Valentine's Day: A Glimpse of History

People all over the world celebrate Valentine’s Day on the 14^th 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 14^th of February in Africa. None of the biographies of these men mention any romantic element about any of these Valentines, but by the 14^th 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 3^rd 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 5^th century, when Pope Gelasius I declared the 14^th 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 17^th century, and by the 18^th 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 20^th 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 18^th 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.