Recently, I received an email from a friend. She wrote in her short note that she has learned that men face the same biological clock that women face. We are both thirty-five and neither of us are looking to have children. This puts both of us at odds with the the other 99% of straight humanity (statistic from Pulled It Out My Ass Polling Services). It, however, doesn’t mean that we do not want the other things that the masses want: passionate and stable relationships. It also means that we face Valentine’s Day differently than the masses. Why is the question. I can’t speak for her, but I do have some idea about myself.
Valentine’s Day is a concoction. Everyone knows that. But it’s history goes back further than the middle of the 1800′s. Are you surprised by that number? Try ancient Rome and the Lupercalia (traditionally February 15th). This day of love sung by troubadours romancing the European court ladies has roots older than Christianity. This means that “Singles Awareness Day” (I love that euphemism) is a deep-seeded part of the Western collective unconscious. Worse yet, the Catholics co-opted the Roman celebration and entangled a few obscure footnote saints to insure that it stuck.
The Lupercalia celebrates Lupercus, a goatskin clad fertility deity. Priests would sacrifice and skin a goat, then run through the streets with the bloody skin. Women would rush the skins hoping to be touched by the bloody hide. This was to insure that they would produce children. PETA would have a field day with this version of the holiday.
To tone down the celebrations that were still being followed well into the early Roman Catholic history, the Church pronounced a feast day celebrating St. Valentine and St. George and other men who were only remembered in name. This holiday was declared to occur on, you guessed it, February 14th. This didn’t start until the end of the fifth century AD. What gets muddy is which St. Valentine. There are three on record. None of them have any kind of extensive bios in the Who’s Who of Saints (aka – the Catholic Encyclopedia). Coincidentally, though, all three were martyrs (most saints are martyrs) and their great acts of faith and devotion are all ascribed to 02/14. As of 1969, the Catholic church no longer celebrates St. Valentine’s day. The events of the lives of these saints are apocryphal at best and the Vatican decided it best to only celebrate dates of well-documented saints.
This lapse of historical content didn’t keep the rest of Europe from celebrating the holiday though. In the 19th century, the vatican donated relics of St. Valentine to Dublin, Ireland. Relics are also supposedly in Roquemaure, France and Stephansom, Vienna. In Dublin, a gold casket carrying the relics are transported through town in celebration of the young and those in love. In 1989, Roquemaure created La Fête du Baiser, the kissing festival, occuring the Saturday after Valentine’s Day. Roquemaure history recounts the miraculous healing of grape vines four years after the arrival of St. Valentine’s relics in 1868.All this history is well and good. It even provides solid grounds for this holiday that causes mass hysteria in the addle-brained love lorn. But it doesn’t account for the mass commercialism. That didn’t begin until the 14th century when the era of humanism and courtly love were just beginning to flourish. From that point on, secular, rather than spiritual, love would be the main focus of the holiday. Songs, poetry, art all would focus on the passions of ancient kings and queens and the trysts of the gods. By the 19th century, the English custom of exchanging anonymous cards professing amour would transplant itself to the United States. At which point all hell breaks loose.
The next thing we know we are hip deep in chocolates and moonie-eyed teddy bears. The holiday has become a ridiculous caricature. Another western holiday with lost and muddied roots. Each generation defines it according to the sentiments of the day. With generation-x (my generation), it is attacked by the bitter lonely and covered in gelatinous sucrose by the 99-percenters. And after the superficial research I have done a ‘la Wikipedia.org (see the links below), I have come to my own conclusions.
This holiday, wether celebrated by the spiritual or secular, is about passion. The Saints Valentine died for their beliefs. Women rushing to meet the Lupercunian priests wanted deeply to bare children. The artists and troubadours of the middle-ages wanted to recount the acts of golden and lost ages. For all of them, each age wanted to celebrate passion. This is my vision of the holiday. It is the day that I tell family, friends, and those that share some aspect of my beliefs that I love them and that I want them to continue to live passionately for each other and for themselves. Valentine’s Day is the day that I remind myself what I live for – art and passion.
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