Faunus, represented with horns and a caprine lower half. Ovid (through whom we are chiefly familiar with the events of the Lupercalia) names him as the god of the Lupercalia. Before the run, the Luperci priests performed their sacrifices of goats, or goats and dogs, – Plutarch calls dogs the enemy of the wolf. This leads to another of the problems scholars discuss, the fact the flamen dialis (high priest of Jupiter) was present at the Lupercalia during the time of Augustus. This priest of Jupiter was forbidden to touch a dog or goat and may have been forbidden even to look upon a dog. It has been suggested Augustus added the presence of the flamen dialis to a ceremony at which he had earlier been absent. Another Augustan innovation may have been the goatskin on previously naked Luperci, which would have been an attempt to add decency to the ceremony.



By the second century AD, some of the elements of sexuality had been removed from the Lupercalia. Fully dressed matrons stretched out their hands to be whipped. Later, the representations depict women humiliated by flagellation at the hands of men fully dressed and no longer running about. Self-flagellation was part of the rites of Cybele on the “day of blood,” dies sanguinis (March 16). Roman flagellation could be fatal. Horace writes of horribile flagellum, but the whip so used may have been a rougher sort. Scourging became a common practice in the monastic communities. It would seem likely, considering the early church’s attitude toward women and mortification of the flesh, some of the rites and rituals of the Lupercalia had Christian associations, despite its pagan deity.



According to Wiseman, after 276 BC, young married women (matronae) were encouraged to bare their bodies. Augustus forbade beardless young men to serve as Luperci because they were considered irresistible, even though they were probably no longer naked. By the 1st century BC, some classical writers refer to the Luperci as wearing goatskin loincloths.



Unfortunately, no one knows which god, or gods, were associated with the Lupercalia. Wiseman suggests a variety of related gods may have been involved. Ovid counted Faunus as the god of the Lupercalia. For Livy, it was Inuus. Other possibilities include Mars, Juno, Pan, Lupercus, Lycaeus, Bacchus and Februus. Obviously, the god himself was less important than the festival.



Sacrifice, which was a mainstay of Roman ritual, had been prohibited since 341 AD, but the Lupercalia survived beyond this date. Generally, the end of the Lupercalia festival is attributed to Pope Gelasius (494-496) or possibly Felix III, both 5th century popes.



The ritual had become important to the civic life of Rome and was believed to aid in preventing pestilence, but it was no longer performed in the proper manner. Instead of the noble families running around naked (or in a loincloth), riffraff was running about in clothing. The pope also observed the Lupercalia was more a fertility festival than a purification rite and pestilence continued despite the ritual. The pope’s lengthy document seems to have put an end to the celebration of Lupercalia in Rome, but according to Wiseman, in Constantinople, the festival continued to the 10th century.



But getting back to the Valentine’s Day connection: the Lupercalia started as a fun event with spectators serving occasionally as willing participants, naked bodies were exposed, there was a fertility component, there was feasting and drinking and everything centered around the location where the Vestal Virgin was raped by Mars, which resulted in the birth of Romulus, the founder of Rome. It is this blend of fun, fertility and erotic elements, as well as the date, that ties Lupercalia to Valentine’s Day, but Lupercalia is not the direct, legitimate ancestor of the holiday as it is celebrated today.



Sources: N. S. Gill, Ancient History; T. P. Wiseman, "The God of the Lupercal," Journal of Roman Studies (1995), and Peg Aloi, The Witching Hour, February 13, 2015.

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Valentine’s Day: Stained in the Blood of Goats and Saints



You just finish putting away all the Christmas and winter decorations and Valentine’s Day rolls around, a time for the showy expression of love, especially romantic love, in the form of mushy cards, a box of chocolates, flowers, a romantic meal, maybe jewelry – you know what you have to do. But Valentine’s Day, formally St. Valentine's Day, has weird ancient roots stained in blood.



The Lupercalia. Like many major Western holidays – Christmas, Easter, Halloween – Valentine’s Day has pre-Christian pagan roots, specifically in the ancient Roman celebration of Lupercalia, which was observed February 13-15 for more than a thousand years before being abolished at the end of the 5th century. The Lupercalia was an odd blend of a spring purification ritual, fertility rite and tribute to Lupa, the she-wolf who suckled the infant orphans Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.



The festivities began solemnly enough near Lupa’s cave on Palatine Hill, where Rome was traditionally founded. The activities were directed by the Luperci, the “brothers of the wolf,” who were priests of Faunus, the Roman equivalent of Pan. The festival got down to business with the sacrifice of two male goats and a dog by the Luperci, whose nakedness was concealed by nothing other than a goatskin. Next, two young aristocratic Luperci were led to the altar and anointed on their foreheads with the sacrificial blood, which was wiped from the bloody knife with wool soaked in milk. A feast followed and then thongs were cut from the skin of the sacrificed animals and the Luperci, who were by this time feeling quite festive, frolicked about the Palatine district.



In the 1st century, the Greek historian Plutarch portrayed the scene. “Many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter, striking those they meet with shaggy thongs,” he wrote. “And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.” There’s a possibility a few of the lads took it upon themselves to help out with the latter. By the 5th century, the festival had been abandoned to the “rabble” in what was by then Christian Rome and finally banned altogether as an unseemly and licentious display. There weren’t a lot of hearts and flowers associated with the Lupercalia, but the festival, at least originally, was a playful and flirty ode to fertility.



February 14: A Day of Revelers and Martyrs. In one of those bizarre historical coincidences, the feast day of St. Valentine happened to be February 14, the day the martyred 3rd-century saint was executed. So one had a Christian commemoration that conflated with a defunct Roman rite of spring. Whether the Lupercalia was a true precursor of Valentine’s Day as we now celebrate it is an open question, but it certainly laid some groundwork.



Life of Valentine or Valentines. Who was this Valentine, whose name is now synonymous with romantic love? And just to muddy the waters a little more, there were at least three saints from the early-Christian era named “Valentine” (Valentinus in Latin), two of whom were executed in the 3rd century on the 14th of February!



By the 3rd century, the Roman Empire was on the wane, with civil pressures building from within and snarling barbarians (including Huns, Goths and Vandals) threatening from without at every corner of the far-flung Empire. Education and morale were low, taxes and corruption up. The Empire had grown too large and unwieldy to control and protect for the military, in its present state, to protect. So Emperor Claudius II, in an effort to shore up the forces, banned marriage for young men throughout the Empire. As legend has it, Claudius thought marriage made men weak, emotionally soft and distracted from their soldiering. According to legend, kindly Valentine was a bishop in the vicinity of Rome who sympathized with the plight of young lovers and agreed to marry them in secret in defiance of the emperor’s decree. Eventually Valentine was found out and jailed to await his punishment. As future saints are wont to do, Valentine befriended his jailer, Asterius, who had a blind daughter named Julia. Valentine helped restore Julia’s sight and became close friends with her as well. When Claudius showed up to interrogate Valentine, he was impressed by the bishop’s manner and conviction, but when holy man refused to consent to the marriage ban or worship Roman gods – in turn trying to convert Claudius to Christianity! – the emperor issued the execution order. As a final gesture of friendship, just before his execution, Valentine wrote a farewell message to Julia, signing it “From Your Valentine.” This last bit was added to the legend centuries after the fact and is almost certainly a little too romantic to be true. There is also no contemporary record of Claudius II’s decree against marriage, so Valentine may have found a different method of annoying him, perhaps simply by being Christian, but one can’t keep a good story down.



Chaucer Invents Modern Valentine’s Day. There is no record of Valentine’s feast day associations with romance until Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls” in 1375, almost 900 years after the abolition of the Lupercalia. In it, The Canterbury Tales author relates February 14 to the beginning of the mating season for birds, humans and every other “species that men know. For this was on Saint Valentine’s day,” Chaucer wrote:



When every fowl comes there his mate to take,

Of every species that men know, I say,

And then so huge a crowd did they make,

That earth and sea, and tree, and every lake,

Was so full, that there was scarcely space,

For me to stand, so full was all the place.



That’s a lot of responsibility for one busy saint!



St. Valentine, like his holiday, is known around the world. The saint’s beflowered skull (above) is on display in Rome and bits and pieces rest in reliquaries in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, England and France. And while his mortal remnants may be scattered hither and thither, Valentine has a great responsibility in the afterlife watching over lovers, beekeepers, epileptics, travelers and victims of the plague. Naturally, he is the patron saint of engaged couples and happy marriages.



Source: Eric Olsen, Cleveland.com, February 13, 2016.

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Valentine's Day Around the World



Like most annual holidays, Valentine’s Day in the United States tends to follow a predictable script. Lovers buy flowers, candy and/or a card and splurge on fancy dinners. From Paris to Dhaka, the script is followed in cities around the world. But there are other locales where people celebrate Valentine’s Day in weird and wonderful ways:



Bulgaria. Valentine’s Day traditionally shares its spot on the calendar with the day of the patron saint of winemakers, St. Trifon Zarezan. Early February is the time of year when grapevines are pruned in preparation for the coming summer. Traditionally, men prune the grapevines and pour wine onto the ground to improve the soil’s fertility. Each vineyard then selects the “wine king,” the person deemed to have had the best harvest, who hosts a feast, with much food and wine, at his home. It isn’t difficult to understand how the two holidays have come to be celebrated in unison.



El Salvador. In El Salvador, as in much of Latin America, February is the Day of Love and Friendship. The centerpiece of the celebration is a game called “Secret Friend.” Salvadoran friends, families, classmates and coworkers write everyone’s name on a piece of paper and then each picks one and each person purchases a gift for another. When the time comes to hand out the gifts, everyone stands in a circle and, in turn, reveals one good quality about their secret friend and others guess the individual’s identity. It is very similar to the “Secret Santa” Christmas game Secret Santa, with a touch more affection.



Peru. Valentine’s Day coincides with Peru’s summer carnival season. Peruvians are often in a partying mood and sometimes they even have a national holiday. As in the U.S., couples exchange flowers, and the choice of flower is orchids. The flowers are abundant in the Andean nation and come in some 3,000 varieties.



The Philippines. In recent years, some Filipino couples have celebrated Valentine’s Day at state-supported mass wedding ceremonies. This year, hundreds of couples will marry on February 14 under the supervision of Mayor Dino Reyes Chua of Noveleta, a town south of Manila. The region’s local government will pay for the cost of the wedding reception, bouquets of flowers and even wedding cakes for the couples, who are all set to return the favor by accepting Mayor Chua and other officials as their new godparents.



At a nearby town, where another mayor is set to officiate at the marriage of some 500 couples at a high school building on Thursday, the best-dressed pair will win a prize of 10,000 Philippine pesos ($192) toward the cost of their honeymoon. The government contends the ceremony helps cash-strapped young couples make their unions official in the eyes of God and the law.



South Africa. Couples have traditionally celebrated Valentine’s by wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Young people pin a piece of paper with the name of their partner or someone they’re sweet on to their clothing hoping they will be noticed and their intended will do likewise. It is believed the custom is based on the ancient Roman Lupercalia, in which our modern Valentine’s Day is rooted.



Wales. The Welsh version of Valentine’s Day is celebrated January 25. Known as Saint Dwynwen’s Day, it commemorates the legend of the nation’s patron saint of love. According to the BBC, the story of Saint Dwynwein is somewhat gruesome, featuring an arranged marriage gone wrong, a convent and a frozen lover. In celebration, Welsh lovers traditionally exchange “love spoons” (above): ornate wooden utensils featuring symbols expressing various sentiments.



Source: Billy Perrigo and Ciara Nugent, Time, February 13, 2019.

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Member Back to Top Post by Kate on Goat: Symbol of Sexuality and Fertility. (Amalthea’s goat horn brimming with milk became the cornucopia.) One of the most lascivious of the gods was Pan/Faunus, represented with horns and a caprine lower half. Ovid (through whom we are chiefly familiar with the events of the Lupercalia) names him as the god of the Lupercalia. Before the run, the Luperci priests performed their sacrifices of goats, or goats and dogs, – Plutarch calls dogs the enemy of the wolf. This leads to another of the problems scholars discuss, the fact the flamen dialis (high priest of Jupiter) was present at the Lupercalia during the time of Augustus. This priest of Jupiter was forbidden to touch a dog or goat and may have been forbidden even to look upon a dog. It has been suggested Augustus added the presence of the flamen dialis to a ceremony at which he had earlier been absent. Another Augustan innovation may have been the goatskin on previously naked Luperci, which would have been an attempt to add decency to the ceremony.

I wonder how the goat became a symbol of lasciviousness and was later associated with the devil? Dogs would have been a better symbol for devil worshipers because they're filthy, disgusting animals. Goats are cute and they aren't filthy.