Fun_People Archive
10 Feb
The Origins of Valentine's Day.

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 99 13:33:34 -0800
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: The Origins of Valentine's Day.

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649
X-http://www.langston.com/psl-bin/Fun_People.cgi
Forwarded-by: Nev Dull <nev@bostic.com>
Forwarded-by: Roland Grefer <btirg@ui.uis.doleta.gov>
Forwarded-by: "Farrukh Imran Younus" <farrukh@safamarwa.webstar.co.uk>
[True source unknown.  -psl]

	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 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...."

© 1999 Peter Langston