February is the month of love; it does contain Valentine’s Day after all, but how exactly did that come to be? There is no exact knowledge of how Valentine’s Day first started, but most people believe that Valentine’s Day came about to celebrate the death and burial of Saint Valentine. Others believe that the Christian church decided to place the feast day of St. Valentine in the middle of February as a way to make the pagan holiday Lupercalia more Christian.
Lupercalia, which is celebrated on February 15, is a fertility festival which was dedicated to Faunus, the Roman God of agriculture, and Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. To begin Lupercalia, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the children of Romulus and Remus lived. They believed that the children were cared for by a she-wolf. The priests would sacrifice a goat for fertility and a dog for purification. They would strip the goats’ hide and cut it into strips, then dip the strips into the sacrificial blood and take them to the streets. They would slap both women and crop fields with the bloody goat hide. Roman women welcomed the touch, as it was believed to make them more fertile for the new year. According to legend, it was said the women would put their names in an urn that a bachelor would pick from, and the two would be paired for the year.
During the Middle Ages, it was believed in France and England that February 14 was the start of the bird’s mating season. This led to the belief that the middle of Valentine’s Day should be a day full of romance and love. The English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, was the first person to record Saint Valentine’s Day as a romantic celebration. He wrote the poem “Parliament of Foules” in 1375 which expressed the idea of Valentine’s Day. Valentine greetings were popular for a long time, but written Valentines didn’t start to appear until after the 1400s. The oldest known Valentine’s poem was made in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans. He had written the poem for his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Although there is no completely known beginning for Valentine’s Day, it is safe to say that the day has held importance for years and will continue to for many years to come.
