Valentine's Day - by P J Vanston
REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR P J VANSTON TAKES A LOOK AT THE ORIGINS OF VALENTINE’S DAY AND I’M SURE I WON’T BE ALONE IN CONCLUDING THAT HE CONSIDERS IT ALL A BIT SOPPY!
Valentine’s Day – Festival of Love
They say that money can’t buy you love, but it would seem that about half of the population disagrees, judging by the £1.3 billion the romantically-inclined will spend on flowers, chocolates and the 25 million Valentine cards sent every year in the UK.
But we are not alone. With the exception of some Islamic states (Iran and Saudi Arabia) which have banned it, and countries such as Brazil (which have carnival at this time of year so have an alternative ‘Lovers’ Day’ in June), Valentine’s Day, or Saint Valentine’s Day, is celebrated internationally as a festival of love, with an estimated one billion cards sent world-wide – and that’s an awful lot of bad love poetry!
Wales, of course, has its own patron saint for lovers, St Dwynwen, whose day is 25th January. Many other countries, too, have their own saints or gods connected to love and marriage – often several of them. But, in a commercial sense at least, St Valentine’s Day is the special day for lovers all over the world.
But who was St Valentine? Depending on which version you read, there were at least two, or three, or possibly even more, saints called Valentine or Valentinus – though he was dropped from the Catholic calendar in 1969. St Valentine’s Day is thus no longer part of the liturgical calendar of any church, so it is not considered a religious festival.
Martyrs to Love
The first St Valentine lived in 3rd century Rome and was sentenced to death for performing secret marriages to help draft-dodgers: only single men had an obligation to join the Roman army. He was executed on 14th February in 269 AD.
The second was a priest in Rome jailed for helping Christians, who promptly fell in love with the jailer’s daughter and, as the story conveniently goes, sent her love letters signed ‘From My Valentine’, and was beheaded for his trouble.
The third became the bishop of Terni in 197 AD and was – yep, you guessed it – also martyred. Not a lucky name, Valentinus, really...
Eventually, Rome changed its religious allegiance to Christianity, resulting not only in a rather sudden drop in the number of Christian martyrs, but also in the emperor Gelasius making 14th February a holy day in honour of St Valentine, in place of the Roman god Lupercus, though the pagan connections to the date are actually far stronger than any Christian ones.
Love’s Lottery
The Romans celebrated a holiday on 14th February in honour of Juno, queen of the gods, and patron of marriage. There were various rituals on this date. One involved girls putting their names into a box. The boys would then draw out one girl’s name each, and the two would be a couple for the rest of the day – a bit like a Roman version of Blind Date, or the pairing up at closing time in a nightclub, but perhaps slightly less desperate. Sometimes, these Roman lottery-selected couples would be expected to be together at various times during the whole year, and sometimes they might even get married too – or if they were really lucky, fall in love...
The main Roman festival, though, for which 14th February was the eve, was Lupercalia. This began on 15th and honoured Faunus, the god of fertility. Men and boys would go to the Lupercal, the grotto in Rome dedicated to the wolf god and god of shepherds Lupercus, where people believed the city’s mythical founders, Remus and Romulus, were suckled by a she-wolf. Goats and dogs would be sacrificed. The men and boys would then put on these sacrificed animals’ skins and go round hitting the women and girls (or, less painfully, crops) with little whips, an act which was supposed to ensure fertility, but which these days would only ensure arrest and public opprobrium – but would perhaps make a great script for a particularly vibrant East Enders Valentine’s Day special.
Emperor Gelasius banned all this in 469 AD – (the fertility festival Lupercalia, not East Enders) – and the pagan festival was de-sexed and adapted to Christian needs. So, for example, instead of pulling girls’ names from boxes in a lottery, both boys and girls chose the names of martyred saints, which no doubt created as much boredom as gender equality amongst ancient Roman adolescents.
It was not until the first stirrings of the Renaissance in the 14th century that the emphasis on love and fertility once again started to supersede the imposed Christian meaning. So completely has it done so that today some Christian groups are actively trying to get Valentine’s Day banned as an ungodly pagan custom – which is doubly ironic, as Islamists and Hindu nationalists also want to suppress it because they see it as a purely Christian festival. Bizarrely, St Valentine seems indeed to have performed the remarkable and unusual trick of uniting the world’s major religions – albeit against him!
The first recorded mention of Valentine’s Day was by Chaucer in the 14th century, when he mentions it as the date when birds find a mating partner – though it is likely that he meant May 2nd, the saint’s day for Valentine of Genoa, rather than the day in February, when our feathered friends are surely focused on survival rather than romance, especially in the Middle Ages when winters were colder.
The first Valentine itself – at least, the first for which there is written evidence – was written in French and sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans, whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London after the French defeat by the English (and Welsh archers) led by Henry V at Agincourt in 1415.
St Valentine’s Day began to be widely celebrated in the 17th century, but the tradition did not really take off until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when cheaper postage rates and mass-produced cards, as well as books of suggested romantic verses, popularised the custom amongst gentlemen and an emerging middle class. In previous centuries, it was May Day, of course, which had been the fertility rite of choice. The ‘new’ Valentine’s Day, however, would take full advantage of the new industrialised consumer society, with its manufactured goods and postal system, in a way that the May Day festival did not.
In the 19th century, Valentine’s cards and gifts were made with lace and ribbons, often elaborately – an idea that was exported from the UK to the US in the 1840s, and has been spread around the world by Hollywood, amongst others, making Valentine’s day the international festival of lurve, kisses and general romantic soppiness – and shopping – that we know today.
Love it or hate it, Valentine ’s Day is certainly here to stay – and there is no doubt that florists, chocolatiers and card manufacturers are keen to keep it that way too.
