St Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day has its origins in a pagan festival in the Roman Empire which featured an early version of the famous car-key-swapping sex games that the village of Kingston was so famous for in the 1970’s. The festival was to celebrate the God Lupercus, otherwise known as Nimrod, a hunting god. It was a celebration of sexual love, and a rite of passage for adolescent boys. The names of teenage girls were put in a box, and the young boys picked out their pot-luck match, who was to be their sexual partner throughout the year ahead. The festivities reched their height on the night of February 14th.

In AD 496 Pope Gelasius outlawed the Lupercalian festivities, and replaced them with a less ribald game of chance. Instead of the names of young women, adolescents were to pull out of the box the name of a saint, and had to dedicate the year to emulating his life. The patron Saint Valentine was chosen as the figurehead of the new regime, which was unlikely to have been too popular. Instead of drawing lots, young men took to sending notes to their potential lovers, the precursor to our Valentine’s cards. The custom survived through the Middle Ages and has never been more popular than in modern times. The Greeting Card Association estimates around a billion are sent annually worldwide. What has changed is the sex of the senders: the same group estimate that 85% of Valentines cards are sent nowadays by women to men. AG