Valentine’s Day, Pagan style.
No one really knows anything about Saint Valentine. In fact, it’s possible that he wasn’t even one person and that that Valentine’s Day actually commemorates two separate saints, or maybe even three. All that’s really certain is that Saint Valentine was a Catholic. And that he was killed.
In fact, an early pope described Valentine as one of a number of saints “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.” That seems a bit shoddy to me in terms of justification, but at least it’s better than the current system of saint-making. The process of canonizing today would make even the most credulous person wince.
In sum, the process goes thus: a bishop gives the prospective saint the title “Servant of God,” which qualifies him or her to be considered by the Curia, and then by the pope. The pope can confer the title ”Venerable,” which is roughly equivalent to, say, level 50 in World of Warcraft, but only if the candidate possesses “heroic virtue.”
According to Wikipedia, no miracles are necessary to get up to Venerable, but to go further along, miracles are required. To help along with the process of miracle-getting, prayer cards are distributed with pictures of the Venerated and admonitions to pray to the candidate for a miracle. One miracle yields Beatification, and two miracles is a ticket to Sainthood. You get one miracle off if you died for the faith.
Mother Teresa, probably the best known Catholic figure of the last century, so far has one recognized miracle to her name: a tumor of an Indian woman that was reabsorbed into the body. As a miracle this is dubious since tumors are reabsorbed all the time without the intervention of shriveled Albanian women, but no one is really objecting to the addition of Teresa to the canon.
The miracles have become a bit of an embarrassment for the Vatican it seems; the sort of thing everyone is obligated to believe in, but that no one really believes in other than the hysterical people who drive out to the middle of the Mojave Desert and take pictures of the sun with Polaroid cameras. Other “miraculous cures” recently counted towards Sainthood: cancer, cancer, more cancer, Parkinson’s, cancer, cancer, and stomach ache.
It’s too bad it isn’t possible to dispense with miracles altogether, but it’s easy to see why the Church is leery of starting down that road. With all the shuffling of feet and polite looking away that accompanies modern sainthood (not to mention the marketing strategy that seems to have created saints such as Gianna Beretta Molla, canonized in 2004 as effectively the patron saint of the modern pro-life movement), it seems much easier to enjoy saints about whom nothing is known. It’s much easier to assign miracle stories to them without actually having to listen to people who actually believe they’ve experienced actual miracles.
And Saint Valentine has been enjoyed by lovebirds, greeting card companies, and hoards of the pious ever since Chaucer first mentioned him in the context of romantic love in “Parliament of Fowls”: “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day/When every bird comes there to choose his mate.”
Chaucer wasn’t referring to February; he was referring to May. But perhaps confusion was understandable, because Valentine’s Day, like virtually every Christian holiday, falls on the same day as a Pagan festival. In this case the festival was called Lupercalia. It was originally celebrated not by the exchange of chocolates and flowers, but by the sacrifice of young men dressed in the skins of goats.
Probably the original Lupercalia wasn’t as cheerful as the modern Valentine’s Day, but it’s possible to see the modern sentiment shining through. In later festivals, two actual goats, rather than two boys dressed as goats, were sacrificed (along with a dog, for some reason), and then the young men in goatskins were merely smeared with blood. Again according to Wikipedia, “they were expected to smile and laugh,” presumably while hoping against hope that no one changed his mind about the efficacy of goat sacrifices.
It was Pope Gelasius I who finally got fed up with the whole thing, banned Lupercalia, and replaced it with a feast day for Saint Valentine. Probably people didn’t see it as too much of an improvement.
Augustus Caesar built a spectacular domed and mosaicked cavern (still existing today), which he used for Lupercalia parties. The highlight of the ceremony took place after the sacrifice, when men dressed themselves in goat skins, cut slabs of meat from the sacrificed goats, and then ran around the perimeter of Rome’s Palatine Hill, smacking women and girls with them.
The ceremony might have ensured fertility, but it also enraged Gelasius, who finally managed to get it banned and replaced with a feast day for the Tomb of the Unknown Saint.
No one has yet attributed any propensity to meat-whacking to Saint Valentine, but we’ve done our best to make the holiday more interesting ourselves, trying (and failing) to make the holiday equally fun sans goats. Valentine is now the patron saint of birds, beekeepers, epileptics, those who fall down a lot, the plague, greeting card manufacturers, and, of course, love.
Most commonly, Valentine’s act of sainthood is civil disobedience of a law forbidding marriage, but there isn’t any indication that any such law ever existed. Instead of giving women the gift of fertility by smacking them with a slab of goat meat, men now give women chocolates and flowers (in Japan the name of the holiday literally translates to “obligation to give chocolate”).
I guess you win some and you lose some. But when you give your beau a gift today, you can thank Pope Gelasius that you’re not chasing her naked through the streets with a handful of raw meat.
Sam Jack ’11 (sjack@fas) whacks people with slabs of goat all the…never mind.