I'm curious, Pogo....do you have any parallels that would stand up to scrutiny?.......
If by "scrutiny" you mean something stronger than whining "is not!", then good news; I am once again home and reunited with my library. Some of this will be redundant with what I put in the OP a year ago, although I get the distinct feeling that OP went unread...
In the Roman Lupercalia (a feast in honour of the pastoral god Lupercus) mentioned at the outset of this thread, young males would draw a "billet" -- a little slip of paper with a girl's name on it -- for erotic games. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius decided to put an end to the Feast of Lupercalia, and he declared that February 14 be celebrated as St Valentine's Day.
Historically:
>> Saint Valentine's Day embraces a time of year that is historically associated with love and fertility. It encompasses the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera in Ancient Athens and the Ancient Roman festival of Lupercus, the god of fertility. {poster note: see more on sacred marriage below]
The priests of Lupercus would perform a traditional purification ritual, slaughtering goats to the god, and after consuming wine, they would run through the streets of Rome holding aloft the skins of the goats touching anyone they met. The occasion compelled floods of young women to the streets in the belief that being touched would improve their chances of conceiving and bring forth easy childbirth. There remains some speculation over the exact date of the celebration.
The first official Saint Valentine's Day was declared on 14th of February by Pope Galasius in 496, in memory of a 3rd century martyred priest in Rome. It is not known for sure whether Pope Galasius was honouring this 3rd century priest or whether it was one of two other martyred priests associated with the 14th of February. One was Bishop of Interamna (modern Terni) and the other apparently suffered in Africa along with a number of companions. Nothing further is known about these two Saint Valentines and it is the priest in Rome that has become the most widely acclaimed of the three. << (
here)
Further back, Lupercal was said to be the birthplace of Rome, the spot where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf (lupus). The festival Lupercalia, on the ides of February, incited fertility for the coming year and honoured Pan (who comes down to our time as "Cupid" among other forms), who protected flocks from wolves. The idea of lupine foster-mothers was a recurring mid-Eastern mythological theme, making appearances in the origins of Zoroaster, the origins of Turkey and the Canary Islands (
Canary, from
canis), and even the fable of Little Red Riding Hood. But we digress.
(But to entertain that digression momentarily, if you really want to get hung up on a single tree ignoring the forest, Little Red Riding Hood is yet another manifestation of the dying-and-resurrection mythological motif. Perhaps you'd be less defensive if put that way.)
As the Christian Church rose in European influence, it subsumed the older pagan festivals and mythological personages into holy-days and saints, in this case substituting the names of real-life partners with sermons or saints' names to be emulated over the next year (with predictable popularity), and eventually coming up in the 5th century with a St. Valentine, a sort of conglomeration of several irreconcilable biographies built vaguely on the spirits of Eros/Cupid and the aforementioned Pan.
Presumably then, the Roman billets were the ancestors, if indirectly, of today's Valentine cards. I can remember a custom like this from my (Catholic) grade school, although I'm pretty sure that custom stopped well short of erotic games.
But it did involve billets.
Indeed the name of the month of
February itself derives presumably from the
febris ("fever") of love. In the Roman Empire Candelmas (February 2nd) commemorates Juno Februata, the virgin mother of Mars. Animals were thought this day to rise out of winter hibernation and provide predictions for the coming year, begetting our modern Groundhog Day:
The badger peeps out of his hole on Candlemas Day, and if he finds snow, walks abroad; but if he sees the sun shining he draws back into his hole. (German proverb)
3
The Celtic name for the same holiday,
Imbolc ("in the belly") usually appends to the goddess/saint Bridget (Bride), though the designated Brigantian day may vary regionally from February 1st to 6th
1,2. Alternately the name of the month may come from
februarius mensis, "month of purification", the last month of the Roman calendar year.
The previous Old English name for this month was solmonað "mud month"
3 Good Saxon directness, predating the Norman French penchant for circumlocution.
Finally (from "sacred marriage above), part of this erotic ingredient, even after Christianization, was sacred sex, where common people engaged in sex as ritual, the couple representing spiritual union between Sophia ('wisdom') and the Redeemer. Kind of a proxy ****, if you can first accept that ******* is an inherently spiritual act. It was called a "rite of spiritual marriage with angels in a nuptial chamber"
5
More on that
here and a primer
here that may open some doors.
Additional sources:
1 Stone, Merlin: Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood (1979)
2 Logan, Patrick: The Holy Wells of Ireland (1980, UK)
3 Brewer, E. Cobham: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870, UK)
4 DeLys, Claudia: The Giant Book of Superstitions (1979)
5 Angus, Samuel: The Mystery Religions and Christianity (1925)
Full disclosure: portions of this post are reprinted from my own earlier work elsewhere on the internets.
That's enough for 2014's version of Valentine mythology; we can pick it up again next year. See you next holy-day.
