The earliest origins of Valentine’s Day can be traced back to a somewhat grotesque, Pagan festival celebrated by the Romans. From February 13th to February 15th, Lupercalia was celebrated to promote fertility (in women and crops).
It would all start with a cave full of Roman men (go figure) in which, they’d sacrifice two animals: a dog for purification and a goat for fertility. They would then slice the animal hide into strips and dip them into sacrificial blood. But wait, there’s more!
Once they had anointed themselves in blood, they would take to the streets, nude, swaying their bloody animal straps around. When they came across a woman, they’d “gently slap” her with the gory goat hide – and the ladies loved it! That’s right, they’d go out of their way to get slapped with bloody goat’s hide because they believed it would make them more fertile in the coming year.
If that wasn’t awkward enough, all the single ladies would put their names in an urn for the local bachelors to pick from. These ‘matches’ would be paired off for the year to test the fertile waters. Often they married.
That is until marriage was outlawed – absurd right? This is where the overly commercialized holiday we’ve all grown to love and hate starts to take shape.
Claudius II or Marcus Aurelius Claudius was the emperor of Rome from 268-270 A.D. He was getting really tired of all the marriage and breeding because none of the guys wanted to join his army. They all had wives and pagan rituals to occupy them, why go to war? So Claudius II just decided to take marriage off the table… even though it would have made more sense to legally enforce a few years of military service. (Maybe none of the ladies wanted to get slapped with his goat hide).
Naturally, this made people want to get married even more. In comes St. Valentine, (the patron saint of lovers) to the rescue. This priest was more than willing to perform marriages for these rebellious young couples in love.
Eventually, St. Valentine was caught and imprisoned for defying the Emperor. There is a bit of folklore that suggests Valentine befriended the warden’s daughter while imprisoned. It was a letter he slipped to her, in which he signed, “From Your Valentine”, that is now said to be the first Valentine ever given.
Sadly, St. Valentine was put to death on this, most romantic of days, February 14th 278 A.D. That’s right, he was given a death sentence.
His punishment for marrying couples in ancient Rome was a beating, followed by beheading! He was later given Saint status for his courageous acts by the Catholic church after his death.
It was years later that Christianity finally overran the Pagan way of life in Rome and the festival of Lupercalia was outlawed. The Catholic Church pretty much frowned upon the whole killing animals, getting naked, and whipping women with bloody strips of skin thing.
They did, however, see the value in celebrating love and honoring St. Valentine. So Lupercalia was benched and St. Valentine’s Day was born.
The romantic side of St. Valentine’s Day gained more notoriety over the years with the help of writers and poets. Most notably would be William Shakespeare referencing St. Valentine’s day in Hamlet: “To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,/All in the morning betime,/And I a maid at your window,/To be your Valentine.”
It wasn’t until 1913 that Hallmark latched onto the love letter aspect and launched their first line of Valentine’s Day cards. They dropped the “Saint” and from there it was a matter of slowly and steadily erasing all signs of true historical significance that brought us to what we all know as Valentine’s Day.
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