Esoteric Coffeehouse

We’re barely out of the Chinese New Year and the next celebration is almost here: Valentine’s Day. Since I can’t miss an opportunity to investigate a festival’s origins and mythology, I will proceed without much further ado.

A quick search on the internet will immediately inform you that the Valentine’s Day originates from the Roman festival of Lupercalia. But what was Lupercalia and how did it evolve into our modern Valentine’s Day?

In its classical manifestation, Lupercalia (“The Wolf Festival”) was a bizarre ritual where skimpily clad young men would run around whipping women with goat skin thongs. The women were also almost naked (1). The running men were called Luperci, the wolf people, and were divided into two “colleges” (2). The festival had enough importance to have Julius Caesar establish a third college, the Iuliani, which was first headed by his loyal general, Mark Anthony, of Cleopatra fame (3). The celebration perpetuated well into Christian Rome, before an archbishop of Rome forbade it.

Despite the fact that numerous Roman writers left testimonials about the Lupercalia, scholars are divided about the origins and meanings of this tradition. For instance, it is not clear what god was celebrated at the Lupercalia, if any at all. Some writers associated the celebration with the Luperca, the she-wolf who fed the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus (4). Other times it was associated with Evander, a legendary Greek hero who came to Rome from Arcadia (5). Most often, however, the celebration was associated with the god Pan, or Faunus as the Romans called it (6). In light of evidence, this is by far the most likely possibility.

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These days if you turn on National Geographic or the Discovery channel you can be sure to run into a program that talks about ancient Egypt and the Pyramids. It is fairly obvious that Pharaonic Egypt continues to exercise a profound fascination on people’s minds. Modern folk are not exception, but the rule, for almost every period in history was mesmerized by the mystery of ancient Egypt. Starting with the Greeks, continuing with the Romans, Islamic culture, the Renaissance down to the present, Egypt continues to embody the mystery of the beginnings of civilization. For most people, the legacy of Egypt is a dead culture buried deep within the sands of the Valley of Kings: but for many of those studying or practicing Hermeticism, it is still very much alive. Today, it is becoming more and more likely that at least part of the ancient Egyptian heritage passed through the figure of the god Thoth to an offshoot of him, Hermes Trismegistus, and then on to the modern times.

Ancient Egyptian religion is still shrouded in mystery, despite the translations of the hieroglyphs. Today we associate this religion mostly with the cult of Osiris and Isis, as well as the sun-god Re. However, it now appears that the god Thoth was an equally, or eventually more important god than these.

I must confess that I have encountered problems trying to unearth the mysterious figure of Thoth. There’s hardly anything up-to-date written about him: my main sources had to remain at the level of 1922’s classic by P. Boylan (1) and a 1973 book by J.C. Bleeker (2), none of which cover the late antique transformation of Thoth into Hermes Trismegistus. For Hermes and Hermes Trismegistus there is quite an enlightening book written by the founder of Western Esotericism research, A. Faivre (3). Yet in the end the information on Thoth is sadly disjointed, not updated and fragmentary, as if destined to perpetuate the myth and mystique of this shadowy god!

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