CHIAVARI, Italy - Today is Valentine’s Day.
It’s a rosy hearts and flowers kind of day. A day where a romantic card, a
gift, a bouquet of flowers from a significant other goes a long way to
sweetening a romance. It’s the perfect day to show a little love.
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| Cupid, the Roman God of Love |
But Valentine’s Day wasn’t always about boxes of
chocolates and fancy wrapped gifts, nor was it called Valentine’s Day. In the
beginning, somewhere around the 4th century, it was a pagan rite of
passage, a tribute to the Roman God Lupercus, the God of Fertility.
The Roman rite of passage went something like this: Every
spring, on the 15th of February, a type of lottery was created to
decide which teenage girl would be with which teenage boy. The names of the girls
were placed in a box and randomly drawn out by the boys. The girls would then
become the “companion” of the boy who drew her name, and they would be together
for mutual entertainment and pleasure, i.e. sex, until the next spring when the
process would be repeated and everyone changed partners.
As Christianity began to spread, the Church was determined
to put an end to this eight hundred year fertility rite, and started looking for
a “lovers” saint to replace the Fertility God Lupercus. After much
searching, they settled on Valentino, the Bishop of Interamma (modern day Terni).
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| Valentino, Bishop of Interamma |
The Bishop had made the mistake of enraging the emperor by
protesting the edict of the Roman Emperor Claudius II forbidding marriage, and
had been put to death by the mad emperor two hundred years before. Claudius
believed that married men made poor soldiers because they were reluctant to
leave their families for battle. He reasoned that the empire needed soldiers
more than men needed wives, so he did what he thought was best for the empire and
outlawed marriage.
To counter the Emperor, Bishop Valentino would often marry
couples in secret. When Claudius learned about this ‘friend of lovers”, he had
the bishop brought to Rome and gave him a choice: convert to paganism and
worship the Roman Gods, or have his head cut off.
Valentino turned down the Emperor’s offer and was
thrown in prison to await his fate. While he was waiting to be executed he fell
in love with the jailer’s blind daughter and, it was said, he miraculously
restored her sight. Just before he was taken away to be clubbed, stoned and then
decapitated, he wrote her a farewell note and signed it, “from your
Valentino.”
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| Romans Doing What Romans Did |
Two hundred years later, the Church decided Valentino
would be the ideal candidate to replace Lupercus, and in 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius
outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival. But because he knew
how Romans love games of chance, he kept the lottery, substituting the girl’s
names for the names of saints.
In the revised version of the Lupercian festival, both
girls and boys could draw a name from the box, but the name was not the name of
the person they would spend a year of hanky panky with, but the name of a saint,
whose life they were to emulate for the entire year.
Admittedly it was a struggle for the Romans to trade a year
of wild sex for a year of piety, but in the end Christianity won out. Actually
the only part of the Lupercian festival that remained was the tradition of men
offering women they were interested in, a handwritten note of affection on Feb.
14th. In the 16th
century the Church tried to do away with that tradition as well, and as you
well know, they didn’t succeed.
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| Family Portrait: Mars, Venus and Cupid |
The cards became more popular and more decorative and often embellished
with a drawing of the naked cherub Cupid, for in their hearts the Romans were
never too far from their old gods. Cupid, from the Latin cupido, meaning "desire")
was the god of desire, affection and erotic love,
and is described as the son of the Venus, the Roman goddess of love. His father
was either Mars, the god of war, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It
seems his mother was friendly with both of them.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Copyright 2016 © Phyllis Macchioni
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