Before Valentine’s Day: The Festival of Lupercalia

SPEAKER_00 0:00 So, Ollie, it's nearly Valentine's Day. Um have you got any plans this year? Uh I do actually. I I often don't have plans for Valentine's Day, but this year I was thinking of going uh a bit more traditional. Uh yeah, nice.

SPEAKER_01 0:13 I mean it doesn't have to be some big sort of overblown commercial thing, right? You you can't go wrong with the classics, flowers, maybe a nice meal together.

SPEAKER_00 0:23 Yeah, exactly. Um I'm thinking, you know, keep it simple, sacrifice a goat, run around town whipping people. Sorry? You know, old school, old school Valentines, like fertility rights, a bit of light public nudity. And this is for your partner or No, no, for the community, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 0:48 It might seem pretty absurd today, but before our modern Valentine's Day, people didn't have quite the same idea of romance in February that we do today.

SPEAKER_00 0:59 Yeah, we had ritual sacrifices in the past, and now maybe a slightly more tender way of showing our affections. And it turns out the origins of Valentine's Day, they are as fascinating as they are surprisingly dark. I'm Molly.

SPEAKER_01 1:14 And I'm Matt, and this is What We Did Before, the podcast where we explore the history of modern inventions.

SPEAKER_00 1:21 And in today's episode, we'll be exploring what we did before Valentine's Day, how our current day celebrations came about. Uh, we'll be diving deep into the traditions of the most famous precursor to Valentine's Day, which is Lupacalia, and we'll be discussing the frankly wild rituals and traditions that our ancestors practiced at this time of year. But Matt, before we start on the uh almost feral nature of some of our history with the Festival of Love in February, it might be a good idea to give a bit of backstory on our current day, Valentine's Day, because actually that's not that simple itself, is it? Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:59 So so let's just start with the name. Many of us have heard that Valentine's Day is named after Saint Valentine, but do you know which one?

SPEAKER_00 2:09 Yeah, to be honest, I thought there was one, just one, uh, until we started researching this. But you know, the most commonly held view is that it's Valentine of Rome. And so Valentine of Rome was executed for defying the emperor and for being a Christian, basically, his Christian faith. And he was considered a martyr, and the idea of the day is to celebrate him, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 2:31 Well, yes, but it turns out that there was another Valentine, and this was Valentine of Turney rather than Rome, and he was also martyred around the same time. So it could be either one of these Valentines. Actually, I think there was mention that there might even be a third. But it's likely that it is either talking about Valentine of Rome, or possibly the two or three of them were always the same person, and the legends kind of, you know, changed and made it seem different to how it actually was.

SPEAKER_00 3:05 So a bit like Santa Claus and St. Nicholas and all of the other combining and merging into one being.

SPEAKER_01 3:12 Yes, yeah, and obviously over time things sort of get blurry with Chinese whispers, as we found many times while doing our research on this.

SPEAKER_00 3:21 Usually blame you can blame Pliny the Elder for it.

SPEAKER_01 3:24 Usually. Yeah, I'm not sure if well, actually, maybe he might be have something to do with this, we'll see. Um, but the legend says that how St. Valentine actually defied Emperor Claudius II was simple. And that was that he used his position as a priest to actually carry out marriages.

SPEAKER_00 3:44 Yeah, and marriages actually they were banned. At least that's what the legend says. So apparently young men, or at least soldiers, were not allowed to get married because Emperor Claudius wanted them to be in service of Rome and not committed to their families. Um and St. Valentine was there to defy this and allow young couples to follow their love together.

SPEAKER_01 4:06 So if we believe that to be true, it's clear to see the link to today's celebration and why the day celebrating this saint would even be associated with love in the first place. That's obviously if you take the legend at face value, of course. Yes, and it's not that simple. No, so to preface this, there's no one source of truth on this. But it seems like the nature of these laws prohibiting marriage might be disputed. It looks like it's accepted that St. Valentine existed and was executed, but the reasons are quite murky.

SPEAKER_00 4:46 Yeah, exactly. And because we don't know why he was executed, that prevailing legend, it's still very possible, but it's also possible that he was executed simply for practicing Christianity openly or helping imprisoned Christians or some other act of defiance like that, not necessarily the marriage thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:04 Yes, and it makes sense, right? Because this was a time when Christians were still being persecuted in Rome. So regardless of the reason behind it, it's it's pretty accepted that he was actually executed, um, whether that's for being a Christian or whether that's for doing like Christian things.

SPEAKER_00 5:24 Yeah, so it's around 270 AD that St. Valentine's was beheaded. Then about 200 years later, in 496 AD, Pope Galasius I established St. Valentine's Day on February the 14th to celebrate this martyr of Christianity. And his symbolism with love was uh the reason why we associate the celebration, the holiday with romance today. Except again, even that's not that simple. Before Valentine's Day, there was a different festival entirely that happened a day later, February the 15th. One with unusual pagan customs, one that focused on health and fertility, a festival that was officially banned by Christians but was still being celebrated quite regularly despite that.

SPEAKER_01 6:11 Yeah, it was a it was a festival that the creator of St. Valentine's Day himself, Pope Galasius I, claimed only vile rabble were involved with. He sought its forceful abolition and possibly did so by replacing it with something more Christianity friendly, obviously St. Valentine's Day. And that festival, the precursor, was Lupacalia.

SPEAKER_00 6:37 So Lupacalia was an ancient Roman festival celebrated on February the 15th, and it's been traced back as far as at least the 6th century BCE. And its purpose as a festival was twofold. So one was to honour the founding of Rome, and the other one was to purify and promote fertility, and they did this by sacrificing goats and dogs and smearing blood on their heads and running through the streets naked and whipping people.

SPEAKER_01 7:03 Oh, okay. Yeah, as you do. So it does sound a bit more intense than uh a candle-lit dinner for two. Um firstly, I guess, how did doing all of that honour the the founding of Rome?

SPEAKER_00 7:21 Well, if it's not blatantly obvious how smearing dog's head blood on your head is is honouring the founding of Rome, then I just think you're completely lost, Matt. No, you you've heard you've heard of Romulus and Remus, haven't you?

SPEAKER_01 7:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the legend of Rome's founders, the brothers who were abandoned as babies, and then a she-wolf rescued them and raised them and nursed them in a cave.

SPEAKER_00 7:44 Exactly. Um and a she-wolf in Latin, uh, the word for that is lupa, and the cave that the wolf uh raised Romulus and Remus in was called Lupercal.

SPEAKER_01 7:54 Oh, okay. So that makes sense from a naming perspective, I get that. But I still don't get why those rituals, those horrible rituals from our perspective today, why were they seen as something that would benefit the community and both honour and help Rome?

SPEAKER_00 8:14 Yeah, well, I really do want to dig into the specifics of the rituals themselves a little later, which I will do. But um basically they they were meant to promote purity, vitality, fertility. And we when we get into these ideas, we'll see that even if we do find them horrible today or a bit odd by our standards, they can be linked to this idea of uh the primal sort of wild energy of the wolf, which you know, this sort of animalistic survival against the odds, and they were, I guess, reconnecting Romans to their origin story.

SPEAKER_01 8:45 Yeah, and now we could really get into it and sort of talk about the fact that Lupacalia itself might have been evoking some connection to a previous festival, the the ancient Greek Lycaea, which is a festival literally celebrated on what translates as wolf mountain, and that's where they celebrate the Greek god Pan. So the equivalent of Pan in Roman mythology is the god Lupercus, and Lupercus' sanctuary was the Lupacal, the cave that we mentioned earlier.

SPEAKER_00 9:21 Okay, so there is this deep tie-in with wolves and Rome's origin story here. But how and why did this festival also seem to celebrate or promote fertility and purification?

SPEAKER_01 9:33 Yeah, that's um that's an interesting one because obviously we've we've spoken about kind of how it talks about Rome's origin. The fertility aspect can also be linked to this origin story. So so in the cave Lupacal, that's where the she wolf took care of Romulus and Remus, and Lupurcus, the god whose sanctuary was that cave, was also the protector of farmers, harvesting and wild animals. So both of these stories, from the nursing of the baby brothers, whose legend is the basis of Rome itself, to the god who is associated with farming. These both have a link with fertility, both in the idea of reproduction and the idea of land fertility.

SPEAKER_00 10:19 And not to mention the fact that the festival took place in February, uh, which, you know, the word februar is linked to the Latin word febru or februum, which means uh purification. And why was this word associated with purification? Yeah, um I I always find it hard to say February. Is it February or February? Or anyway, in the early Roman calendar, February was actually um the last month of the year. So it was meant to be a month of purification and ritual to end the year ready for spring. And the purpose of February was uh really just to clean up after the previous year and the activities done in this sort of final month of the year, including Lupacalia, were uh really themed on this idea of like ending you ending everything and getting ready for that springtime. So they wanted to prepare for I suppose a good, fruitful year in almost every way.

SPEAKER_01 11:15 Actually, I kind of like this idea of the year ending in February. Um I do too. Yeah, I think it it I naturally feel like March is like the start of like, oh, okay. Especially at the moment, it's completely frozen outside. It's been like minus 10, minus 20 degrees where I am, and I'm just so ready, and it feels like around March is when my year is actually gonna begin.

SPEAKER_00 11:38 Yeah, a lot of people get um I think Blue Monday is a one of the Mondays in January, right? Where every you know people just start feeling depressed, and maybe it's because Christmas is all over and the sort of reality of real life is kicked in. But I think it's also because, especially in the countries where we live, it just gets horribly cold and bleak and there's nothing to do. Why not put Christmas at you know in January when everyone's already miserable so you can lift everyone's spirits and then have everybody get lovey-dovey in February so um they feel ready for spring? I like the sound of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:11 On that note, shall we get into the nitty-gritty of the rituals? Because we've spoken about the things we do like about this idea. Maybe we don't like some of the details.

SPEAKER_00 12:21 Yeah, it seems there was a lot of spanking going on and not the good kind. Well, what good kind are you thinking of? I'll show you later. Oh god. Anyway, uh the spanking was meant to ward off evil spirits of infertility. So at least they weren't doing it for no reason. There's always a reason.

SPEAKER_01 12:49 Um but I guess if you watch TV shows set in sort of pre-modern times, you do get a sense that people were much more interested in kind of reproductive health than they were in in love.

SPEAKER_00 13:04 Yeah, I do find this a lot with like royal shows, for instance. They clearly show that marriage was never really for love. Um, and actually like marriage for love was out of the ordinary. And I know with royals they're sort of dealing with the throne and succession and things like that, and continuing your bloodline, but it does seem that actually the sort of marriage for love feels at least a bit more recent. So having a festival focused more on fertility than romance, I I think that does make a bit of sense. But what on earth has has all of that got to do with sacrificing goats and dogs?

SPEAKER_01 13:41 So what you had were a few priests, uh a small group of them. They'd kill some dogs and some goats, and then two of them would get naked. Okay, cool. Yeah, so so the sounds like a party. The naked priests would then be smeared in blood from the sacrificial knife. And this represented raw animal vitality. Yeah, I'm feeling it. And when they laughed laughed, yes, uh like a pre-planned sort of scripted laugh part of the ritual.

SPEAKER_02 14:17 Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:18 Um when they laughed, the blood was then removed with wool soaked in milk, and them laughing kind of signified a specific point in the ritual, and then it was time to move on. So this was kind of like a successful transition from danger to safety, from death to renewal. And actually, in in pre-modern times, there was something called apotropaic laughter, which is the use of humour or laughter to ward off evil or bad luck. So this sort of cheeky laugh mid-ritual would reassure everyone that things were proceeding correctly.

SPEAKER_00 14:58 Just as the laugh that I just did there is uh a signifier that the podcast is proceeding correctly, even if it even if it doesn't feel like it is.

SPEAKER_01 15:07 Yeah, that's true. We're just uh channeling our ancestors when we laugh in this podcast. After that, they would do some pretty horrendous things, so they would at least by our standards. So they would flay strips of flesh off of the sacrificed animals, and they would turn those into thongs. Not we're we're not talking about Valentine's Day here, Ollie. We're talking about ribicalia, so not the thongs that we know today, which I guess are sort of appropriate, but no, we're talking about um thongs that were also called februa, as we mentioned before. Uh, these were ritual and purification tools.

SPEAKER_00 15:54 Okay, and and this is uh where the whipping comes in, right? So the naked priests would run about the city of Rome brandishing these thongs, and they'd they'd whip all the women that they could find. Yeah, it sucks to be any nearby women when that happens. Well, apparently they were fine about it. Um many even, you know, got their skin out like in in preparation to be lashed, like, come lash me. Um, and it was it was all meant to improve their fertility. So, you know, they were up for it because they thought, well, it'll make me more fertile, it'd give me help with pregnancy or maybe childbirth. So the priests would take the thongs and typically they'd strike women on the hands, the arms, or the back. And in some traditions, the strike was aimed at the abdomen or the breast specifically, because that helped either promote fertility or lactation. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:43 Kind of makes me wonder if them being fine with it is something that is actually true, or if that's something that the men who wrote about it said, oh no, the women were fine with it, honestly. They loved it.

SPEAKER_00 16:56 Yeah, yeah, no, they were actually like lining up to be whipped. Yeah. I'm just imagining these days, you know, putting on your Tinder profile um has to be okay with February the 15th thong whippings.

SPEAKER_01 17:11 But imagine just just how much that love has changed, uh, or or at least our February celebration has changed. Imagine going back and explaining like how people date the today when it's like, well, we used to just run around the streets and whip people, and you know, then one thing led to another.

SPEAKER_00 18:33 Yeah, but except it was the priests whipping them. So one thing hopefully didn't lead to another, at least not in that circumstance.

SPEAKER_01 18:40 Well all of this to say, we might think that this is weird or gross or just disgusting even now, but what they were doing was just kind of like this other ritual that that that they held really important to them.

SPEAKER_00 19:00 Yeah, exactly. And you you know, as we mentioned in our Christmas episode as well, you've got to remember that life, especially around winter time, is really hard back then, and it was just a totally different time. And I guess maybe our views on love and romance, you know, they aren't solid um things, tangible things that we can latch on to as like uh you know, truisms or ideas which have a weight which we can define. Uh you know, that it it is malleable, it's up to us to decide what love means, and it was up to our ancient ancestors to do that too. And for them, this was the way to celebrate these things and to celebrate fertility. Um, so yeah, we have a just a different perspective on life, I think.

SPEAKER_01 19:42 Yeah, and obviously when you consider the context that it was one of these purification things at the end of the year, the idea of not doing it, if all you've known and sort of all of generations of your family have known is that that's something that gets done, and the reason why is so that we can have, you know, a year where Rome thrives, where we'll have babies being born and our crops are going to grow and we're gonna be fed. The idea of not doing it must be actually like pretty terrifying, and even after it was banned by Christians, people still celebrated it for many years, so it was obviously very popular.

SPEAKER_00 20:26 Yeah, I wonder who came up with the idea. Right, guys. I've got a fantastic idea for February the 15th. Go on. It involves naked priests and a lot of whipping. Go on. Yes, I think that's something we could do for hundreds of years. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm in. Um anyway, Matt, I think I'd like to come back to those legends that we spoke about at the beginning about modern St. Valentine's Day, because now we've got a bit of an understanding of Lupacalia, what it was like, and and why it may have been banned by Christianity. Let's come forward to to the present day and you know discover how much of the Valentine's story that we know about St. Valentine of Rome could be accurate. So what what what do we know here?

SPEAKER_01 21:14 Well, we know that Saint Valentine existed in some form. What we don't know is whether he was committing secret marriages. So the problem is that the story about these secret marriages appears centuries later.

SPEAKER_00 21:32 Yeah, so they they could be embellished, they could be made up. Poets like Geoffrey Chaucer appeared to be one of the first to link Valentine's name to romantic pairing. So it that was in Parliament of Fowls, which he wrote in 1382, which is over a thousand years after St. Valentine's execution. So it seems more that before this he was actually celebrated for his martyrdom, not as a saint defending the notion of love.

SPEAKER_01 21:58 Yeah, that's that's right. And um, we can't sort of understate the power of his martyrdom. I mean, you can see examples throughout Catholic and Christian churches in general where they have artifacts of Saint Valentine. Um, there's actually a small church where my partner's from that has pieces or believed pieces of his skull that they have in the church, and that's like their claim to fame for that church. So it's we can't understate that you know Saint Valentine was a very important figure, but in terms of the connection to love, that is disputed. And then there's also the date. And it's likely when the Pope, who invented Valentine's Day and basically moved the date by one day, co opted some of the pagan traditions. I mean, Christianity is is known for borrow borrowing from paganism, as they did with Christmas, and not to mention the Idea that maybe Saint Valentine himself is like a personified, Christian-friendly, thematic replacement of Cupid, the Roman god of desire.

SPEAKER_00 23:10 Yeah, so there's loads of doubts over the exact truth behind the origin story of our Valentine's days and our Valentine's heroes. And of course, you know, these are just theories. Nobody knows for sure what happened, but we can talk about what we do know. And we know that Lupicalia existed, we know some nuggets of history, and we also know what the legends say. Whether those legends are true or whether you take a more cynical view is up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think. And and what else have we kept? I mean, well, we've got the February timing, the obsession with pairing together. You could argue the anxiety about being single and the desire to promote fertility, the idea of being together, even if it's done a bit differently. We've we've kept all of that, for good or for bad.

SPEAKER_01 23:58 And what is clear is that we simply have not been celebrating love in such a kind and romantic way for all of history. And while I'm not so fond of how commercial Valentine's Day has become, I'm quite glad not to be sacrificing animals this February.

SPEAKER_00 24:18 But Matt, I I think it would uh be remiss of us not to say that uh Spencer Hyman, who we spoke to for our episode on chocolate, do go back and have a listen to that. We have Spencer to thank for this episode. So um he was talking about um the origin of the connection between Valentine's Day and chocolate. And I actually used his article on um Coco Runner's Chocopedia as inspiration for for a bit of today's um research. But one thing that he mentions there is the link um is is why we came to connect chocolate with Valentine's so strongly.

SPEAKER_01 24:53 Yes, yeah. So um obviously this is present-day Valentine's rather than uh Lupicalia. So just as we learnt in a previous episode, the Victorians are the ones who kind of commercialized Christmas. They also did the same with Valentine's Day. So by this point in history, Richard Cadbury had come up with a rather wonderful way of making solid chocolate bars.

SPEAKER_00 25:21 Yeah, that's right. And uh some of this detail can be found in our episode with Spencer, but uh Cadbury bought a Van Houten uh cocoa press from the Netherlands, which could squeeze cocoa butter from the bean, which made it feel and taste a lot better. Before that, people were uh putting things like animal fat, red lead, and even brick dust into their chocolate to bulk it out. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:43 Not what I would give to my girlfriend for Valentine's Day. Here's some brick dust chocolate. So yeah, we can see why maybe it became more acceptable to give chocolate. Um this sort of step forward in in the production of chocolate allowed boxes of chocolate and greetings cards also to sort of become the new way to celebrate Valentine's Day. And on uh Spencer's Chocopedia it it says the boxes Cadbury designed were so beautiful that they were often kept as places to store other love mementos once the chocolate had been consumed.

SPEAKER_00 26:23 So, Matt, before we wrap up, I thought it would be interesting to explore the most symbolic image of Valentine's Day uh to well, of romance and love that there is, and that is the heart. So have you ever wondered why the heart symbol that we all instinctively recognise looks nothing like an anatomical heart? I mean, an anatomical heart isn't the most romantic thing.

SPEAKER_01 26:47 Uh I thought uh I thought heart was kind of like an upside-down bottom. Oh yeah, I suppose it could be.

SPEAKER_00 26:55 Um well, um one theory is that a a lot of people in fact think the uh origins of the shape is uh the sylphium seed theory. So silphium was a plant used in the ancient world and it was extremely valuable. It was used as a seasoning, a medicine, uh, and even a contraceptive, apparently.

SPEAKER_01 27:14 I've never heard of Sylphium, though.

SPEAKER_00 27:17 Yes, that's because it's extinct. It's actually uh thought to be the oldest documented plant extinction in human history. Oh okay, that's actually very interesting. So why is that? So uh it used to be found in Cyrene, which is modern-day Libya, and it's thought that it just couldn't keep up with the rigours of agriculture and environmental pressure, but up until that point it looks to have been really, really important. The seed pod even appears on ancient coins.

SPEAKER_01 27:47 But why did that have anything to do with kind of the heart or the heart symbol?

SPEAKER_00 27:52 Ah well, um the shape of the seed pod looks quite like the modern heart. And not only did it have all of these other uses in the ancient world, but ancient people all also linked this plant directly to fertility and sex, or at least that's what it seems like. So it does feel like a pretty likely candidate for where that shape came from. The trouble is there's just no way of proving this theory, and there really is no ancient text that says for for certain this symbol means love.

SPEAKER_01 28:22 Ah, okay, and also many historians think that there's a much cleaner explanation for why we have the heart shape that we do. Like the anatomical misunderstanding theory. So ancient people didn't dissect human bodies freely, especially not in Europe, so ideas about an anatomy were often inherited, not observed. So the heart was believed to have two chambers, a pointed base and a rounded top.

SPEAKER_00 28:50 Yeah, so it makes sense if you were to visualize that description. And people, you know, they just had to trust the work of authority figures back then, people like the Greek physician Galen, to find answers of how the inner body looked. And you see that medieval diagrams reflect this symbolic and not anatomical heart as well.

SPEAKER_01 29:10 But what does seem to be clear is that medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who we mentioned made the first links to Valentine's and Love, was also among the first to link in writing the heart symbol directly to romance. So it's probably in the 14th century that the heart symbol gets properly locked in.

SPEAKER_00 29:30 There is also the idea that the heart shape um just emerged as a pure symbol, like no links to plants or anatomy or fertility, it just sort of looked right to portray it like that to medieval artists. But that doesn't feel very satisfying as an origin story. And then genuinely, some people do think the symbol is that way because it looks either like a woman's breasts or an upside-down bottom, as you alluded to before, Matt, uh, which probably tells you a bit more about humans than it does about medieval symbolism.

SPEAKER_01 30:01 Well, thank you very much, Ollie. That's actually been very fascinating episode. I've never, until we did our research on this one, thought about uh the history of Valentine's Day. I just thought that it was a commercial, very modern thing. I knew about St. Valentine. I really didn't think that it held any links to history other than just coincidentally in the name.

SPEAKER_00 30:26 Yeah, I agree. I I didn't realise uh until Spencer had suggested, Spencer Hyman suggested it in our last episode, and big thank you to him for doing so, that um there was such a rich and wild history that Lupicalia even existed. So it's been really fascinating to unpack all of that. I really hope you've also enjoyed listening to this episode. Please leave us a review, let us know what you think in the comments, and do subscribe. It really helps us out. I'm Ollie. And I'm Matt. And until next time, this is what we did before.