will you be my valenmatine?
February 14th, 2008
According to my calendar, it’s Valenmatines Day!
Where does Valentine’s Day come from anyway? Who was St. Valentine? Is this another case of the Church co-opting a big pagan day and making it their own (see Christmas, Easter, Halloween)? The BBC has a great little history of Valentine’s Day that’s pretty interesting. Turns out, no pagan stuff here, though the time is noted as traditionally being the fertility celebration time for the Greeks and Romans…the Greeks celebrating the marriage of Zeus and Hera, the Romans celebrating Lupercus, the god of fertility (also known as the "protector of flocks against wolves").
Who? Lupercus?! Well that’s right, and according to the BBC, Lupercus’s festival was traditionally celebrated with your standard goat-slaughtering, wine-drinking and dead-goat-skin-touching by fertile young girls. Now that’s a Valentine’s Day I can get behind! How did this devolve into chocolates and cards!?
There’s more info here. My favorite bit:
One of [the rituals of Lupercus] was a lottery where the names of available maidens were placed in a box and drawn out by the young men. Each man accepted the girl whose name he drew as his love – for the duration of the festival, or sometimes longer.
Roman key party!
To get to the official Valentine’s Day of Feb 14th, we get to turn instead a heart-warming story of a martyred Bishop who conducted illicit marriages in Rome in 270 AD. The Emperor at the time thought that married men made poor soldiers so he outlawed marriages for young soldiers. But feisty Bishop Valentine (it’s a Roman name?) thought marriage was part of God’s plan and married young people anyway. Nice one!
Meanwhile, back here in 2008 AD, Kanye West celebrates Valentine’s Day by posting a short, Spike Jonze-directed video for "Flashing Lights". It’s kind of great. A bit gratuitous maybe, but isn’t that what Kanye (and Valentine’s Day) is all about?
When I first started reading about Kanye, I kept calling him Kayne. I bet that happened with a lot of people.