Lupercalia: The Parents of Valentine's Day
Introduction
Nothing exists in a vacuum. The actions and traditions of the modern era required years of elaboration. If Darwin says anything, it is this: complexity requires simplicity. And our culture is complex. Here, I will describe the evolution of Lupercalia into Valentine’s Day and the thinking behind it. This is a complex psychological phenomenon. Why individuals have ritual at all is not clear to the modern person, or even those who perform the ritual. Valentine’s Day, in the mind of the average person, is simply a day on a calendar, an excuse to buy chocolates, a thing. This, I believe, is untrue. Valentine’s Day is a living cultural body, and we as modern people can enter into a relationship with it.
The Ancient Mind
Think like the ancients thought. The bizarre behaviors they displayed make little sense in today’s “rational” context. The modern mind does not, nor did it, produce such rituals. Life elaborated. It was more simple, and it bootstrapped off simplicity and became complex. Almost by definition, complexity is built of simpler parts. A society is writhing, breathing strings of organic and synthetic bodies. People are strings of muscle and sinew, organs and their interplay. Atoms are made up of neutrons, electrons, and protons. Our complex contemporary culture relies on the simpler concepts from which it arose.
What was the nature of those concepts? Neurons that fire together, wire together. This is a truism of neurology. When two things happen together, they become associated. You smell a dripping steak, your mouth waters. You see an attractive person, your heart pounds. But what makes someone attractive? Hip to waist ratio? Symmetry of their face? Their personality? Common interests? Do any of these things alone constitute attraction? No; “attractive” is a concept, a constellation of elements associated with one another. However, with time, exposure, and contemplation, one may notice that there is a difference in the elements of attraction. Biologist Bret Weinstein has pointed out the difference between “hot” and “beautiful.” The former being physically attractive, the later being emotionally, spiritually attractive. Now, “attractive” has differentiated into “hot” and “beautiful,” all while the concept “attractive” has transmuted into a category. This is the meiosis of the mind. The splitting of conceptual cells. As information accumulates, some associations are connected on one end of the cell, but not the other. When enough information builds up, the differences become impossible to ignore - and the conceptual cell splits. The concept differentiates. And by definition, there is an abstraction as well, given that the category contains the commonalities across its subordinate concepts. History can be read as the interplay between differentiation and abstraction.
What we had to do in order to have the concepts and categories we have now, is differentiate them from each other. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says, “It seems that knowledge and perception, and therefore experience, exist only in relations between things.” Philosopher of consciousness, David Chalmers, notes that most things are characterized by their “relations” to other things; like an atom is defined by its subsequent parts. We must, in order to continue, recognize that the ancients’ concepts are our categories, they are precursors to our own way of thinking. And only, as I will argue later, are they uncovered when the thin veil of modernity is no longer afforded to us.
There are only two states: entropy and negentropy. We either deteriorate into chaos, or exert energy in order to maintain order. The less assertion of maintaining energy, the less order, the less complexity can be maintained. The psychoanalysts called that energy, in a psychological context often referring to sex, libido. Libido is “life energy.” It brings things, even ways of being, to life. To maintain a psychologically complex concept part of the mind, libido is spent. If I want to put my mental energy into nuance, then nuance I will have - but not if I don’t inject energy into that region of the mind. Instead, I would spend libido in low resolution regions, and receive low resolution concepts in return. The move from complexity to simplicity is regression.
Regress with me. Reality is a category in our minds, it contains “objective” and “subjective” concepts. These too had to be differentiated. Clinical psychologist and theorist, Jordan Peterson says, there is “matter” and “what matters,” and identifies this split with the Enlightenment. We, at that time, recognized that the interior world, our feeling and experience, was something separate from the exterior world. This is the difference between, “she is attractive” and “I am attracted to her.” The former believes that the attractiveness radiates from her. Attract comes from Latin attrahere, to draw or pull. She pulls you in. This is a conflation between your feeling, and her, external, self. It is a projection. Whereas, “I am attracted to her” recognizes that it is I that feels attracted; the subject is separate from the object.
The conflation of these things, Carl Jung called participation mystique. That is to say, it is a projection of oneself onto the external world. It is an identification with the world - I am the world. Neumann identifies this with Totemism, the use of objects or animals as a spiritual symbol of one’s identity; the totem is identified with. Modern examples are Harry Potter’s Patronus, the totems in Inception, sports teams (i.e. “I am a Bears fan), and even the clothes we use to express our identities. Our ancestors projected their psychic contents onto the world, and so do we, just to a lesser degree. Neumann says, “humanity is putting something outside itself in its myths, something whose meaning is not conscious” (p. 263).
The myths that gave rise to Lupercalia are a mix of objective-fact and subjective-experience. Insofar as they are subjective-experience, we can come to understand the minds of those who came before us. Each character is a constellation of associations. They are personified elements of subjective-objective reality. It is the nature of being as the Romans saw it. In order to understand Lupercalia, we must ask, how did they see the world?
The Myth
Amulius killed his brother and usurped his kingdom. Rhea, his brother’s wife, was a threat to his legitimacy. If she had sons, they could take the throne. Instead of killing her, he made her a Vestal Virigin, one of six celibate priestesses. However, the god of war, Mars, impregnated her, and she had two sons: Romulus and Remus.
Amulius demanded they be thrown into the river Tiber. Instead, Rhea placed them in a basket and sent them down river. They survived, landed on the shore, and were raised by a she-wolf, the Latin word being lupus, and a woodpecker - both were emissaries of Mars. When they grew older, having been raised by a wolf, they killed Amulius and took the throne. When they returned to the cave of the wolf, they named it Lupercal and the festival, which took place on February 15th, honored her.
The Mind
A remarkable amount of time could be spent explaining why each character represents what. I will try to keep this to a minimum for clarity’s sake. Instead, I will rely on Peterson and Neumann’s interpretation of myth.
Culture is male. Nature is female. Yin is nature, darkness, the unconscious, absorption, female. Yang is heaven (consciousness, whose byproduct is culture), light (enlightenment), penetration, male. Nature birthed culture, so nature is the mother of culture. Terra Materna (Terra is the Roman version of Gaia, Materna is the root of both “maternal” and “matter”), remains in our language today as “mother earth.”
Amulius is calcified culture. He should not be ruling. He is illegitimate. His modern equivalents are the sick Theoden and Denethor from The Lord of the Rings. He is the blind king, unwilling to see. He is Scar from The Lion King. He is Set for the Egyptians. He is the unmoored left hemisphere of the brain, who is obsessed with what is known, what is certain, all while denying that anything outside of his purview exists. McGilchrist has notes patients with right hemisphere damage, who must rely on their left hemisphere, will neglect the left side of their bodies. When their left arm is pointed out to them, which they no longer use or acknowledge, they create fantastical stories of denial. Some say “it’s my mother’s” or a fellow patient’s (McGilchrist, p. 67). It doesn’t see anything it does not want to, and it can rationalize anything away.
Rhea is a virgin. Independent of Amulius. She is pure. Free from the stagnant culture. She is a virgin mother; The Madonna, Mary. Her sons are products of her union with a higher, masculine (cultural) value: Mars. Rome is the grandson of war, a virtue upheld.
The sons of a woman in union with her values, produce an empire. When the old culture tries to kill them, extinguish their individuality, they kill the old culture - returning their higher value to the throne. They are raised by a wolf. Wolves have many children, they are fecundus. Fecundity has two conceptualizations; the creation of many children, and the creation of many ideas. It is the category of that which creates many things. As life energy, it is libidic. Fertility, represented by the wolf, is celebrated. Lupercalia celebrates the birth of Rome and Romans.
Lupercalia
At the feast of Lupercal, the satyr-god named Faun is honored as a connection to Rome’s Greek and pastoral roots. Sheep also represent fertility. The pastoral life that sheep represent and Greece herself, gave birth to Rome. The Luperci, male priests, sacrificed a dog and sheep. Then, they ate the sheep at the feast. If you take sheep to mean fertility, Romans literally embodied fertility as Christians consume the “body of Christ.”
The Luperci cut thin strips of leather from the animals called februa, named for Februus, god of purity. From him, impurity was differentiated; the god of malaria and fever was Febris. Februa later became February. The Luperci ran naked through the streets of Rome, and used the leather strips to whip anyone who came close to them. This was a blessing. They came into contact with fertility. They were “hit on.”
Punishment, using pain, banishes bad behavior. You stop touching the stovetop because you were burned. A spirit is a pattern of being, and the spirit that touches the stovetop is vanquished by pain. The pain of being whipped banishes the spirit of infertility. The ancients believed that it banished those behaviors, whatever they were, that resulted in infertility, implicitly. It encouraged fertility by discouraging what was bad for it.
These meaning-laden whip strikes have modern equivalents. Camille Paglia, feminist and historian of the arts, notes, “newlyweds are pelted with rice to drive off evil spirits and fertilize the bride. Blows mark a rite of passage into maturity. The kneeling knight is struck with sword on shoulder by his lord. At Catholic Confirmation, the kneeling adolescent is slapped by the bishop. The Orthodox Jewish girl at first menstruation is slapped by her mother. In Stover at Yale, the lucky initiate to Skull and Bones is ambushed at night and slammed on the back” (p. 44). Newly promoted Marines have their ranks beaten into their collarbones, and new non-commissioned officers have their “blood stripes” beaten into their legs.
Pagan purity and punishment live still in modern ritual, and extend more broadly into our behavior. Insofar as someone “loses themself” or has “lost control,” we must ask, what has taken control? If you are not in control of yourself, or you no longer have a self-concept, what has you? “I’m consumed by my work.” “Sorry, I was not myself.” Whatever remains, or is uncovered, when you have disappeared, must be something that isn’t reliant on “you.” It may be non-human, insofar as humanity is defined by its self awareness.
During sex, the youngest and most distinctly human part of the brain, the part that deals with higher order reasoning, shuts down. Instinct and emotion, ancient systems, take over. What is human, is replaced by what is animal. Many animals do not have self consciousness. They do not have what makes us human. When we lose our self consciousness, we act unconsciously. Acting unconsciously is the work of an artist. It is intuitive, not intentional. It is implicit, not explicit. The dancer moves his body over the floor. He is expressive, but is not relying on language. He communicates, without speaking. It is an act. It is performance art. When one loses themself in sex, they become unconcsious. We express through action. Sex is performance art! What are we expressing? When one whips or slaps a lover, one acts out ritual banishment. Kissing is flirting with biting, biting is flirting with consuming. Cue the whisper, “you’ve been bad.”
These emergent, or uncovered, ritual behaviors began in antiquity, and emerge when the conscious, modern mind falls away, making room for our unconscious action. The Romans became desperate for unconsciousness, addicted to its opioid-pleasure. Better to be ignorant and blissful. Just how unconscious can we become?
Broadly speaking, initially, Lupercalia was jovial. The Luperci ran through the streets playfully whipping anyone who came near. They jumped and danced like their satyr-god, and in order for the ritual to be complete, two young men had to laugh. Men and women were paired by drawing lots, brought together by fate, as they still are, and encouraged to celebrate the creative force of life. But, as all things do, it trended downward. Paglia notes the increase in bureaucracy in Rome, a reason she cites for being Libertarian, and McGilchrist describes an imbalance in neurology. For McGilchrist, the certainty and object-orientation of the left hemisphere begins to take over, and it is certain that the right hemisphere is worthy of neglect. Peterson notes that the mephistophelian way of being is to criticize life right out of existence; it’s better not to be at all.
The Romans stopped exerting ego-sustaining energy, just as we now can, and let their unconscious eat them. Their decadence, the ease of life that suggests one needn’t maintain their willful force, permitted animalism. The pattern of instinctual, animal behavior was uncovered when old concepts were not maintained. Sulpicia, a poet writing not long before the fall of the Roman republic writes,
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.
Gaiety resonates in her writing, but the “delight in sinning” rumbled in the loins of Rome. Paglia writes, “As the republic ends, Catullus records the jazzy promiscuity of Rome’s chic set. Patrician women loitering on dark streets, giving themselves to common passers-by. Half-clad men molested by their mothers and sisters. Effeminates soft as a rabbit and ‘languid as a limp penis.’ A sodomite waking with battered buttocks and ‘red lips like snow,’ mouth rimmed with last night’s pasty spoils. The strolling poet, finding a boy and girl copulating, falls upon the boy from behind piercing and driving him to the task. Public sex, it is fair to say, is decadent.”
The early Christians saw Lupercalia as the Dionysian revelry it had become. Lust. Sex. Death. Nero burned Christians to light his dinners and “castrated the boy Sporus… dressed him in women’s clothes, and married him before the court, treating him afterward as wife and empress” says Paglia. The concepts “man,” “woman,” “wife,” became playthings in Nero’s unconscious mind. The depth psychologist Eric Neumann wrote, “the positive and negative aspects of sexuality are dangerously close to one another… [one] surrenders ego and returns to the womb,” and in time “the ego perishes and succumbs to the supreme fascination of the nonego.” In decadence, the will - the ego - is no longer seen as necessary. One worships its death by all forms, through violence or sexuality. La petite mort - orgasm as “little death.”
It is no surprise that puritanism arose out of Christianity. The Christian psyche is still reeling from its youthful sexual trauma. Early Christians witnessed the persecution of their friends, while the Romans reveled in lustful abandon. Sex had become intertwined with violence, perhaps because sex shares hunt and pursuit circuitry, and it was necessary to evolved out of it. They demonized the Romans, rightfully, as their behavior was daemonic. They associated the Roman goat with evil, and later, evil’s personification, Satan (see Baphomet or the film The VVitch). Christian PTSD demands celibacy of those unmarried and their priests. But Eros loves irony. The “Catholic girl” trope was born. Manga artist Toshio Maeda used a tentacle monster in an erotic scene because censors didn’t allow for a penis to be printed. Sexual repression does not lead to purity, but the inability to responsibly engage in sex. Repression is a pressure cooker.
Conclusion
In the 5th century, while Christianity rose out of Rome, Pope Gelasius I replaced the feast of Lupercal with a feast celebrating Saint Valentine. Valentine, who was likely the amalgam of several people, was beheaded for the crime of helping persecuted Christians - and secretly marrying them. Valentine paired Christian couples, like the drawing of lots, and baptized them by water instead of a whip. Christianity funneled the urges of Lupercal into a more functional, tame, cultural niche. And since, we have transmuted Valentine’s Day from festival to commercial function. Entire books could, and likely have been written on the shift to materialism, the elevation of matter over what matters, in our culture. Our modern Valentine’s Day is far removed from the synchronized pagan holiday, only lightly associated with the thundering Roman sexuality. The certain mind does not see the whole, it sees objects. It leaves out depth and life and music. And now, our holiday feels more like a trinket than an experience. I pray we remember the depth of history, the depth of our culture. The Western world, and mind, was built over the course of tens of thousands (nay! Billions) of years. I pray for a paradigm shift where we see the world not as objects to be manipulated, but as beings we have relationships with. When Valentine’s Day begins, ask what relationship you would like with it.
Notes and References
My way of thinking has been so greatly influenced by Jordan Peterson, Eric Neumann, Camille Paglia, and more recently, Iain McGilchrist, that to cite them would be to put a footnote at the end of every sentence. I have avoided this, and will instead encourage you to pick up their books, listed below.
https://www.thehealthy.com/sex/happens-to-brain-when-have-sex/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/valentines-day-ancient-fe_b_456184
https://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day
https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain/up-next
Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann
Sexual Personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia