Lupercalia (for Valentine's Day)

[sluggo]

Lu·per·ca·li·a
(lōō'pər-kā'lē-ə, -kāl'yə)

n. A fertility festival in ancient Rome, celebrated on February 15 in honor of the pastoral god Lupercus. (AHD)

Lupercalia is the birthplace of today's "St. Valentine's Day", the former being a Roman festival of sexual licence wherein at one stage, a young man would be assigned a partner for erotic games by drawing one of a number of billets each with a participating female's name.

Further back, Lupercal was said to be the birthplace of Rome, the spot where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf (lupus). The festival Lupercalia, on the ides of February, incited fertility for the coming year and honoured Pan, who protected flocks from wolves. The idea of lupine foster-mothers was a recurring mid-Eastern mythological theme, making appearances in the origins of Zoroaster, the origins of Turkey and the Canary Islands (from canis), and even the fable of Little Red Riding Hood. But we digress.

As the Christian Church rose in European influence, it subsumed the older pagan festivals and mythological personages into holy-days and saints, in this case substituting the names of real-life partners with sermons or saints' names to be emulated over the next year (with predictable popularity), and eventually coming up in the 5th century with a St. Valentine, a sort of conglomeration of several irreconcilable biographies built vaguely on the spirits of Eros/Cupid and the aforementioned Pan.

Presumably then, the Roman billets were the ancestors, if indirectly, of today's Valentine cards.

Interesting V-day customs of Japan and Korea noted here; and a more colloquially entertaining summary of the above is here.

Would love to hear variations on the day from our members of other lands.

[gailr]

Those whose taste does run to "mountains of little chalky candy hearts" may check out the ACME Heart Maker. You can design and download a jpeg of your very own personalized greeting. (alpha agora has too many letters. rat!)


A friendly warning: there's a link to hearts others have devised, and they're not moderated. Anyone can make one. Some are sweet, some are childish, some are clever, some run more to the old ways.

[Perry]

The holiday sounds like fun. But I am reminded of a game of spin the bottle where my spin landed on a girl, upon whom I had a giant crush, only to be crushed by her refusal to kiss me.