Welcome to the Lupercalia!

You Survived Valentine’s Day, So Go Wild!

If you’re reading this, unless you’re a ghost, you made it through Valentine’s Day alive, if somewhat worse for wear. It’s a brutal holiday meant to test our mettle, cull the wheat from the chaff, and a bunch of other now-meaningless metaphors. Depending on who we’re involved with, it can feel like a trap. Flowers? Lingerie? Chocolates? Wine? Dinner? Sex? How much? What kind? What price range? What color? What size? Ack!

The good news is that February 15 is the Lupercalia. If you found your VD less than satisfactory, perhaps your Lupercalia will make up for it, assuming you celebrate it in the traditional, ancient, manner. So ancient that its origins are uncertain, although they seem likely to be Greek. Rome, however, is the Empire that refined it to an art of excess in homage to purification until the Christians showed up and transformed it into the cash grab and guilt trip it is today.

What, you ask, is the traditional manner of Lupercalia celebration? It wasn’t flowers, lingerie, chocolates, or dinner, that’s for sure. It did include plenty of wine, nudity, and largely consensual impact play, however. Also, blood. Cuz, fertility. And sacrifice.

At least one male goat and a dog were put to death because nothing says ultimate sacrifice like killing an herbivore and man’s best friend. The killing of the dog is curious because the festival has strong ties to the Luperci priesthood or Brotherhood of the Wolf. I suppose killing the closest relative of your totem creature is a sacrifice. Like so many early sacrifices, it was final and bloody.

After the animals were dead, two members of the priesthood were anointed with their blood from the knife used to commit the act. Once so anointed, the blood was removed with wool soaked in milk. This act of symbolic purification was completed with laughter. Then the fun could begin! First, the sacrificial feast, followed by young men drunk on wine running through the streets naked while striking people with strips of februa from the sacrificial animals. Women, it is said, would intentionally allow their hands to be whipped by the bloody thongs in hopes that it would make them fertile or lead to an easy delivery if already pregnant.

Those were different times dealing with different realities and driven by different motivations. Hallmark didn’t exist yet so there was nobody to adopt the soiree, tone it down, move it back a day, and market it as St. Valentine’s Day.

In many ways, Valentine’s Day is a vast improvement since there’s less authorized spilling of blood. We seem to have lost the whole purification-of-the-city thing and you really need to find or create a good dungeon if you’re going to whip people these days. But please, if your floggers draw blood, either reserve them for the person whose blood has anointed them or clean the heck out of them.

Fortunately, another thing that the ancient Greeks created and passed down to us was pornography, originally meaning writing and art depicting the life of prostitutes. Regardless of the best efforts of the holier-than-thou crowd, the world is still blessed with sex workers, some of whom entertain, entice, enchant, arouse, comfort, and make us fall in love with them while making or participating in what the 21st-century labels pornography.

Ironically, the content created by these women (and men) is not deemed prostitution, in the same way, one-on-one or other private hire situations are. Many well-respected writers who may or may not have employed their services have written brilliantly about the lives of sex workers. Many artists throughout history have relied upon bordellos for women willing to shed their garments and have their beauty translated into tangible visual proof. And the sex workers themselves have and continue to speak up and out about the realities of fulfilling fantasies for financial gain.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been and doesn’t remain a push to silence these voices and shutter these visions, but at least our dogs and goats are safe on Valentine’s Day even if our wallets bleed and some of us are especially happy for the existence of wine. And porn.