People all over the world celebrate Valentine’s Day on the
14th of February, but few people ask why we do so. Most of my
friends are unaware of the story behind this centuries-old ritual, but they are
so eagerly looking forward to enjoying it. This is just an attempt to put the day into perspective, especially
for those conservative people in society who look upon the day with suspicion
and disgust.
Valentine’s Day or St Valentine’s Day is celebrated to
commemorate the death of St Valentine. It is not very clear who Saint Valentine
actually was. There are about three Valentines who were martyred and mystery
shrouds the fact as to who among these three is honoured by the celebration of
Valentine’s Day. Valentine of Rome, a priest in Rome, was martyred in AD 269;
Valentine of Terni was the bishop of Interamna (modern Terni) and is said to
have been martyred during the persecution under Emperor Aurelian; and there is
also a mention of a Valentine who was martyred on the 14th of
February in Africa. None of the biographies of these men mention any romantic
element about any of these Valentines, but by the 14th century
Valentine’s Day was associated with romance and the distinction between the
three Valentines had been completely lost.
Several legends abound as to the origins of Valentine’s Day.
The most popular legend refers to a 3rd century Christian priest in
Rome named Valentine. During the reign of Emperor Claudius II of Rome, marriage
among young people was outlawed as the emperor came to believe that single men
made better soldiers than married ones. But Valentine went on performing secret
marriages among young couples. When the emperor came to learn of this, he put
Valentine to death – somewhere around AD 269. Another legend talks of Valentine
being put to death trying to assist Christians in escaping Roman prisons where
they were tortured. Legend also has it that Valentine sent the first
Valentine’s Day greeting while he was imprisoned to – most probably – the
daughter of the jailer, who visited him every day in the prison, and with whom
he had fallen in love. It is also said that this girl had been blind and
Valentine cured her of her blindness. It is said that this greeting was signed,
“From your Valentine”, a phrase that is still very alive.
But the celebration of the month of February as a month of
romance has a much deeper root in the rituals of pre-Christian Rome. Many
believe that the celebration of Valentine’s Day can be traced back to the
celebrations of Lupercalia in Rome. Lupercalia was celebrated around the 13-15
February and was essentially a fertility cult dedicated to Faunus, the Roman
god of agriculture, as well as to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.
An order of the Roman priests, called the Luperci, gathered
on that day at a secret cave that was believed to have been the cave in which
infant Romulus and Remus were cared for by a she-wolf or lupa, and sacrificed a
goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. The goat’s hide would be then
stripped into strips and dipped in the sacrificial blood. The priests would then
take to the streets, gently slapping women and crop fields with the strips as
it was believed that the touch would make them more fertile. Legend has it that
on that day, all the young women of the city placed their names in a big urn,
from which the city’s bachelors drew a name and became paired with the woman
for the year. This often ended in marriage.
Lupercalia prevailed during the early part of Christianity,
but it was deemed “un-Christian” and outlawed during the 5th
century, when Pope Gelasius I declared the 14th of February as St
Valentine’s Day in AD 496. Valentine’s Day became associated with love much
later, and at the time was believed by many in France and England to be the
beginning of the mating season for birds. On the other hand, Valentine’s Day
greetings were popular during the Middle Ages, but the first written greetings
that we have today is a poem from 1415, written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to
his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture
at the Battle of Agincourt. It is said that Valentine’s Day first became
associated with Romantic love during the time of Geoffrey Chaucer when the
tradition of courtly love flourished. A verse by Chaucer refers to the day and
he is often seen as the first person who associated romantic love with
Valentine’s Day. The day has been deleted from the General Roman Calendar of Saints
in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, but many churches continue to celebrate the day.
Valentine’s Day began to be popular in Great Britain around
the 17th century, and by the 18th century it became a
common practice for friends and lovers to exchange tokens of affection (called
valentine) and hand-written notes. By the beginning of the 20th
century, due to the improvement in printing technology, cheap postal rates and
social prohibition on direct expression of one’s feelings, printed cards began
to be popular. In America, hand-written greetings became popular during the
early 18th century, but it was Esther A. Howland, known as the
“Mother of the Valentine”, who made printed cards popular during the 1840s. At
present, the Greeting Card Association claims that an estimated 1 billion
Valentine’s Day cards are sold every year, with women buying 85% of those.
Another piece of information that I came across in Wikipedia
is that “the modern cliché Valentine's Day poem can be found in the collection
of English nursery rhymes Gammer Gurton's Garland (1784):
The rose is red, the violet's
blue
The honey's sweet, and so are you
Thou are my love and I am thine
I drew thee to my Valentine
The lot was cast and then I drew
And Fortune said it shou'd be you.”
Courtsey: The Internet, especially Wikipedia.
Charles The library at Charles Dickens' house.
