Roses Are Red, and So Is the Blood of the Martyrs

Like a lot of Christian holidays, Valentine’s Day was likely a co-opting of a pagan holiday, this one called Lupercalia.

How pagan was Lupercalia? It was led by “brothers of the wolves”, who sacrificed not just goats, but also a dog. Then the priests, gathered on the Palatine Hill in Rome–where Romulus and Remus were supposedly nursed by the she-wolf–smeared blood on their foreheads and wiped the knife off on a sheepskin soaked in milk.

Oh, right–then the priests cut strips of the goat and dog skin, ran around naked except for goat-hide loin-cloth (these priests, like Ted Haggard, were clearly “heterosexual with issues“), and began whipping girls and women with the animal skin. The girls lined up for this because (of course) a flogging by these fundamentalists was supposed to increase their fertility. Shakespeare wrote of Julius Caesar urging Marc Anthony to flog Caesar’s childless wife Calpurnia for that reason. That detail, unfortunately, is often overshadowed by a more famous line a few sentences later: Beware the Ides of March.

And don’t bother looking into the early Christian that some think was the real St. Valentine. When flogging didn’t kill him, the Romans just sawed his head off.

This is the true genesis of Valentine’s Day: murder, sacrifice, breastfeeding, betrayal.

And no, I’m not against the holiday. It’s easy to hate something that Hallmark has so effectively branded and commercialized. But at its root Valentine’s Day is about the mess of human relations, the daily struggle that is building a life and a family. We rut and fight and stumble and recover. Nothing is perfect, little comes easy.

That’s why Valentine’s Day–on the Ides of February–is more like Memorial Day or V-J Day for the parents of young children. Remember our losses, and celebrate whatever victories there are to report. Be glad that we signed up for this battle, regardless of the outcome.

As Pat Benatar says: Love is a Battlefield, motherfuckers.