Dark side of Valentine's Day

While the season of Valentine's Day approaches, many exchange gifts, flowers, chocolates and cards for affection. It's a cute fluffy natured celebration, with decorations of love hearts and roses. It's a holiday for lovers. However, it's got a dark eerie aspect to it that's forgotten or hid away. Many have been hushed about it and kept it's creepy meaning locked up inside a dungeon.

The earliest period of celebrating Valentine's Day was connected to a Roman holiday in ancient times. This was called Lupercalia, and a pagan celebration of fertility. It was much more horrific than modern Valentines' Day. Lupercalia involved animal sacrifices, lottery love games and women chased in the streets by naked men carrying whips. It was a wild event that spanned three days, the 13th, 14th and 15th February. It was to honour Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, their foster mother Lupa the she-wolf and their den at Lupercal in the Palatine Hill. 

However much more happened later to shift the Lupercalia celebration to the softer Valentines Day. This was by Pope Gelasius, who changed this holiday's name to Valentine's Day in 496 AD. He altered the pagan meaning and transformed it to mean about romantic love. Valentines Day is named after a priest called St Valentine who was responsible for organising secret weddings between lovers. This happened during a time when Emperor Claudius II banned marriage. So when St Valentine's activities were discovered, he was arrested and put to death. 

Also there are many spooky rites initiated on Valentine's season. Just the night before Valentine's Day, at midnight, go to a graveyard and then run around a church twelve times and a vision of your future lover would appear as a ghost, or you may see other visions. If done properly this should work, according to superstition. The age of chivalry during the Middle Ages was abundant in strange creepy rituals for Valentines Day. This includes hollowed out turnips with lights flickering inside. There was a return to the Roman Lupercalia lottery love-match game in Medieval England, and also until the 17th century throughout the British Isles, played during parties and drew names out of a jar. There were love potions women drank, a mixture of leeks and earthworms! Tasty!   

She Wolf Night