There's a She-Wolf in your Valentine
What sane woman wouldn’t want goat and dog blood rubbed all over her to usher in fertility?
Ah, Lupercalia, the ancient Roman festival named after the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus, Rome’s founders.
So romantic, right?
History is wild, y’all.
You probably heard some version of the following Valentine’s Day origin story:
A third-century Roman priest performed marriages in defiance of the emperor, who preferred single men because they made better soldiers. The emperor had Valentine beheaded.
Or this one:
While Valentine was in prison, he cured the jailer’s daughter of blindness. Valentine fell in love with the daughter and wrote her a love letter before his execution.
These stories about defiant priests and sorrowful lovers may seem romantic, but there’s little evidence that they’re historically true, no contemporary records to prove this oft-told origin story.
Lupercalia, on the other hand, was a real pagan tradition.
Celebrated from February 13 to 15, Lupercalia was named for the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus at Lupercal, Lupercus’s sanctuary, where the festival kicked off.
The priesthood of Lupercalia was called the Luperci, or “brothers of the wolf,” who sacrified a dog for purification and two goats for fertility.
Boys were annointed via sacrificial knife, and the hides of the sacrificial animals were cut into strips and given to runners, who walked through the streets and whipped women to get ’em pregnant and make childbirth easier. The sacrificial blood was also used to mark plants for the coming planting and farming season.
But alas, the Catholic church doesn’t want us to have nice things.
Pope Gelasius I began expelling pagan festivals and rituals, including Lupercalia, and forced something akin to the modern St. Valentine’s Day in the fifth century. And by 1913, Valentine’s Day was a proper Hallmark holiday plagued by greeting cards, heart-shaped everything, and mass quantities of sugar.
So when my daughter asked me why today’s Valentine’s Day isn’t a real holiday, I told her it was based on an old lie.
A story.
Fiction.
This doesn’t mean we can’t bake pink, heart-shaped cookies; far from it.
We’ll use baking as today’s homeschool mathematics and chemistry lesson. And we’ll have a historical lesson about Lupercalia and why it’s rude to go around slapping women with bloody rags (or anything else).
But knowing that today’s Valentine’s Day is based on an old lie does mean that we should question origins, learn a little more about history before we go a-celebratin.’
You know, just in case we end up celebrating abuse against women as if true love lies at the end of a bloody whip.
So, in homage to the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus and who is culturally seen as a protector, a mother-figure, and a symbol of power, here is “She Wolf.”
(Now, my elder-millennial ass could absolutely get down with Shakira Day, a celebration of dance, though my moves look more like Elaine’s erratic kicking than those of a professional belly dancer. I’m comfortable with this.)
Will you let your she-wolf out so it can breathe? Or celebrate in another way?
Let me know in the comments.
Happy howlin.’
<3 Fal