Our Day of Love: Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is loosely connected with the ancient Roman holiday, Lupercalia, celebrated on February 15th. Rome's earliest inhabitants were shepherds who shared the wilderness with wolf packs. Not surprisingly, these pastoral people worshipped a deity named Lupercus, who watched over shepherds and flocks. This festival took place in an era before calendars -- before the month of February even existed.

Each spring, the Luperci priests gathered at the cave of Lupercal to honor twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, who (according to legend), were nursed by a mother wolf. Another ritual of Lupercalia honored a rural god Faunus who, like the Greek god Pan, was a god of crops and herds. This ceremony involved animal sacrifice and the animals' blood was smeared on the foreheads of young boys of noble birth. The boys were then ordered to run through the streets, laughing out loud and lashing anyone they encountered with thongs made from the hides, called februa.

Young women reportedly welcomed the lashes, known as februatio, believing this ritual would assure fertility. The month of February came from these words, which mean to purify. Long after Rome had become a powerful empire, Lupercalia continued to be an important festival -- except its focus evolved, switching devotions to a more popular female deity. It was now Juno, the goddess of women and marriage, who would be honored on February 15th with a lottery where boys and girls were paired. Names of maidens were placed in a box or vase and were drawn by young men. The two were then considered partners for the festival's duration, sometimes for an entire year. Often the pairing resulted in love and marriage for the young couple.

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.

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.

The History of Valentine's Greetings

Verses and romantic greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, when lovers said or sang their valentines. Written valentines began to appear after 1400. The oldest "valentine" in existence was made in the 1400s; it's in the British Museum. In 1537, King Henry the Eighth declared that February 14 was "Saint Valentine's Day" by Royal Charter.

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.

By the 18th century, British sweethearts were exchanging hand-crafted greeting cards; these grew in popularity and were given in place of valentine gifts. The French were trimming their oversized paper hearts with yards and yards of real lace. Early valentines were homemade, fashioned by hand with colored paper, watercolors, and colored inks. In America, Valentine's Day did not become a tradition until around the Civil War [1861-65].

Finally, love went retail. Miss Esther Lowland is credited with developing the first commercial valentines. She is reputed to have earned $5,000 her first year in business. This was in the 1840s when $5,000 was a great deal of money. More elaborate cards began to be produced at home -- garnished with satin ribbons, spun glass, lace, dried flowers, mother-of-pearl trinkets -- then sold in stores. Valentine's Day became so popular it rivalled Christmas for expense and attention.

Handmade valentines varied. They included:

Acrostic valentines: verses whose first lines spelled out a beloved's name;
Cut-out valentines: made by folding the paper several times, then cutting out a lacelike design with small, sharp, pointed scissors;
Pinprick valentines: made by pricking tiny holes in a paper with a pin or needle to create the look of lace;
Theorem or Poonah valentines: designs that were painted through a stencil cut in oil paper, a style that came from the Orient;
Rebus valentines: verses in which tiny pictures take the place of some of the words (for example, an eye would take the place of the word "I");
Puzzle Purse valentines: a folded puzzle to read and refold. Among their many folds were verses that had to be read in a certain order;
Fraktur valentines: had ornamental lettering in the style of the medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Eventually, valentines began to be mass-assembled in a plant. Early manufactured valentines were black and white pictures, painted by factory workers. Fancy valentines were made with real lace and ribbons; paper lace was introduced later in the 1800s. By the late 1800s, valentines were being made entirely by machine. In the early 1900s, a card company named Norcross began to produce valentines. Hallmark owns a collection of rare antique valentines and occasionally displays them.

Who's This Cupid Fellow?

His name Cupid is derived from Latin -- Cupido -- a personification of cupido, meaning desire. He was the Roman God of Love, and is usually identified with Eros, his Greek equivalent, from whose name comes the word erotic.

Cupid's arrows come in two varieties. Cupid's Golden Arrow generally refers to true love while Cupid's Leaden Arrow represents wanton, sensual passion.

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