This isn’t some essay about how much I hate Valentine’s and how it’s a holiday designed to make the single people of the world feel really bad about themselves. Because, contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate V-day.
(Why bother calling it Valentine’s when it has nothing to do with St. Valentine anymore?)
But V-Day is what you make of it.
The actual day that we celebrate as V-Day is actually Lupercalia, dedicated to the marriage of Zeus and Athena. When the Roman Catholic church was setting a date to celebrate both of the martyrs named Valentine, they chose Lupercalia so that the pagans and polytheistics would also celebrate it. The word Lupercalia comes from lupus, or wolf, so the holiday may be connected with the legendary wolf that nursed the mythical Romulus and Remus. Priests of this cult, luperci, would travel to the lupercal, the cave where the she-wolf who reared Romulus and Remus allegedly lived, and sacrifice animals (two goats and a dog). The blood would then be scattered in the streets, to bring fertility and keep the wolves away from the fields. (Really romantic, huh?) Lupercalia was a festival local to the city of Rome.
The more general Festival of Juno Februa, meaning “Juno the purifier “or “the chaste Juno,” was celebrated on February 13-14. Pope Gelasius I (492-496) abolished Lupercalia. The pope also declared in 496 that the feast of St. Valentine would be on February 14. However, no one really knows which St. Valentine the feast is for. It could be a priest in Rome, a bishop of Interamna, or a martyr in the Roman province of Africa.
In 270 AD, the Roman emperor Claudius II dragged the Empire into many wars and needed to acquire more troops. His solution was to ban marriage. One priest, Valentine, disobeyed Claudius’s orders and married people anyway. He was imprisoned where he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter. On 14 February, 270 AD, Claudius had Valentine beheaded. Before walking to the gallows, Valentine wrote a farewell message to his love. He signed it, “From your Valentine.” This is just one of the three St. Valentine’s.
Not to be a downer or anything. I really do like V-Day, no matter why we celebrate it. For me, though, it’s more about love in general, instead of anything romantic or whatever. I celebrate my family and my friends.
I could go on, really, but I don’t want to sound like a know-it-all (though I’m past that point now, I think. Especially since I do the same thing every Christmas…) I’ll hopefully have an actual blog some time in the near future.
