Valentine Heart of Our Hearts
(c) By Donna Henes, Urban Shaman*
from Always in Season: Living in Sync with the
Cycles

The Romans celebrated the sacred sexual frenzy
(febris, in Latin)
of the Goddess of amorous love, Juno Februa, on
February 14,
coinciding with the time when the birds in Italy
were thought to
mate. These orgiastic rites of the Patroness of
Passionate Love,
merged with Lupercalia, the festivities in honor of
the pagan god,
Pan which were observed on the following day,
February 15. On
Lupercalia, men and women inscribed their names
on love notes
or billets and then drew lots to determine who their
sex partner
would be during this festival of erotic games.

At last love has come. I would be more
ashamed to hide it in cloth than leave it
naked. I prayed to the Muse and won. Venus
dropped him in my arms, doing for me what
she had promised. Let my joy be told, let
those who have none tell it in a story.
Personally, I would never send off words
in sealed tablets for none to read.
I delight in sinning and hate to compose a
mask for gossip. We met. We are both worthy.
--Sulpicia
First Century BC Roman

Lupercalia, which combined elements of worship of
Juno
Februa and Her Northern equivalent, the Norse
goddess
Sjofn, was the original Valentine's Day. Naturally,
the fathers
of the early Christian Church outlawed its
observance as lewd
and heathenish. However, they were quite unable to
halt the
practice. Eventually it was necessary to create a
sainted martyr
whose feast day would be observed on February
14th. In this way,
the Church could sanction a celebration that it
simply could not
suppress. There are, depending on the source,
anywhere from three
to eight Saint Valentines. Each has a conflicting
biography concocted
by a different author. But in every version he
emerges as the patron
of lovers, bowing to the original intention of the
occasion.

The first St. Valentine's Day was celebrated in 468
AD In the
beginning, the Church attempted to institute the
practice of exchanging
billets printed with pious sermons and scripture to
encourage a holy
attitude -- what a dry substitute for a direct
experience of divine ecstasy,
which the people craved. Needless to say, the
experiment failed on a
grand scale. By the fourteenth century, the
celebration of Valentine's Day
had lost all Christian content and had reverted back
to the love feasts of
old, albeit, tempered by more than a thousand
years of church-imposed
morality built on the separation and opposition of
body and soul. One now
strove for perfection of the spirit through the
repression of the body.
Courtly
love, which was chaste and pure, was the ideal in
the Middle Ages. The
monks of the Middle Ages identified fifteen classes
of kisses, only one
of which was unchaste:

1. The decorous or modest kiss
2. The diplomatic kiss, or kiss of policy
3. The spying kiss, to ascertain if a woman had
drunk wine
4. The slave kiss
5. The kiss infamous (a church penance)
6. The slipper kiss (practiced toward tyrants
7. The judicial kiss
8. The feudal kiss
9. The religious kiss (kissing the cross)
10. The academic kiss (on joining a solemn
brotherhood)
11. The hand kiss
12. The Judas kiss
13. The medical kiss (for the purpose of healing
some ailment)
14. The kiss of etiquette
15. The kiss of love

The symbols of Lupercalia come down to us intact,
but thoroughly
cleansed, completely abstracted from their original
flesh and blood
intensity. The cute little chubby Valentine angel so
familiar to us,
is an insipid and impoverished characterization of
Cupid, the Roman
equivalent of the Greek god Eros, the Hindu Kama.
He was the son of
the Roman, Venus and Mercury, The Greek,
Aphrodite and Hermes.
S/he was thus an Herm-Aphrodite, an embodiment
of the duality