Why? Why? Why? The flowers, the chocolates, the cards....
Who brought us to this state?
Well, sorry, but nobody really knows:
The origin of St. Valentine, and how many St. Valentines there were, remains a mystery. One opinion is that he was a Roman martyred for refusing to give up his Christian faith. Other historians hold that St. Valentine was a temple priest jailed for defiance during the reign of Claudius. Whoever he was, Valentine really existed because archaeologists have unearthed a Roman catacomb and an ancient church dedicated to Saint Valentine.
The Valentine of whom I'm most fond might not have been a saint at all, but possibly the bishop of Rome and definitely one of the fathers of Gnosticism. There is a certain romance to his theology, which was part of mainstream Christianity from 200 to 600 A.D.:
All Valentinians agree that God incorporates both masculine and feminine characteristics. This is in opposition to traditional Jewish and orthodox Christian descriptions of God in exclusively masculine terms. According to most sources, the Father (or Parent)can be understood as a male-female dyad. This is related to the notion that God provides the universe with both form and substance.
So maybe it's his fault.
It's more likely to have been one of three martyrs who died horribly (as martyrs do) for their faith.
Thebest known of these helped shelter fellow Christians during the two-year reign of Emperor Claudius II Gothicus, also known as Claudius the Cruel. This was well before Constantine founded the Holy Roman Empire, and was sort of the run-up to the persecutions of Diocletian. This Valentine was tossed into prison for conducting weddings -- Claudius had banned all such unions because he needed lots of single men to become soldiers to help him conquer the natives of northern Europe. He also mandated worship of the gods of Rome because, hey, every little bit of patriotic fervor (and supernatural aid) counts. Secret weddings by Christian priests were a double no-no.
Once jailed, Valentine reputedly cured his jailer's daughter of blindness and (possibly) earned the friendship of the emperor, but took things one step too far when he tried to convert Claudius to Christianity.
Claudius had him dragged out to the Flaminian Gate (now called the Porta del Popolo) and clubbed -- one hungry guy in a robe versus a bunch of beefy soldiers with heavy sticks.
He wasn't quite dead by the time their arms got tired, so they chucked stones at him. That didn't kill him either, so eventually they just cut off his head.
That did the trick.
What was left of his body wound up in a reliquary in Dublin, Ireland, if you really want to go see him (or a, um, vessel stained with his blood).
As usual, church fathers chose to celebrate the marriage-minded martyr on the 14th of February because of an older pagan celebration of Lupercalia, in honor of Februata Juno, a kind of sacred swingers' holiday:
On the Ides of February, or Feb. 15, in a holiday called the "Feast of the Wolf" (or Feast of Lupercalius), Februata Juno would call forth the animals from their winter hibernation...In an act symbolic of awakening animals from their hibernation, and to honor Februata Juno, on Feb. 15 young woman would place their names in an urn, from which young boys would draw a name. The couples would then be sexual partners for the day, and sometimes for the rest of their lives.
February was consecrated to angry Mars and regal, motherly Juno -- a time of passion and fertility, but not exactly romance :
This was a time of purification and religious celebration. As with the rest of the month of February, the object of much of the ceremony was the remembrance and honor of deceased ancestors, as well as the celebration of fertility and the coming Spring. Luper relates to lupus, or the wolf which popular myth held had reared Romulus and Remus.The rites of this day included the sacrifice of a goat or a dog at the cave-grotto known as the Lupercal. With the sacrificial blood wiped across their foreheads, the youth partaking in this ceremony would then run the circumference of the Palatine hill, perhaps about 5K, tracing the traditional route of the city boundary traced by Romulus the day he founded Rome. In the process, girls who approached the runners would be brushed or splattered with the februa, thongs of sacrificial goatskin, presumably bloody, symbolically blessing them with fertility.
Actually, according to some sources, those februa were more than just "brushing" the girls as the runners went by. These bloody thongs, known as "instruments of purification," were dipped in milk and wielded by the runners as whips, who used them to lash the female spectators.
It was these short whips that gave their name to the month of February.
Now, does it all make sense?
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