What Christians Should Know about Valentine's Day

 

Pagan Valentine Celebration

 

Every year on February 14, the world marks Valentine’s Day. Millions send messages and gifts of love to the people most important in their lives.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the fourteenth has its roots in the Christian faith, with the day seemingly named after Saint Valentine, a priest who lived during the third century AD. However, many historians believe the day originated from the Roman pagan festival of fertility called Lupercalia, an event filled with animal sacrifice, random coupling and the whipping of women; not quite the romantic chocolate and roses day that we celebrate today.

Lupercalia was a major festival on the Roman calendar and was commemorated every year on February 15. It was held in honour of the gods Faunus and Lupercus, the gods of agriculture and fertility. It also honoured the mythological founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

In the morning the priests of Lupercus, known as Luperci, gathered at Lupercal cave, the place where Romulus and Remus were said to have been cared for as babies by a she-wolf. The cave lay at the foot of the Palantine Hill, the spot at which the brothers were believed to have founded Rome.

In a representation of fertility and because Lupercus was a god of shepherds, two males goats were sacrificed in the cave. This was followed by the sacrifice of a dog to represent purification and because dogs often guard the flocks. Blood taken from the sacrificial knife was then smeared across the foreheads of two naked Luperci. The knife was then wiped clean with a piece of milk-soaked wool. Historians have suggested this ritual is the reason why Valentine’s Day is associated with the colours red and white; red represents the blood from the sacrifice whilst white represents the milk on the wool that wipes the knife clean, signifying new life.

Feasting followed this ritual and after stomachs were full the Luperci cut strips from the sacrificed goats called ‘thongs’ and dipped them in the sacrificial blood. The Luperci then ran naked through the streets of Rome and whipped any woman within striking distance. Many welcomed the lashings, often revealing bare skin for the thongs to strike. The Romans believed that the thongs would make childless women more fertile whilst blessing pregnant women with the gift of an easy birth.

 

Another custom during Lupercalia was the pairing of young Roman boys and girls. At some point during the festival, the names of young girls were written on bits of paper and slipped into a jar. Every young man would then pull out a girl’s name from the jar; the pair would then be coupled together for the duration of Lupercalia. Many stayed together until the following year’s festival, some even fell in love and married.

As Christianity swept across the globe, many pagan traditions were absorbed and adapted into the Christian faith. ‘Lupercalia was clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the [ancient] Christians are trying to close it down,’ Noel Lenski, Professor of Classics and History at Yale said in an interview with NPR. ‘So there's reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we'll just call this a Christian festival.’

In the fifth century AD, Pope Gelasius I banned Lupercalia and in 496 AD the Catholic Church declared February 14 a day to feast and celebrate the life of the martyred Saint Valentine, said to have been executed on 14 February 269 AD.

With over 10,800 saints and multiple Valentine’s, it’s not officially known whether the stories about Saint Valentine were about one man or multiple men merged together. The most popular belief states he was a priest in the Roman Empire during the third century AD, executed under the command of Claudius II for conducting marriages in secret after the Emperor had outlawed them.

The story goes that whilst awaiting his fate in prison he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter. After his sentence finally came through, Valentine supposedly left a farewell note to the young lady and signed it ‘from your Valentine’.

He then exited the jail and walked towards the most unromantic of ends - death by beating and decapitation.

Whilst we may never know the full truth about Saint Valentine’s origins, the stories about him all emphasise his attributes as a heroic and potentially romantic figure. ‘It may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia,’ Lenski states.

However, the direct association of February 14 with overt romanticism and declarations of love doesn’t seem to have started until over a thousand years later during the Middle Ages. The famed fourteenth-century English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of ‘The Canterbury Tales’, is often credited as the man who made the link. At that time it was believed that European birds began to pair up in mid-February, specifically around the fourteenth.

‘For this was on seynt Volantynys day. Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make,’ Chaucer wrote in his poem ‘Parlement of Foules’, making one of the earliest references about St. Valentine’s Day being a day for those in love.

Other poets followed his lead, including Shakespeare. The romantics retold history, converting the day into one about devotion, love and courtship. From then on it seems that budding lovers began to send romantic notes to their sweethearts on the Valentine’s Day.

Industrialisation during the eighteenth century made things even easier for smitten couples with the mass-production of illustrated romantic cards. The day’s pagan roots were still very much on display with images of Cupid, the Roman god of desire and love, often adorning the cards. From there the day gradually grew into the billion-pound industry that it is today.

 

What About valentine day cards?

It’d be remiss if we didn’t start off by providing at least a snapshot of Saint Valentine. On the one hand, he’s renowned as the patron saint of love and marriage, on the other, epilepsy, plague and beekeeping.

Even the Catholic church accepts that ‘St Valentine’ may be a conflation of two, maybe even three, individuals. In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church removed St. Valentine from the General Roman Calendar as so little is known about him.

The basic story is that he was sentenced to death by Claudius Gothicus for marrying Christian couples. He was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate, Rome on 14th February 269.

Lupercalia

Long before Saint Valentine’s Day was celebrated on the 14th, the Ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia was held on 15th February, possibly to honour the wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twins who founded Rome. The festival involves the ritual sacrifice of animals, a feast and then the Luperci (men who have been ordained as priests for the day) are tasked with whipping young ladies with strips of sacrificed animal skin to supposedly promote fertility.

The festival concluded with single men and women being paired off to continue the celebrations in private. But in 494 BC, Pope Gelasius I banned Lupercalia and replaced it with the more romantically and morally inclined 'Feast of St Valentine' on the 14th.

The dawn of the Valentine’s Day card

There isn’t much evidence that the Feast of Valentine inspired the writing of love notes until 1415, when the imprisoned French Duke of Orleans wrote a romantic letter to his wife, citing Valentine, from the Tower of London. This lack of cards is hardly surprising, as most of the population was illiterate. However, it’s evident from Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, both of whom refer to him in their works, that St Valentine was a familiar figure in the Middle Ages.

It wasn’t until the Victorians began to take advantage of their literacy and the uniform Penny Post system that the sending and receiving of Valentine’s Cards became more popular, though not all were declarations of love.

 

Vinegar Valentines

To most decent people, the thought of sending degrading cards to someone you don’t like on Valentine’s Day is strangely obnoxious, but it’s been claimed that about half of Victorian Valentine's cards were either mocking or downright insulting in tone. For obvious reasons, not many of these cards survived but a few examples featured drawings and text mocking a person for being bald, alcoholic, aggressive, indiscreet or even supporting women’s suffrage.

One notable example featured an image of an approaching locomotive with the verse, ‘Oh miserable lonely wretch! Despised by all who know you. Haste, haste, your days to end -this sketch, the quickest way will show you!’

In another particularly extreme example, the Pall Mall Gazette reported the sorry of a woman sending her estranged husband an offensive valentine. It read: ‘In his anger he purchased a revolver and meeting his wife last night shot her in the neck. The woman lies in the hospital in a critical condition.’

The commercialisation of Valentine’s Day

Most of the time the phrase ‘the commercialisation of…’ has negative connotations but the popularity of Valentine's Day is almost purely down to the sending of cards. And for that, we have to thank Esther A. Howland of Massachusetts, the first person to start a successful Valentine's card business at the end of the 1840s.

The mass-produced Valentine’s card

Back in the UK, ornate and expensive Valentine’s cards could be purchased. Some examples featured intricate hand-painted detailing on embossed papers finished with silver lace and woven silks, putting them out of reach of the ordinary day-to-day citizen. So Howland, a talented artist, convinced her father to supply her with the necessary materials to make a more modest version based on the one she received from her father’s partner. They were an instant hit. The profit she turned was invested back into her business, which eventually grossed hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

In 1916, fourteen years after the death of the so-called ‘Mother of the American Valentine’, Hallmark got in on the act. By printing their Valentine’s Day cards from steel die engravings, they could produce up to 700 cards per hour, before they were hand-finished by artists and packed off for shops and stores all over the USA.

Facts about Valentine's Day

To put the popularity of Valentine's cards into some sort of context, New Yorkers mailed more than 86,000 Valentines in 1866. Now, 145 million cards are sent every year in the US alone.

And in the UK, the annual number of Valentine’s Day cards sent rose from an estimated 200,000 in the 1820s to nearly eight times that in the 1870s.

Americans spent over $20 billion on Valentine's Day gifts in 2019. On average, men spent around $291 per Valentine’s Day and women $106.

In Finland, February 14th is called ‘Ystävänpäivä’ which roughly translates as ‘friend’s day’.

 

So What is wrong with celebrating Valentine?

Why would it matter that the origin of Valentine’s Day is rooted in paganism? In this day and age, who really cares? After all, you’re just interested in doing something nice for your significant other on a day that seems to be for that purpose.

So what’s wrong with that? So what if the origin of this holiday goes back into ancient history? Would it matter if it turns out that what we consider innocent fun is actually offensive to God?

Leather strips and fertility?

First, let’s take a brief look back into the ancient history of Valentine’s Day.

The origin, though somewhat murky, is generally accepted as follows:

The ancient Roman festival Lupercalia is considered to be one precursor to Valentine’s Day. It was celebrated from Feb. 13-15 as a purification and fertility ceremony.

“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, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

“They would then strip the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year.

“Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage” 

“The Roman romantics ‘were drunk. They were naked,’ says Noel Lenski, now a religious studies professor at Yale University, told NPR in 2011. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile” 

The Dark origin of Valentine.

Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.

Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one place to start is ancient Rome.

The Romans' celebrations were violent

 

From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.

The Roman romantics "were drunk. They were naked," Noel Lenski, now a religious studies professor at Yale University, told NPR in 2011. Young women would line up for the men to hit them, Lenski said. They believed this would make them fertile.

 

The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival — or longer, if the match was right.

The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the third century. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine's Day.

As the holiday spread, it evolved

Later, Pope Gelasius I muddled things in the fifth century by combining St. Valentine's Day with Lupercalia to expel the pagan rituals. But the festival was more of a theatrical interpretation of what it had once been. Lenski added, "It was a little more of a drunken revel, but the Christians put clothes back on it. That didn't stop it from being a day of fertility and love."

Around the same time, the Normans celebrated Galatin's Day. Galatin meant "lover of women." That was likely confused with St. Valentine's Day at some point, in part because they sound alike.

 

As the years went on, the holiday grew sweeter. Chaucer and Shakespeare romanticized it in their work, and it gained popularity throughout Britain and the rest of Europe. Handmade paper cards became the tokens du jour in the Middle Ages.

Eventually, the tradition made its way to the New World. The Industrial Revolution ushered in factory-made cards in the 19th century. And in 1913, Hallmark Cards of Kansas City, Mo., began mass-producing valentines. February has not been the same since.

History also records that around A.D. 500 Pope Gelasius established St. Valentine’s Day in an attempt to convert this pagan Roman fertility festival into a Christian holiday, thus retaining its attractions and making it easier for pagan people to accept Christianity. (It is unclear as to which Valentine was being honored by this day, since there were several Catholic saints so named.)

The Roman church was astute enough to keep the game of chance alive due to its popularity. But it replaced the women’s names with names of saints. Both men and women participated in the drawing and were told for the following year to emulate the life of the saint whose name they had drawn.

But the pagan roots are still visible today.

“A common symbol of Valentine’s Day is Cupid (‘desire’), the Roman god of love. The son of Venus and Mars, he was originally depicted as a young man who would sharpen his arrows on a grindstone whetted with blood from an infant, though now he is commonly presented as a pudgy baby. This transformation occurred during the Victorian era when business owners wanted to promote Valentine’s Day as more suitable for women and children” 

What difference does it make?

In our time there’s little acknowledgment of any of the sordid history, and the emphasis is on romance and relationships. So back to the question we started with: What difference does it make?

God has given some very serious warnings in the Bible about deciding for ourselves what is right and wrong and about how He wants to be worshipped. If we care about the Word of God, we should consider how to apply those principles to the observance of Valentine’s Day. Most people consider their participation in Valentine’s Day to be harmless fun. But how we view the day might change if we care what God thinks about holidays and festivals that have their origin in ancient pagan cultures, as Valentine’s Day clearly does.

God has given some very serious warnings in the Bible about deciding for ourselves what is right and wrong and about how He wants to be worshipped. If we care about the Word of God, we should consider how to apply those principles to the observance of Valentine’s Day.

Take a look at what God says:

“Then it shall be, if you by any means forget the LORD your God, and follow other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that you shall surely perish” (Deuteronomy 8:19).

“Take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed from before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods? I also will do likewise.’ You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way; for every abomination to the LORD which He hates they have done to their gods. … Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it; you shall not add to it nor take away from it” (Deuteronomy 12:30-32).

It matters to God

God has given us many examples to show us that He hates pagan practices and celebrations, but mankind continues to ignore the warnings. We may conclude that Valentine’s Day is harmless and say that we don’t practice the original pagan traditions. But God does not take these things lightly.

 

Compilation and Appended by Letitia Marais