Valentine’s Day: The Origins

Lily Mora
Feb 28, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Mar 1, 2023

Have you ever wondered what the true origins of Valentine’s Day are? Valentine’s Day as we know it now is celebrated internationally. It’s a holiday filled with overpriced chocolates, flowers, and stuffed bears. Over the years Valentine’s Day has evolved to become a holiday that celebrates consumerism. Couples around the world continue to enjoy this holiday as it provides a special day to celebrate each other and their love. It may be a surprise to many as the love-filled holiday has darker origins.

Lupercalia

As with many other holidays, the origins can be traced back to ancient Rome. The ancient Romans celebrated a holiday called Lupercalia on Feb. 13th – 15th. Historians indicate this festival as the beginning of Valentine’s Day. This celebration was used to honour the god Lupercus, god of fertility, and to honour Lupa, the she–wolf who was partially responsible for the foundation of Rome (according to legend). This festival was quite brutal. They would sacrifice a goat and a dog to the gods. Men would then use the hide of the sacrificed animals and whip young women with it, they would line up to be whipped. The young women of Rome believed that this act would make them fertile.

The Romans also hosted matchmaking lotteries in which men would draw the names of young women to be coupled up with. If it was a good match the couple would be separated for the rest of the festival. Much of the festival was spent drunk and unclothed.

St. Valentine’s Day

There are many legends associated with the origin of St. Valentine’s Day, as the truth becomes a little muddled and murky. One of the legends is as follows; Emperor Claudius II decided that young men who were single made better soldiers. Thus, the emperor outlawed marriage for young men. A roman priest, Valentine, took it upon himself to fight this injustice in secret by wedding young lovers together in defiance of the decree. Another version states that the true namesake of St. Valentine´s Day comes from the Saint Valentine of Terni, a bishop who also defied the Emperor.

On Feb. 14th Emperor Claudius II, executed these two men (mentioned above), in different years in the third century.

The Catholic Church honoured, the men slain, with a celebration of St. Valentine´s Day on Feb. 14th. Later, Pope Gelasius I, took both St. Valentine’s Day and Lupercalia and combined them in the 5th century. This was mostly due to the fact that the Catholic Church wanted to expel the pagan rituals. The festival that came about was one that celebrated fertility and love.

Evolution

At some point as the holiday evolved and expanded across Europe, it ended up combining with the Norman holiday, Galantin’s Day. The word Galantin meant “lover of the women”. As we can suspect from context clues this meant that this holiday was used to celebrate love. Both holidays sound very similar and most likely were confused with each other at some point which ended up mixing the two holidays up.

This holiday evolved even quicker as the years passed. A lot of this was due to writers such as Shakespeare and Chaucer who romanticized it in their writing. And in 1913 Hallmark began releasing Valentine’s Day cards. The holiday as we know it now is completely different from its origins and beginnings. It’s almost impossible to think that a holiday filled with so much love and joy had origins written in blood.