What is the Origin of Valentine’s day

February 14, the day most lovers express their love to each other by exchanging gifts and affection. But, what if I told you that the origin of Valentine’s day, one of the most celebrated days of the year had quite a peculiar origin and had nothing to do with love.

Pagans origins, maybe?

Nobody can really pinpoint when it all started but Valentine’s day has been associated with the roman festival called Lupercalia in which young men would run the street, drunk and half-naked, after hitting the women with the skin of goats or dogs they have just slain. The women actually lined up to be whipped because they believed that the practice enhanced fertility. Afterwards, a matchmaking lottery was drawn, and the couple then would coupled during the rest of the festivities. Apparently, the Pope Gelasius forbade the festival and replaced it by the more austere martyred St Valentine.

The Valentine martyrs

Origin of Valentine’s day may have been found in the writings of Belgium Monks in the catholic church. They were called the Bollandists who recorded the lives of the saints. They wrote about the stories of a handful of “Valentini,” including the earliest three of whom died in the third century.

The earliest Valentinus is said to have died in Africa, along with 24 soldiers. Unfortunately, little is known about him.

We know only a little more about the other two Valentines

According to a late medieval legend ,a Roman priest named Valentinus was arrested during the reign of Emperor Gothicus and put into the custody of an aristocrat named Asterius. As the story goes,  Asterius made a bargain with Valentinus: If the Christian could cure Asterius’s foster-daughter of blindness, he would convert. Valentinus cured the girl and Astrious and his whole family were baptized.

Unfortunately, when Emperor Gothicus heard the news, he ordered them all to be executed. But Valentinus was the only one to be beheaded. He was buried at the site of his matyrdom in Rome.

The third Valentinus was a bishop of Terni in the province of Umbria, Italy. According to his equally muddled legend, Terni’s bishop got into a situation similar to the other Valentinus and was beheaded on the orders of Emperor Gothicus.

Two different versions of the Same Story?

It is likely, as the Bollandists suggested, that there weren’t actually two decapitated Valentines, but that two different versions of one saint’s legend appeared in both Rome and Terni.

Nonetheless, African, Roman or Umbrian, none of the Valentines seems to have been a romantic.

However, origin of valentine’s days, through legends had St. Valentine performing Christian marriage rituals or passing notes between Christian lovers jailed by Gothicus. Yet, none of these medieval tales had any basis in third-century history, as the Bollandists pointed out.

Many churches in mediaval time claimed to possess bits of a St valentinus’ skull in their treasuries. Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, for example, still displays a whole skull. In 11th- century, it is rumored that a valentines skull was used to cure all sorts of illnesses. However, as far as we know, though, the saint’s bones did nothing special for lovers.

Chaucer and the love birds

The love connection may have appeared more than a thousand years after the martyrs’ death, when Geoffrey Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales” decreed the February feast of St. Valentinus to the mating of birds. Soon, nature-minded European nobility began sending love notes during bird-mating season which might have occurred more in February in those days.

In the following centuries, Englishmen used Feb. 14 to write poem to their love interest. Shakespeare helped romanticize valentine’s day in his work. With the rise of capitalism, cards adorned with unctuous poetry were mass-produced and chocolate manufacturers galvanized sweets for one’s sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.

There you have it. If someone asks you to be his or her valentine today, be happy that the request does not ask for your head as well.

Happy Valentine’s day.

XoXo, JP