Question by Lilit: Lupercalia or Valentines which do you prefer?
It should be exposed that Valentine’s Day was originally concocted by the Christian Church to ruin the festival of Lupercalia (named after the Roman God Lupercus) which was held on the 15th of February and continued throughout the month.
Lupercus, was the God of Wolves. I know you thought that was George W. Bush, but that’s the God of Fox. I know – its confusing.
Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman God of Agriculture, (the date in February was originally chosen to welcome spring) and to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus commemorating young men’s rite of passage.
To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, were originally discovered happily staying alive by suckling a “lupa” (a she-wolf – think Ann Coulter).
The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification because apparently with all those priests around, there were no pure goats.
The young men would then slice the goat’s leather hide into strips, dip them in the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, slapping both women and, as the story goes, fields of crops with the goat-hide strips. Okay, a lot more women, than fields, were being spanked with these goat-strips, but this wasn’t a bad thing.
Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year…or at least more popular at Roman parties.
Later in the day, a lottery was held where all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn and the city’s bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and the girl would be the sexual partner of the young man for a year.
Now THIS was a lottery! You can imagine how crowded the liquor and 7-Eleven stores were. Everyone’s a winner!
Okay, except for the goat and the dog, but there weren’t any special interest groups back then.
Except for the ultimate self interest group, the Church.
In 498 A.D. Pope Gelasius of the Christian Church declared the celebration a pagan holiday, because it was fun, and decided to christianize the hell out of it. He did this by creating a “misinformation” celebration on the day before the festival of Lupercalia, February 14th, in the hopes of confusing the entire matter.
Instead of the names of young women, the urn would contain the names of Christian Saints and the young men and women were to emulate the ways of the saint they picked from the urn for a year.
Way to kill a holiday.
So much for the Lupercalia festival. The Christian church now needed a new holiday “mascot” to coordinate with the date they needed and found one in Saint Valentinus. But Saint Valentinus was a virgin and knew nothing of romance. This fact would hinder the effort to confuse the celebrations. Not to mention if anybody should have been celebrating Lupercalia, it was this guy.
The Christian church knew this wouldn’t fly and created an elaborate story about Valentinus and love.
Oh those Christians and their elaborate stories.
So now you’ve got Valentinus, an anti-lover chosen to be the propaganda machine’s namesake of a lover’s holiday that wasn’t created to be a lover’s holiday but rather was invented to demolish a sexual holiday.
And it worked. Because you’re all crazy.
Happy Lupercalia
My question to you is Do you like your traditional Valentines Day or would you much rather have some good old fashioned Lupercalia?!!
Best answer:
Answer by Black Death
Lupercalia for sure! Sacrificing innocent animals, whacking females with goat hides, a lottery to see if you can win a sexual partner for a year, the Pagan Romans had a better style than the Christians.
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!