All You Need Is Love

ALL >> “Will you be my Valentine?” It is a tale as old as time. Every year for as long as one can remember, Valentine’s Day has been celebrated worldwide with flowers, chocolate, cards and professions of love. No one questions why it is done. It is now simply culturally (and commercially) accepted to adopt a “valentine” every Feb. 14, and if you have a significant other, it is highly expected to go all out in expressing your appreciation for his or her existence. When and where did the holiday began, though? History is somewhat unsure. Its origin story has two different birthrights: the Catholic church and the pagan holiday of Lupercalia. Throughout time, February has been recognized as a month of love and romance. Lupercalia was celebrated by Roman pagans and was a fertility festival dedicated to the Roman god of agriculture, Faunus, and the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Held on the ides of February – otherwise known as Feb. 15 – Roman priests would sacrifice animals for fertility and purification in a cave that people believed housed Romulus and Remus when they were young and thought to have been raised by wolves. After the animals were sacrificed, the priests would remove the hide, dip it into the blood and then travel around, slapping women with the hides in an attempt to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later, the women would put their names in an urn and become paired with the unmarried men in town based on the luck of the draw for a year. Sometimes – most times, in fact – these unions would turn into marriages. Lupercalia did not last very long as Christianity began taking over the early Roman Empire, and in 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius I denounced it and declared Feb. 14 as Valentine’s Day, a day commemorated to celebrating St. Valentine. The story gets even murkier here. No one actually knows which St. Valentine is being commemorated with the romantic holiday. As history goes, there were at least three Christian saints in the fifth century with the name Valentine: a Roman priest, a bishop in Terni and one who not many people know much about, other than he was martyred in Africa. It makes it more difficult to determine who Valentine’s Day is about when considering that supposedly, all three Valentines were martyred Feb. 14. Many scholars believe the stories point to the priest St. Valentine, though, who was martyred by Claudius II, the Roman emperor in 270 A.D. Here, however, the story once again goes somewhat awry. No one is quite sure exactly how and why the concepts of marriage and love and “valentines” worked their way into a day celebrating the heritage of St. Valentine. Some say it was because Valentine began secretly performing marriages for young lovers, after Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men due to unmarried men making better soldiers than those with families. When Claudius discovered the infraction, he had Valentine put to death. Other stories say Valentine was imprisoned for helping Christians escape Roman prisons, which were harsh and full of terrible conditions, and that he fell in love with his jailer’s daughter. Before being put to death, he sent her a card, signed “From your Valentine.” This phrase sounds very familiar to the signatures of Valentine’s cards today. Another idea about how Valentine works in relation to the holiday has less to do with what the Greeks referred to as “eros,” or passionate love, and more to do with “agape,” or Christian love – he was martyred for his faith, and thus a hero in the Christian hall of fame. Regardless of how it happened, the Roman church declared Valentine’s Day to be Feb. 14, whether to quash out the pagan celebration of Lupercalia or to celebrate the life of a heroic priest.