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| Kissers kiss in car in the woods while werewolf yakkha looks on (americanmonsters.com) |
Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and
kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids
are actually dark, bloody -- and a bit muddled.
IMAGE: A drawing depicts the death of St. Valentine --
one of them, anyway. The Romans executed two men by that name on Feb.
14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.
Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.
Those Wild and Crazy Romans
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| Wolf in sheep's clothing (kingsenglish.com) |
From
Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men
sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the
animals they had just slain.
The Roman romantics "were drunk.
They were naked," says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to
hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.
The
brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the
names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for
the duration of the festival -- or longer, if the match was right.
The
ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day
of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men -- both named Valentine --
on Feb. 14th... More
Lupercalia Festival
Wisdom Quarterly edit of Wikipedia entry
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| Nymphs adoring Pan in woods (arcadia93.org) |
This was a very ancient, possibly pre-Roman pastoral festival, observed from February 13-15 to avert "evil"
spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. It subsumed Februa, an earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February (Februarius) its name.The name Lupercalia was believed in antiquity to evince some connection with the Ancient Greek festival of the Arcadian Lykaia (from Greek λύκος, lukos, "wolf," Latin lupus) and the worship of Lycaean Pan, who is depicted as constantly erect, assumed to be a Greek equivalent to Faunus, as instituted by Evander. In Roman mythology, Lupercus is a male deity or godling sometimes identified with the Roman god Faunus or Greek god Pan. More
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