Valentine’s Day Origins – Lupercalia, the God Pan, and the Werewolves
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009We’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.
