The Myth of Saint Valentine's Day

The Rose, no.4, group 3 by Hilma af Klint

How do older land-based traditions survive when they are subsumed by conquering empires and dominator cultures? They hide as stowaways in the new religions, fusing symbiotically with holidays and gods so as to survive. Saint Valentine’s Day is probably another such occurrence, overlapping neatly with the older spring and fertility festival Lupercalia celebrated on February 15^th that’s origins are now obscure to us. We can gather that its name derives from the Latin “lupus” for wolf and there is speculation that the celebration honored a theriomorphic deity – half human and half canine – that protected people from wolves. Another interpretation of evidence offers that the god Faunus was associated with the festival, a woodland variation of the goat-god Pan. The celebration included animal sacrifices by priests known as Luperci. And then the young men would daun the sacrificial animal hides and run through the hills, striking with leather thongs at young women believing that the action would render the women more fertile. Summoning erotic and playful energy and overseen by magical theriomorphic gods, the festival developed into a ritual that paired young women off with men by lottery. However, the rise of Christianity demonized these pagan and embodied rituals. Pope Gelasius I outlawed the festival and the myth is that in knowing he could not totally eradicate such a long-lasting and well-loved rite, he suppressed and replaced it with a Christian holiday and saint: Saint Valentine.

Whether or not this origin story of the lover’s holiday is true, what seems clear is that a rite honoring eros and springtime could not be fully eradicated by Christianity. Instead, like algae and fungi fusing to create lichen more resilient to environmental pressures, Lupercalia used a symbiotic syncretism to survive, slipping into the new figure of Saint Valentine, changing a sterile martyr into a figure of redemptive, embodied love. It is disputed which Saint Valentine is even the correct martyr to associate with the day given that there were several. Legend has that one such figure called Valentine defied emperor orders and secretly married couples to protect the men from being called into war. Other accounts suggest the man martyred by Claudius II Gothicus in 270 CE is the best fit as he signed a letter to his jailer’s daughter with the now popular phrase “from your Valentine”.

While the holiday gained popularity in the 15^th century, becoming associated with the Roman god Cupid of love, birds as the season overlaps with avian migratory patterns, and flowers, it has faced another syncretic shift, fusing with extractive capitalism. The holiday stresses consumerism, encouraging couples to buy gifts, candy, and express love through material transaction. It also upholds a narrow view of love that exiles the queer, the disabled, and the solitary. We need to slip loose our heteronormative ideas about how love arrives and reclaim the wild origins of this holiday. It was overseen by wolves and goat-men. It was deemed dangerous by empire because it encouraged anarchic behavior from young men and women. Love must be commodified and defined and contained because it is dangerous. A real holiday devoted to love doesn’t inspire you to buy more objects. It inspires you to throw them down and run to the hills to commune with a lover that is bigger than a human being, bigger than a single self. Real love shows people that more pleasure, more freedom, more miracles are possible than the dominant culture has neural-pruned us to expect. How can we reclaim the inter-species and revolutionary origins of this holiday? 

Sources:

Lupercalia in Britannica

NPR Origins of Valentine's Day

I’ll be doing an event devoted to Lichenized Lovers, Erotic Ecology, and the Myth of Saint Valentine’s Day this Tuesday, February 14th at the Alchemist’s Kitchen in NYC. You can get tickets here.

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