A LOOK AT LOVE

Love can be complicated, so it’s no surprise that the story behind why we celebrate Valentine’s Day is the same.

We celebrate Valentine's Day with flowers and chocolate but it began as a pagan ritual for purification and fertility with the sacrifice of animals.

Love thongs?

Lupercus was an ancient Italian pagan divinity who was said to be the god of shepherds and fertility. In Roman mythology, Luprical was a she-wolf that took care of infants Romulus and Remus, who became the founders of Rome. A festival was held every February to celebrate them. Two goats and a dog were sacrificed and young men ran about in thongs made of goatskins. Women who had no children would line up to have their hands hit by goat skin straps.

Also in Roman mythology, Cupid was the god of love and fertility. The Romans celebrated the Lupercalia festival in February even after the empire banned all non-Christian cults and festivals in 391 A.D. Enter St. Valentine

St. Valentine was added to the calendar of saints by Pope Gelasius in 496. The reason we celebrate Valentine's Day on Feb. 14 (same as Lupercalia) is it's the date he would not renounce his Christianity and was executed. His story is little-known and so many questions remain that in 1969, the Roman Catholic Church removed St. Valentine from the general Roman calendar. The church does recognize him as a saint by Roman martyrology.

There are several stories about Valentine, including his healing of a jailer's blind daughter and his secretly held marriages, but facts are few. The Catholic Church says, “The romantic nature of Valentine's Day may have derived during the Middle Ages, when it was believed that birds paired couples in mid-February. According to English 18th-century antiquarians Alban Butler and Francis Douce, Valentine's Day was most likely created to overpower the pagan holiday, Lupercalia.”