LEDO - Live Everyday Die Once

LEDO is a journal of the "everyday of everything" in my life that is worth remembering ...... to remind me that each new day is a chance to explore new things, to enjoy life, and to thank God! I always believe that we live everyday and we die once!

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Interesting to Know: The Origins of Valentine's Day (2)

Day 46 of 2016

It is believed that the origin of Valentine's Day is a mystery as well as a murky one. There are two most popular origins - the first one is about St. Valentine and the other one is about a Pagan Festival.  Whichever origin you will agree, they are both unromantic!

St. Valentine (en.wikipedia.org)

In this issue of my Blog, the Pagan Festival Origin is presented.  This is sourced from http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day/history-of-valentines-day.

While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial–which probably occurred around A.D. 270 – others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.

Lupercalia survived the initial rise of Christianity and but was outlawed—as it was deemed “un-Christian”–at the end of the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine’s Day. It was not until much later, however, that the day became definitively associated with love. During the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds’ mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of Valentine’s Day should be a day for romance.

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