St. Valentine's Day!

Here is an article I wrote 17 years ago about St. Valentine's Day. It appreared in The Main Street, a short-lived publication that my friend, Nathan Lerner was involved with. This was written back when going to a library was the primary way to research a subject.  To this day, I believe it is the only thing I've written that has been published in print.

As a moderately bitter woman lacking a sweetheart to celebrate with, I chose to resent the 'holiday' rather than let myself feel lonely or sad. I began researching the evolution of St. Valentine's Day believing that it had been invented by chocolatiers, the greeting card industry and purveyors of diamonds. What I discovered was so much more interesting, compelling, and even horrifying!

I hope you enjoy reading the original, unedited version! Typing this into my computer flashed me back to that time in my life. You may get a kick out of the bio-line at the end of the article; I sure did!

Look at the calendar. It’s Valentine’s Day.

     I find myself drawn into greeting card stores only to leave moments later, empty-handed and somewhat depressed. Oh, sure, I’ve felt almost everything expressed on those cards – cute and clever; sarcastic and caustic; sexy, guileless, lustful, vengeful, and just plain smitten. An arrow-toting, winged cherub evokes no emotion in me at all, and all the expense so lavishly devoted to promoting this amorous festival only indicates how profitable it must be. Another “Hallmark Holiday” helps us mark our passage through time.

In search of deeper meaning beyond the frivolity of prefab sentiment calculatingly scrolled across lacy, heart-shaped cards, and long-stemmed red roses that mysteriously double in price the second week of February, I set out to learn about the alleged Saint Valentine. Just who is this chaste and priestly man who protects over such an overtly sexual celebration?

It turns out there may have been as  many as five Saints Valentine, with history and folklore confusing and substituting priests for bishops, martyrs for mere mortals. The Valentine who seems most closely linked with the tradition of love notes was a Roman priest during the reign of pagan Emperor Claudius the Goth, circa 269 A.D.

This Emperor allegedly grew wary of having his young soldiers complain about war. It seems they were reluctant to leave their wives and families to fight the ever-present battles. So, Claudius did the sensible thing. Putting his imperial authority to use for the good of the people, he banned marriages and nullified engagements.

Enter Valentine. Ever the man of God, working to convert the Pagans to Christianity and extolling the virtues of marriage, he went underground, so to speak, and performed marriage ceremonies against the Emperor’s guidance.

For this, our romantic innocent was arrested, beaten with clubs, stoned, and finally beheaded on, you guessed it, February 14. Now there’s reason for celebration.

Two additional bits of tradition connected to our Patron Saint endear him further to our hearts. While imprisoned, he is said to have cured the jailor’s daughter of blindness, which allegedly infuriated Claudius, perhaps speeding up his execution date. And finally, on the eve of his decapitation, the young priest is said to have sent a love note, however chaste and pure, to the jailor’s daughter. This note he signed, “From your Valentine.” Romance, intrigue, unrequited love, violence: if it were a move, none of us would believe it.

It’s difficult to associate the notion of ‘arrested, beaten with clubs, stoned and finally beheaded’ with our modern tradition of velvet-covered, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and candle-lit dinners for two. So you may wonder how the sweetheart-love thing evolved out of this tragedy.

It seems the Pagans had a festival on February 15 honoring the god Lupercus for protecting the crops and the town from wolves. As part of this tradition, fertility and the continuity of life were overtly commemorated, while sexuality was part of the joyous subtext. The festivities of Lupercalia included girls’ names being drawn from a hat by boys looking for a sweetheart for the year to come. Sort of the human pairing that imitates turtle doves and love-birds said to mate this week of the year.

           The Christians sought to distract the Pagans from this polytheistic heathen festival by offering up a St. Valentine’s Day celebration. The Saint was traditionally honored the day before Lupercalia, so it was the convenient and logical choice to replace or outshine the Roman holiday. In this St. Valentine’s Day celebration, the priests maintained the tradition of sweethearts for the boys and girls. After all, they didn’t want to take all the fun away from the misguided mortals and thereby make the ‘new’ religion unbearable.  Eventually the priests did try to inspire the boys to draw the names of Saints out of a hat to determine which Saintly life each should try to emulate in the following year. That attempt didn’t make for such a joyous celebration, so the choosing of sweethearts was reinstated, now under the protection of Saint Valentine, and Sainthood, well – that was left to the dedicated few.

This history and folklore blends together nicely for an overview of the evolution of our contemporary celebration, but some issues continued to perplex me.  Take Cupid, for example. How did this mischievous, winged cherub become the idol for the lovelorn; the angel on whom is pinned all romantic expectation; the archer whose power is love, inspiring us mortals to wish our beloved’s hearts pierced by his arrow?

It seems he is Roman mythology’s answer to the Greek God of Love, Eros. A St. Valentine’s Day evolved into a celebration of love and romance, Cupid was prayed to and became inseparable from the festivities. Originally, Cupid was a young man whose image was associated with vitality, passion, virility, sexuality, and implied danger. His sexual energy was seen as threatening by the people of the church, and contrary to what they intended for the celebration. After all, Valentine was a Saint: chaste, pure and, well, Saintly. There ensued Cupid’s regression into the de-sexualized infant creature whose image today graces our greeting cards and decorations for February 14.

Hence, we’ve got fact and fiction, folklore and tradition. There’s the notion of springtime and rebirth arising out of winter and death. Natural cycles of fertility and the continuity of life are symbolized by birds mating, and vulnerability is encouraged as we are coaxed into exposing our hearts. This Saint Valentine’s Day celebration certainly has elements that appeal to a sensitive and romantic spirit.

Then, there’s the Greeting Card Industry. The tradition of sending a card to one’s beloved with the Valentine mantra, “Be Mine” was initially left to artisans and poets and those with the patience of a Saint to cut and paste fabric , paper and lace into invaluable tokens of love. It wasn’t until the late 18^th Century and the invention of lithography that Valentine’s Day cards became accessible to the masses and, consequently, pop-culture.  Initially the cards were sold along with lace and hearts so the sender could personalize what was indeed a very personal message. Eventually, however, the cards evolved into variations of what we buy today: someone else’s words and designs used to illustrate and communicate what we feel, at least at the moment of purchase, under the pressure of love’s obligation to Saint Valentine.

It’s not all bad. If you’re not a poet or an artist but have really strong feelings for someone, along with an urgent need to express them, and if it happens to be during the first half of February AND you have a couple of free hours, you’re likely to find just the right card to express your emotions. If you want to take the creature with whom you are enamored  to a candle-lit, romantic, invitation-only dinner for two on or around February 14^th, I say, “Bon Appetit!” On the outside chance that fresh-cut flowers and boxed-chocolates are your style, there’s no reason to limit yourself from giving these to your beloved simply in protest against consumerism and market-based tradition.

As for me, I can happily resume reading Valentine’s Day cards with a new appreciation for the celebration.  St. Valentine’s history and the story of his tragic death couple with the beauty of nature and the continuity of life to create a western tradition of devoting a day to reveling in the magic of romance and love. What better aspect of life to celebrate in the dead of winter?

Corina Benner is a  Philadelphia-based writer, actor, and creative spirit, perpetually in search of meaning in the chaos and apparent senselessness of the world around her.