Valentine’s Day wasn’t always so sweet. Find out about its wild origins and evolution.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, millions of people around the world present flowers, chocolates and tender love notes to their sweethearts. While the holiday really became cemented in the 19th century, historians link its roots to wild pagan revelries that predate the birth of Saint Valentine himself.
Read on for Valentine’s Day’s unique origins, its rise as a Christian holiday and the emergence of now-familiar V-day traditions.
The origins of Valentine’s Day
The seeds of the holiday we know as Valentine’s Day were planted in Lupercalia, an ancient Roman festival honoring Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage.
Held on Feb. 15, Lupercalia also honored the Capitoline Wolf, a mythic creature who supposedly suckled Romulus and Remus, Rome’s twin founders, when they were abandoned as infants. (The Latin word for wolf is lupus.)
Dating back at least to the 6th century B.C., Lupercalia was a sexually charged and violent rite, involving the sacrifice of dogs and male goats as a sign of virility.
Priests known as Luperci had their foreheads anointed with the blood from the sacrificial knife, and then were wiped clean with wool soaked in milk. The Luperci would later cut strips of goat hide and run naked through the city, whipping nearby women with the bloody hide.
“Many women of rank also purposely get in their way and, like children at school, present their hands to be struck,” Plutarch wrote in his Life of Caesar. “The belief is that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery and the barren to pregnancy.”
Also during Lupercalia, men would choose a woman’s name from a jar and escort her to the festival. In some cases, the couple would form a romantic bond.
The rite continued for centuries, even after the ascension of Christianity in Rome, with Pope Hilarius reportedly demanding Emperor Anthemius abolish it in 467 A.D.
Some 30 years later, Pope Gelasius tried to replace the pagan rite by instituting the Feast of Saint Valentine on February 14.
There are several stories involving Christians named Valentine who were executed by the Roman Emperor Claudius II, but the most famous was a third-century martyr imprisoned for secretly marrying Christian couples and helping persecuted believers.
This Valentine was reportedly executed on Feb. 14, 289 A.D.
In one early telling, the future saint restored sight to his jailer’s blind daughter. Later, the legend grew to include a letter he gave the girl before his execution, reportedly signed “Your Valentine.”
The evolution of Valentine’s Day
The elements of marriage, love and romance already associated with Lupercalia made it a good fit for a Saint Valentine feast day. In Medieval Europe, people believed birds chose their mates on Feb. 14. In his book Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer imagined the goddess Nature paired off all the birds on “Seint Valentynes” day.
By the 15th century, the day became associated with the code of courtly love that came into vogue in Europe.
In 1400, King Charles VI of France established the Charter of the Court of Love, “as a distraction from a particularly nasty bout of plague,” according to a post on the University of Oxford website. Members would meet for dinner in Paris on Feb. 14 — male guests were expected to perform an original love song, which would be judged by a panel of young women.
The now-familiar traditions of flowers, candy and amorous notes (known as “Valentines”) emerged in the 1600s.
Valentine’s Day in the US
In the 1800s, as marriage in America shifted from more of an economic alliance toward a romantic relationship, the popularity of Valentine’s Day soared. Gifts — especially spoons and gloves — exchanged as tokens of affection, according to historian Elizabeth White Nelson.
“There are all these nostalgic histories of Valentine’s Day in this period of popular literature that invent historical stories of [the holiday] that aren’t necessarily accurate,” Nelson told Teen Vogue. “They get recycled; the same story of courtly love and the ways in which this is the ideal form of love.”
In the mid-1800s Valentine’s Day became even more commercialized: In 1850, Esther Howland, the daughter of a stationery store owner in Worcester, Massachusetts, began producing lace-bordered Valentine’s cards with poems, roses, cherubs, and other imagery now universally associated with the holiday. At the height of her business, “The Mother of the American Valentine” was making $100,000 a year.
Then, in 1868, British chocolatier Cadbury sold its first box of chocolates shaped like a heart.
Even a global pandemic couldn’t stop people from expressing their devotion: In 2021, Americans spent $21.8 billion dollars on Valentine’s Day shopping, according to Statista, up from $15.7 billion a decade prior.
The Valentine’s Day heart
You don’t have to be a cardiologist to know that the “heart” shape that’s everywhere on Valentine’s Day bears little resemblance to the actual organ pumping blood through your body.
The heart has been viewed as the source of human love and emotion since antiquity. But the ancients had little understanding of its actual appearance.
Well into the Middle Ages, the heart was represented as looking “like a pine-cone,” based on a description by second-century Greek physician Galen. Medieval artwork would often depict a young man offering his “cone-heart” to a maiden.
The shape we associate today with a Valentine’s heart emerged in the 14th century: An illustration from poet Francesco da Barberino’s Precepts on Love (Documenti d’Amore) features Cupid astride a horse whose neck is draped with the familiar symbol.
A symmetrical heart with a cleft in the middle also appeared in the French manuscript The Romance of Alexander from about 1340. It shows a woman receiving the love token from a suitor, who points to his chest to indicate its source.
In an illustration from Petit Livre d’Amour, a collection of love poems written by Pierre Sala in 1500, the author is shown dropping his heart into a flower for his mistress.
By the 1800s, mass-produced Valentine’s Day cards made the heart symbol ubiquitous.
The “sacred heart” of Jesus has been part of Christian iconography for centuries, often depicted as flaming and pierced by a lance or encircled with a crown of thorns. In the 1530s, Christian reformer Martin Luther made a red heart within a white rose his personal seal.
Countries where Valentine’s Day is banned
While Valentine’s Day is widely popular, it is by no means universally celebrated: In 2008, Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice issued a fatwa prohibiting shops from selling red roses, stuffed teddy bears, heart necklaces or other romantic paraphernalia on Feb 14.
The edict was routinely enforced by religious police until 2019, Bloomberg reported.
Shops and restaurants in Iran are similarly prohibited from promoting the romantic holiday, and bans on Valentine’s Day are also enforced to varying degrees in Malaysia, where it’s been linked to moral decay, abortion, alcoholism and fraud.
In 2017 Pakistan’s High Court ruled the holiday was against Islamic teachings and barred the media from airing promotions of the celebration on television.
In 2016, Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain declared that Valentine’s Day “has no connection with our culture and should be avoided.” A year later, the Islamabad High Court barred the media from airing promotions of Valentine’s Day on television.
Hindu extremists in India have assaulted women and couples on Valentine’s Day for purportedly embracing a morally bankrupt tradition imported from the West.
In 2012, authorities in Uzbekistan discouraged citizens from celebrating Valentine’s Day, and instead promoted appreciation of Babur, a 15th-century descendant of Genghis Khan who founded the Moghul Empire. Babur’s birthday coincidentally falls on Feb. 14.
First published on Feb. 9, 2022 at 3:30 a.m. PT. (CNET)