Everybody's Doing It

Every year around this time you hear a lot of fatuousness about Valentine's Day and how it is a phony holiday created by the greeting card industry or other rot like that.

But, a quick primer:

What we call Valentine's Day is really an amalgam of several ancient and modern festivals celebrated at this time of year, many of them half remembered and gutless after a couple thousand years of watering down, but even so.

For the ancient Athenians, who had different months, the period of time between what we call the middle of January and the middle of February was set aside to celebrate the marriage of Zeus, king of the gods and Hera, his sister and bride. Being ancient Greece, one can assume this was mostly celebrated by having sex with young boys.

For the Celts, Imbolc fell in the first week of Febraury, a kind of Fertility festival celebrating rebirth ('Imbolc' means, roughly, "in the belly" and referred to the ewes and other animals who became pregnant at around this time and would birth in the Spring). As this was the time of year when winter's grip began to loosen, people would gather together to have sex. Lots of sex. Pagan sex. You know, the good kind, with ram's horns and wicker.

And, oh yeah, I suppose there was a kind of veneration of the feminine about Imbolc as well, and we've hung on to that part also. After all, I have very seldom been wined or dined or presented with degrading articles of underwear on this day. Because I'm a man. I get it.

Sexists.

For the Romans, the early part of February was the Lupercalia, where, again, fertility and sex were venerated, along with Juno, the goddess associated with marriage. They would also venerate the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus. Men would run through the street wearing bloody wolf pelts and this would get them invited to parties where girls became very drunk.

I mean, really. They would sacrifice a wolf in the main square and these young men would come up to the altar naked where the priest or priestess would tie these long thongs of flesh cut from the wolf's pelt around their arms and legs. The boys would run through the streets, lashing at the women who gathered on the sidewalks in white gowns. If you were the women, you hoped to be lashed by the bloody thong because it would bring you love in the year to come, or fertility, or ease in childbirth.

The bloody thongs were called "Februa." Ahem.

In fact, the Lupercalia was such an orgiastic free-for-all that the early popes spent centuries trying to do away with it. Eventually, under the "if you can't beat 'em, change the name of the thing they like so much and pretend they've just been doing it wrong for a thousand years" school of management that had worked so well with Christmas, the popes started associating the Lupercalia with an otherwise not especially noteworthy couple of dudes called Valentine, who were early Christian martyrs. That they were chubby toddlers with wings and a mastery of archery is less well known, but makes their martyrdom all the more poignant.

In the Medieval period, the mythologization, poeticization, and refinement of romantic love really got off the ground. The idea of "courtly love," of a code of honor relating to the pursuit of a paramour, became the major topic of art and literature, especially among the upper class. In Hamlet, Ophelia is even shown to be thinking about Valentine's Day, and we know well things turned out for her. Take heart, single ladies!

But, as with so many of our great traditions and holidays, the real architects of the way in which we celebrate Valentine's Day today are the Victorians. They get a bad wrap for being prudes, but they invented porn! (not sexy pictures, as such, but the idea of sexy pictures being something illicit that you hid in your sock drawer because your wife doesn't ever have any reason to look in your sock drawer - not even if someone mentions this blog to her. Look it up!)

Yes, the Victorians gave us the greeting cards and the chocolates and the obsession with the images of those chubby little gremlins called putti. (No idea if they were also responsible the everpopular tradition of the Valentine's Day lingerie purchase and the ceremonial refusal to wear.)

So quit bitching. Cranks and conservatives and curmudgeons have tried to whine and moan their way out of our remarkably festive civilization, turning up their noses at the redolent smell of paganism in everything we hold dear. Some people won't be happy until we have nothing to celebrate at all and just spend all our time in church or at work. SNORE.

Humans have been celebrating this time (and, indeed, in many cases, this exact day) for centuries and millennia as a time to think of erotic love and overpriced, underwhelming prix fixe dinners.

Embrace it.