Lonely? No one to love? Why not come and drink heavily.

Valentine's Day advertisement in the Cambodia Daily, 
promoting Phnom Penh's Rock Hard Café

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Saint Valentine's Day, February 14

Put on that goat skin 
and be my valentine!   

by Pip Wilson  

 

This year for Valentine's Day, why not dump the sentimental cards and the dozen red roses, and do something really traditional, something that harks back to the origins of this ancient commemoration?

If you want to get right into the ancient spirit of Valentine's Day, try these party tricks. First, go with your friends to a local cave and sacrifice some goats and a dog. Find two young men of good breeding and smear their foreheads with your bloody knife, then wipe the blood off with wool soaked in milk. The youths must laugh during this.

Next, your whole party should run licentiously around town wearing the skins of said goats, and infertile townsfolk will come out on the streets to be belted by you with straps of goat-skin. This will help them have children.

At some appropriate juncture of your evening, arrange to have the names of all the females written on billets, put in a container and drawn out one at a time by the males. This will enable the sexes to pair off as lovers.

Yes, the modern practice of celebrating Valentine's Day most likely has its roots in the ancient Roman celebration of the Lupercalia, when all these weird customs were indulged. The ceremonies started in the cave where it was said Romulus and Remus, the legendary twin founders of Rome, were suckled by a she-wolf. Scholars are uncertain, but it could be from the Latin word for wolf, lupus, that the festival got its name. It could even be there is a connection with the terms wolf whistle and wolf (a rakish man), as has been suggested.

The Lupercalia was celebrated on February 15, and it is generally believed that much of its fertility and romantic significance became transferred, over the centuries, to the  Feast Day of St Valentine, February 14. (More)

 

Three Saint Valentines

There were as many as three St Valentines whose days all happened to be February 14. As with the Lupercalia, little is known about our Val. Tradition has it that he was a Christian priest of Rome, later a bishop, blessed with the ability to restore sight to the blind. He was clubbed, then beheaded, on February 14, around 279 CE in the persecution of Emperor Claudius the Goth.

The evidence of Valentine's existence is scant, but there is little reason to doubt that some such person existed, particularly as the evidence of an early cultus around him is strong. The Catholic Church, however, has little time for our Val today .

One tradition says that Valentine performed secret weddings when Claudius, thinking marriage prevented men from being good soldiers, banned them. It might partly be from this, too, that this day is associated with love.

What does seem quite certain in our search for the meaning of this day is that in medieval Europe it was widely believed that birds on this day chose their mates. Chaucer, who died in 1400, refers to this belief in The Assembly of Fowls:

For this was on Saint Valentine's Day
When ev'ry fowl cometh to choose her make (mate)

 

In later years Shakespeare, in Midsummer Night's Dream also alluded to this belief.

February 14 being in the Northern Hemisphere the approximate beginning of the Spring thaw, the birds do in fact pair up round about St Valentine's Day. This observation has influenced the device used on Valentine cards even today, of a pair of love birds snuggling up to each other.  

Customs

Certainly as early as the fifteenth century (and probably for centuries before), the British had many customs associated with romantic love for this day, and were using the word "valentine" to mean one's chosen lover. The Lupercalian practice of drawing billets inscribed with the names of the youths and maidens was the way this choice was made, and as recently as in the 1880s this was also the method in parts of America, such as Georgia.

Another way that the valentine was selected was quite simply that the first person of the opposite sex you saw on St Valentine's morning was the one, and you had to kiss that lucky person. It is for this reason of it being more a chance thing, and a party game, than an affair of the heart, that we can read in the famous diary of Samuel Pepys (February 14, 1667) that the good gentleman was quite nonchalant about his wife having a valentine:

This morning came up to my wife's bedside little Will Mercer to be her Valentine, and brought her name written upon blue paper in gold letters. 

 

(The fact that Will was diminutive in stature, and quite probably a child, doubtless assisted Samuel's calm reflection of this moment.) We note here the presence of what is obviously a Valentine card. The English invented these – there is a record of a Norfolk woman in 1477 sending her lover a note saying "To my right well beloved Voluntyne". By the seventeenth century valentines (as the cards, as well as the lovers, came to be called) were known to have the corny little doggerel verses we see today, written by the giver rather than a greeting card company hack. One example is:

Love to thee, I send these gloves
If you love me, leave out the "g"
And make a pair of loves.

 

Though chance did play a part in the selection of a valentine, who might be either a 'significant other' for the chooser, or just a friend for the year (as in the case of Mrs Pepys), romantic love (as we see in the "Snookums wuvs Piglet" style of newspaper ads each February 14) has long been a part of all this. The English poet monk, John Lydgate, who died in 1440, wrote in a poem of praise of Queen Catherine references to Valentine's Day which are just as gooey as the greeting card gems.

The greeting card craze was so big in England by 1822 that Britain's postal service had to employ extra mail sorters for the cards. By the 1860s, the folklorist Robert Chambers noted that two hundred thousand letters more than normal passed through the post office in London at this time.  

More customs

Other customs grew up around this lovers' day. In olden times people in Cumberland, England, gave pace-eggs (like Easter eggs), sometimes with cupids painted on them. An English custom popularly practised by maids was to take five bay leaves, pinning one to each corner of a pillow and the fifth to the middle; if the girl dreamed of her sweetheart she would be married before the year was out. To make the magic even stronger, she would scoop out the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, fill the void with salt, scoff it all down (shell and all) and trust that the dyspepsia thus induced would stimulate the desired dream.

In the west of England, three single young men would venture out before daylight on Valentine's Day to catch an old owl and two sparrows. If they were successful and could bring the birds to the local inn before the females of the house had risen, they were rewarded with three pots of breakfast in honour of the saint, and they could ask the same at any other house in the neighbourhood.

The British believed that rooks, birds like our crows, commenced nest building on St Valentine's Day. After the change in the calendar in 1752, the day corresponding to February 14 became February 26. Many simple folk thought they had been robbed of twelve days of income, and generally there was resistance to the calendar change.

A certain Reverend Dr Waugh liked to relate the story of his father's gardener, who told him that the "craws" (rooks) always started nest-making on February 14. The young Waugh, wishing to show off, asked the old man if the craws counted by the old or by the new style, just then introduced by Act of parliament.

The aged gardener glared at the young student contemptuously: "Young man, craws care naething for acts of parliament."  

In Australia

Similarly, today's young (and not so young) love birds "care naething" for Lupercalias and Roman bishoprics. Australia somehow escaped the Valentine's Day bug until the last three decades or so, and curiously its snowballing popularity is often denigrated as being American-inspired, somehow "unAustralian". There is a grain of truth here, but this ancient Western festival of lovers, harmless as it is, and often quite wonderful, is now part of the birthright of the whole world, and always was rightfully part of Australia's British heritage.

Happy Valentine's, young lovers, and don't let the culture KGB expropriate your long candlelit dinners or your icky poems, your supplications for forgiveness, your tears or your kisses. After all, it's your one day of the year.

 

 

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Some quotations

For this was on Saint Valentine's Day,
When ev'ry fowl cometh to choose her make (mate) ...
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345 - 1400), Canterbury Tales

Saint Valentine, thou art full high on loft,
Which driveth away the long nightes black,
Thus singen smalle foules for thy sake,
Will have they cause for to gladden oft,
Since each of them recovered hath his Make (Mate):
Full blissful may they sing, when they awake.
Chaucer, ibid

Seynte Valentine. Of custome yeere by yeere
Men have an usaunce, in this regioun,
To loke and serche Cupides kalendere,
And chose theyr choyse, by grete affeccioun;
Such as ben move with Cupides mocioun,
Takyng theyre choyse as theyr sort doth falle:
But I love oon whiche excellith alle.
John Lydgate (c. 1370 - c. 1451), English poet/monk, from a poem in praise of Queen Catherine, consort to Henry V

Muse, bid the moon awake,
Sad winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate,
This day's Saint Valentine's
Michael Drayton, English poet (1563 - 1631)

Good morrow, friends! St Valentine is past;
begin these wood-birds but to couple now?
William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, IV, i

Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your valentine!
Shakespeare, Hamlet , IV, v (Ophelia)

Grandpa Pencil's page of Shakespearean sonnets for Valentine's Day

Hail, Bishop Valentine! whose day this is;
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners.
John Donne (?1572 - 1631), an epithalamium on the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine (February 14, 1614)

Called out in the morning by Mr. Moore, whose voice my wife hearing in my dressing-chamber with me, got herself ready, and came down and challenged him for her valentine, this being the day.
Samuel Pepys (1633 - 1703), Diary, February 14, 1660 

(Valentine’s day). Up early and to Sir W. Batten’s, but would not go in till I asked whether they that opened the door was a man or a woman, and Mingo, who was there, answered a woman, which, with his tone, made me laugh; so up I went and took Mrs. Martha for my Valentine (which I do only for complacency), and Sir W. Batten he go in the same manner to my wife, and so we were very merry.
Samuel Pepys, Diary, February 14, 1661

This morning comes in W. Bowyer who was my wife's Valentine ...
Samuel Pepys , Diary, February 14, 1662  

This morning came up to my wife's bedside little Will Mercer to be her valentine, and brought her name written upon blue paper in gold letters.
Samuel Pepys, Diary, February 14, 1667

Go, little gloves, salute my Valentine
Which was, which is, which must and shall be mine.
Love to thee I send these gloves
If you love me, leave out the "g"
And make a pair of loves.
Seventeenth-century English verse on a Valentine card      

Yestreen at the valentines’ dealing,
My heart to my mou gied a sten 
For thrice I drew ane without failing,
And thrice it was written “Tam Glen”.
From a 1790 poem

Last Valentine, the day when birds of kind
Their paramours with mutual chirpings find,
I early rose just at the break of day,
before the sun had chased the stars away:
A-field I went, amid the morning dew,
To milk my kine (for so should housewives do).
Thee first I spied - and the first swain we see,
In spite of Fortune shall our true love be.
John Gay (1685 - 1732), English poet (the words are those of a rural woman)

The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own.
Elia (Charles Lamb) quoted by William Hone, The Every-Day Book, or a Guide to the Year, 1868,   p110

Knock the kettle against the van
Give us a penny if you can
We be ragged and you be fine
Please to give us a Valentine.
Up with the kettle and down the spout
Give us a penny and we'll get out. Knock the kettle against the van
Give us a penny if you can
We be ragged and you be fine
Please to give us a Valentine.
Up with the kettle and down the spout
Give us a penny and we'll get out.
Children's begging rhyme, England

Good morrow Valentine
I'll be yours
If you'll be mine
Valentine – Valentine
Traditional rhyme, England

See Grandpa Pencil's page of poems for Valentine's Day

   

Index of Articles on folklore and other topics

 

Folklore, customs, pre-Christian origins of: 

Epiphany  Candlemas/Imbolc  Hall Sunday  Collop Monday  Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day

  Ash Wednesday & Lent  Mid-Lent  Care Sunday  Painful Friday  Lazarus Saturday

  Palm Sunday  Spy Wednesday  Maundy Thursday  Good Friday  Easter Saturday  Easter

Easter Monday  Easter Tuesday  Hocktide  Ascension  Rogation Days  Whitsunday/Whitsuntide

Corpus Christi  May Day/Beltaine  Lammas/Lughnasadh  Michaelmas  Halloween/Samhain

Martinmas  Advent  Christmas Eve  Christmas  More at Articles Index

Hundreds of feast days of saints, gods and goddesses at Wilson's Almanac Book of Days

St Brendan's amazing voyage

The 'Seven Sleepers' saints

Saint Martin and Martinmas (Hollantide)

Lady Day; strange Tichborne lore; the penitent thief

Saints Medard and Swithin: rain prognostication

Sacred Cave of Rome's Founders Discovered, Archaeologists Say

 

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