It’s Valentine’s Day, a holiday that celebrates the transcendent power of love with roses, chocolates ... and a mostly nude child with 10-foot wings and a crossbow.

Cupid – that nearly universal symbol of Valentine’s Day – was the god of love, desire, and affection in classic mythology. Although originally portrayed as a slender young man, he is now most commonly depicted as a gleefully chubby baby or small boy flitting around with wings, a bow, and maybe some heart-tipped arrows.

All of it is adorable, of course, until you consider what a "real" Cupid would look like. The idea of a naked infant flying around is creepy enough on its own, but creepier still are the massive, vulture-like wings he would need to stay in flight, or the lethal weapon he would have to carry to achieve his aims.

Condorman ———

Eric Miraglia /Flickr

Many of the most popular representations of Cupid involve a small boy with miniature wings the same size as his body – or smaller. But how big would his wings actually need to be in order to support the weight of the chuckling cherub?

Instead of devising some elaborate da Vinci-inspired artificial wings for Cupid to flutter around on, we need only look to nature for an organic equivalent. In general, larger birds tend to have wider wingspans, so if we can find a flying bird that carries roughly the same weight, we can assume that its wings could adequately carry Cupid on his mission.

The CDC puts the average weight of most boys aged 24 months at 28 pounds. The Cupid in pop culture imagery usually appears to be a boy this size, and probably no greater than 30 pounds at the high end. The same data shows that boys around this age are typically about two feet tall, which also fits the common depictions of Cupid.

So what can we use for a comparison? Most birds normally don’t weigh very much because of the basic mechanics of thrust and drag, so it turns out Cupid would be in the same weight class as the largest flying birds on Earth. The Andean Condor, for example, is a New World vulture that can weigh up to a whopping 33 pounds and live up to a century. So a 30-pound child would at the very least need wings this size to fly.

Now we have a flying naked baby with a wingspan five times longer than his body length. That’s scary enough, until you consider the bow Cupid would need to carry around.

The Crossbow of Love ——————–

dewet /Flickr

In the many TV shows and cartoons that depict Cupid, his arrows always seem to pierce the hearts of his targets. It takes somewhere between 20 and 40 foot-pounds of kinetic energy to fell medium game like deer and antelope, and at between 100 and 200 pounds, we can also consider an average adult human to be medium (and the most dangerous) game. Since Cupid will likely need a weapon capable of delivering that sort of force and accuracy at a medium range, it seems like the bows and arrows of the Roman era might not cut it anymore.

A modern crossbow that can put out around 80 foot-pounds of energy – enough to take down a grizzly bear – seems a better tool for the task at hand, with the precision, range, and penetrating power that Cupid's task requires. Crossbows were actually so effective that the Pope banned them in 1139 from wars between Christians because of their lethality and ease of use, so any bolt Cupid fires is then sure to meet its mark.

Behold the real face of Cupid: a hybrid baby-vulture armed with a crossbow and held aloft on 10-foot-wide wings, a terrifying abomination worthy of our finest nightmares.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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