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The real score about Valentineâs Day |
2004-02-13 |
Found this yesterday. Off-topic but seasonal. Feel free to remove if needed Fred. EFL. âIF you must write about Valentineâs Day,â my wife Leonor admonished me the other day, âdonât be a spoilsport. By all means take a break from your grammar columns, but donât try to take away the romance from Valentineâs.â --snip-- âNot with this one, Leonor. I have a new thesis: that people should thank their lucky stars they can celebrate Valentineâs Day not so different from how the ancient Romans did it. As you know, those people started it all almost a thousand years before the Christian evangelists came to Europe. They had this much-awaited love festival on February 14, precisely the same day as todayâs Valentineâs Day. It went by another name, of course. They called it the Lupercalia.â âUmm...interesting,â Leonor said. âTell me more about it.â âThe Lupercalia, in plain English, was the âFeast of the Wolf-God.â It was an ancient fertility rite in honor of a god who protected sheep from the wolves. Its high point was a mating game, a lottery for young, unmarried men and women. The organizers would write the names of qualified, interested women on small pieces of parchment, then drop them into a big vase. Each qualified male drew one piece from the vase, and the woman whose name was on that piece became his date or âsteadyâ for one whole year.â âThat simple? Unacquainted couples were paired with no courtship, no legal and religious mumbo-jumbo?â âYes, Leonor, and they had a whole year to find out if they were temperamentally and sexually compatible. If they were, of course, they married and raised a family.â âHow wonderfully uncomplicated, but how unromantic! And my heart bleeds for the young couples that had an eye for each other beforehand. With, say, 1,000 womenâs names in that lottery, the probability of a woman getting picked by a man she already liked would be next to zilch; so were the chances of a young man picking the woman he really liked. And the chances of a mutually attracted pair being mated? Thatâs 1/1,000 multiplied by 1/1,000 or one in a million, right?â âRight, Leonor! A priori romances simply couldnât bloom unless the partners decided to mutually violate the rules. But there was one good thing going for that lottery, I think: it leveled the playing field for love and procreation. It must have exquisitely churned and enriched the gene pool of the ancient Romans.â âMaybe so, but donât you think their ritual was so elemental, so...shall we say, âuncivilizedâ?â âThatâs saying it mildly, Leonor. It scandalized the early Christian missionaries. They found it decadent, immoral, and, of course, unchristian. So they tried to change it by frying it with its own fat, so to speak.â âHow?â âWell, the clerics simply revoked the practice of writing the names of young, unmarried women on the pieces of parchment. They wrote on them the names of the Christian saints instead. And you know what they offered to the young, unmarried man who picked the name of a particular saint?â âWhat?â âThe privilege of emulating the virtues of that saint for one whole year.â That sounds fun..... âWhat spoilsports, those clerics! Why would any sensible lover whether male or female want to play that sort of game? For Peteâs sake, that lottery was for love and romance and chance encounters, not for sainthood!â âThatâs right, so the Romans resisted the new mechanics and stuck to the old. It was two centuries before the evangelists again tried to stamp out the Lupercalia in a big way. In 490 A.D., Pope Gelasius canonized a Roman by the name of Valentine. He was, by tradition, a priest martyred 220 years before for violating a ban on performing marriages during wartime. Valentine was stoned to death on a February 14, Lupercalia Day, so his feast day was conveniently made to coincide with it. In a sense, the clerics finally succeeded in Christianizing the ancient rites, but only in name and only edgewise, in a manner of speaking. As history would prove, no power on earth could stamp out its earthly and earthy attractions.â âYouâve got a lovely story there,â Leonor said, âand you kept your promise of not being a spoilsport. So Happy Valentineâs Day, my love!â âFor you, Leonor, Happy Lupercleâs Day just this once, OK?â |
Posted by:CrazyFool |
#2 Nice article, but Lupercalia was celebrated on February 15, not 14. And the ritual described in the article in no way resembles what really went on: http://lonestar.texas.net/~robison/lupercalia.html http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/lupercalia.html http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/dunkle/romnlife/luprclia.htm |
Posted by: growler 2004-2-13 4:20:17 PM |
#1 Thnx,CF,, such an enlighting article. For example; Each qualified male drew one piece from the vase, and the woman whose name was on that piece.... So now we know where the term getting a piece comes from. |
Posted by: GK 2004-2-13 2:40:26 PM |