Is Valentine’s Day, the day to celebrate love. There are those who take advantage of the opportunity to get away as a couple, exchange gifts or at least watch a romantic movie together on the couch. Flowers, hearts and arrows They abound everywhere.
Although for many this holiday is considered a capitalist invention, the truth is that its origins still remain uncertain.Where does Valentine’s Day come from? The story of the Roman priest who He defied the law by performing marriages between young people secretly is the one that has become popular.
Although this also seems to be the confluence of two different characters: that of a Roman priest to whom miraculous healings are attributed, executed by Claudius, and that of the martyred bishop of Terni. Both They died on February 14th and their name was Valentin.. As time went by, not only would the stories merge, but the The commemoration of this figure would become linked to spring and love.
For others however, Valentine’s Day could have a wilder, more lustful and pagan origin, marking Lupercalia as the ancestral beginning of Saint Valentine.
Lupercalia: the wild Roman festival in February in honour of fertility
“What are you waiting for, bride? You will not become a mother by the power of herbs or prayers or magic spells. Patiently receives the lashes of the fertilizing right hand and the father-in-law will then have the long-awaited name of grandfather.”
Thus sings Ovid in his Fastos at Lupercalia or Lupercalia festivalsa festival that took place in the streets of Rome every February 15 for more than a millennium. In it, men sacrificed a goat and a dog, and then running almost naked, whipping the women with the skins of the animals they had just killed.
The deity to whom the Romans dedicated this festival is believed to have been already uncertain for the majority of citizens in the time of Cicero. Lupercus —protector of shepherds and their flocks—, Faunus, Februus, Pan and Juno They are the gods to whom they are believed to have paid tribute.
The ritual began with the morning sacrifice of a goat and a dog in the cave of Lupercalia, where Romulus and Remus had been suckled by the she-wolf. It was carried out by the Luperci, a congregation of priests worshippers of Faunus, who were dressed only in a goatskin as a loincloth. Already at that time these were associated by the Romans themselves as something anarchic, wild and pre-civil.
After the slaughter, two young Luperci were taken to the altar to be anointed on their foreheads with the blood of the sacrifice. Animal skin was cut into whips or straps.
With them in their hands they would run almost naked through the Palatine hills, beating the attendees in an act of purification. Women crowded to receive the lashes, which ensured fertility and prevented childbirth pains.
“Nowadays many of the young nobles and magistrates run naked through the city, for fun and with joy beating those they meet with hairy straps. And many women of rank deliberately place themselves in their path, and like children at school, They present their hands to be beaten, in the belief that the pregnancy will end in assisted delivery, and sterility in pregnancy,” Plutarch described.
According to Yale historian Noel Lenski, The festival, known for its debauchery and nudity, became a Christian holiday in the 5th century. by Pope Gelasius “It was rather a drunken revelry, but the Christians put clothes back on him. That did not prevent him from being a day of fertility and love“.
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Tags: Love, Curiosities, Valentine’s Day