From
Always in Season: Living in Sync with the Cycles ©
Donna Henes, Urban Shaman. (
CityShaman@aol.com) Reprinted with permission.
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, (named incidentally in honor of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus), 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:
- The decorous or modest kiss
- The diplomatic kiss, or kiss of policy
- The spying kiss, to ascertain if a woman had drunk wine
- The slave kiss
- The kiss infamous (a church penance)
- The slipper kiss (practiced toward tyrants)
- The judicial kiss
- The feudal kiss
- The religious kiss (kissing the cross)
- The academic kiss (on joining a solemn brotherhood)
- The hand kiss
- The Judas kiss
- The medical kiss (for the purpose of healing some ailment)
- The kiss of etiquette
- 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 and opposition of the sexual union. The arrows that Cupid shoots are the phallus, the lingham. These projectiles of passion are often depicted as piercing the heart. The heart, the center of the soul. A bittersweet image which intimates that love hurts. A graphic image of penetration, which is reminiscent of the arrows that Hopis shoot into rounded bundles of corn as a ceremonial gesture of fertility.
But just what is this heart-shaped symbol supposed to signify, anyway? Certainly it bears no resemblance whatsoever to an anatomically correct actual heart. The zoologist, Desmond Morris speculates that the heart symbol represents a bending over buttocks. A form that is reminiscent of the sexual habits of our ancestor kissing cousins, the apes, who do it from behind. Please! Spare me.
The horizontal-double-dip-cone-of-a-shape that we call a heart has to be two round breasts riding proudly above the magical fertile triangle of love. A full-figured female torso just like that of the Venus of Willendorf. The tits, hips, and lips of the late Great Mother Earth, Herself. The venerated love of our lives.
Let Her never be out of our hearts.
My heart, my mother;
My heart, my mother!
My heart of transformations.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
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