The Bloody Origins of Saint Valentine’s Day

By Ronan Wolfer, student at Loveland High School

The holiday everyone loves: Valentine’s Day. Love in every form is celebrated, and kindness is spread like a disease. Positivity is the focus, and the first hints of Spring emerge from their burrows. Many give loved ones gifts to celebrate their relationships. Despite the extreme commercialization of Valentine’s Day, it hasn’t always been roses, puppies, and boxes of chocolates.

The first people to celebrate a version of Valentine’s Day were the Romans, but they had different ideas of celebration than we do today. Every year, they would perform a three-day nudist ritual in February called “Lupercalia,” welcoming spring and fertility. The really crazy part is how they would welcome spring: slaughtering a goat and murdering a dog. After skinning the dead animals, the women would take turns getting whipped with the hides by the men. This was believed to make women “more fertile.” Next, the men would randomly be matched with women, spending the next two days coupled. This matchmaking process rarely resulted in permanent partnerships, but was necessary to maintain the population in the Ancient Roman Empire.

On special occasions, the emperor would have criminals sacrificed in addition to the animals to appease the gods and punish wrongdoers. It was in this way that the holiday got its name. Once the Romans shifted to Catholicism, a panoply of religious figures named Valentine or Valentinus rose to power and were subsequently executed for defying Emperor Claudius II. There are a few legends that nobody has been able to prove, all of which concern a St. Valentine. The most historically accepted tale contends that the holiday’s namesake was a priest who specialized in marrying people. The emperor decided that unmarried young men would make better soldiers than those who are married, so he declared that those fit to fight couldn’t get married. The priest continued to marry people in secret, but was betrayed by a couple who didn’t want to be separated by war.

Claudius found out and had Valentine executed with the goat and the dog to degrade him, but rather than disappear into history as another faceless dead Catholic, Valentine was declared a saint, and the day was celebrated in his memory by all of the couples he had married. Lupercalia was officially renamed Saint Valentine’s Day by Pope Gelasius I to expel pagan celebrations in the West, and the holiday became much more modest with the name change. People chose to remain clothed, chose who to partner up with, and gift-giving became a significant part of the courting process. The radical shift to capitalism in Western Civilization led to greater commercialization in the holiday, creating the Valentine’s Day we all know and love today.