Subject: The Origin of Valentine's Day
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 23:25:10 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: Jim Roberts
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup" <heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
Subject: The Origins of Valentine's Day
This was sent to me by my friend John, a Torah-observant believer in the
Portland, OR area:
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From: E. John Benson
To: Jim Roberts
Subject: The Origins of Valentine's Day
Did you know: The Origins of Valentine's Day ????
St. Valentine's Day: 5th Century Rome
"...The Catholic Church's attempt to paper over a popular pagan fertility
rite with the clubbing death and decapitation of one of its own martyrs
is the origin of this lovers' holiday.
As early as the fourth century B.C., the Romans engaged in an annual
young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage
women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men;
thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual
entertainment and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year,
after which another lottery was staged. Determined to put an
end to this eight-hundred-year-old practice, the early church fathers
sought a "lovers'' saint to replace the deity Lupercus.
They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been
martyred some two hundred years earlier.
In Rome in A.D. 270, Valentine had enraged the mad emperor the mad
emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage.
Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they were
loath to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so
Claudius, never one to fear unpopularity, abolished marriage.
Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young lovers to come to him in
secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius
learned of this "friend of lovers," and had the bishop brought to the
palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and
conviction, attempted to convert him to the Roman gods, to save him
from otherwise certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce
Christianity and imprudently attempted to convert the emperor. On
February 24, 270, Valentine was clubbed, stoned, then beheaded.
History also claims that while Valentine was in prison awaiting execution,
he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his
unswerving faith, he miraculously restored her sight. He signed a farewell
message to her "From Your Valentine," a phrase that would live long after
its author died.
>From the Church's standpoint, Valentine seemed to be the ideal candidate
to usurp the popularity of Lupercus. So in A.D. 496, a stern Pope Gelasius
outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival. But he was clever enough to
retain the lottery, aware of Romans' love for games of chance. Now into
the box that had once held the names of available and willing single
women were placed the names of saints. Both men and women extracted
slips of paper, and in the ensuing year they were expected to emulate the
life of the saint whose name they had drawn. Admittedly, it was a different
game, with different incentives; to expect a woman and draw a saint must
have disappointed many a Roman male. The spiritual overseer of
the entire affair was its patron saint, Valentine. With reluctance, and the
passage of time, more and more Romans relinquished their pagan
festival and replaced it with the Church's holy day.
Valentine Cards
Traditionally, mid-February was a Roman time to meet and court prospective
mates. The Lupercian lottery (under penalty of mortal sin), Roman young men
did institute the custom of offering women they admired and wished to court
handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards acquired St.
Valentine's name:
As Christianity spread, so did the Valentine's Day card. The earliest
extant card was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife while
he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. It is now in the British Museum.
In the sixteenth century, St. Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, attempted
to expunge the custom of cards and reinstate the lottery of saints' names.
He felt that Christians had become wayward and needed models to
emulate. However, this lottery was less successful and shorter-lived than
Pope Gelasius's. And rather than disappearing, cards proliferated and
became more decorative. Cupid, the naked cherub armed with arrows
dipped in love potion, became a popular valentine image. He was
associated with the holiday because in Roman mythology he is the
son of Venus, goddess of love and beauty.
By the seventeenth century, handmade cards were oversized and
elaborate, while store-bought ones were smaller and costly. In 1797,
a British publisher issued "The Young Man's Valentine Writer," which
contained scores of suggested sentimental verses for the young lover
unable to compose his own. Printers had already begun producing a
limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called "mechanical
valentines," and a reduction in postal rates in the next century ushered
in the less personal but easier practice of mailing valentines.
That, in turn, made it possible for the first time to exchange cards
anonymously, which is taken as the reason for the sudden appearance
of racy verse in an era otherwise prudishly Victorian. The burgeoning
number of obscene valentines caused several countries to ban the
practice of exchanging cards. In Chicago, for instance, late in the
nineteenth century, the post office rejected some twenty-five thousand
cards on the ground that they were not fit to be carried through
the U.S. mail.
The first American publisher of valentines was printer and artist Esther
Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870's cost from five to ten
dollars, with some selling for as much as thirty-five dollars. Since that
time, the valentine card business has flourished. With the exception
of Christmas, Americans exchange more cards on Valentine's Day
than at any other time of the year...."
The above stories are quouted from "Panati's Extraordinary Origins of
Everyday things, Charles Panati, Harper & Row Publishers,New York,
NY 1987 pp 50-52
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