14 February 2008
The Lupercal
Every year on this day, the Romans celebrated the founding of their great city by killing two goats and a dog, smearing the blood on the foreheads of two noble youths.
The rite referred to Romulus and Remus, the Original Romans, half divine and half mortal, by Mars, out of Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, to use the lineage tradition of the equine world.
The God-inspired pregnancy at caused a lot of unpleasantness, since Vestals were sworn to abstinence. Silvia came to a bad end as a failed virgin, and the boys were on their own.
They were suckled on the milk of a she-wolf in a cave on the Palatine Hill, and hence the ancient name of the holiday we celebrate today: the festival of the wolf.
It was not all crumpets and skittles in those ancient days in Alba Longa. Romulus slew Remus over a dispute over who had the support of the local gods, or about metered taxis versus flat zone-based fares. At this distance across the centuries it is hard to be completely sure. But it is certain that Romulus was behind the hostile take-over of the woman of the adjacent Sabine Tribe, and the fertile consolidation of the young city-state around the sacred Seven Hills.
Romulus did a bunch of other stuff after he became King of Rome, but what he was remembered for was the relationship between himself, his deceased brother, and his step-Mom. For seven hundred years the rite was celebrated by the cave where the boys were nurtured.
Goatskin-clad priests of two cults (later three to honor Great Caesar's ghost) killed a dog and two male goats and smeared the resulting blood on the foreheads of two boys from noble families. The blood was then wiped off with wool soaked in milk, which not regarded as a mixed metaphor. Then the goats were skinned and cooked for the feast, and thongs were cut from the flesh.
After dining, the young men donned the skins of the sacrificial animals and raced around the Palatine Hill, swinging the thongs at young women who lined up along the route to receive the largely symbolic but messy lashing.
This was widely believed to ensure fertility and ease of childbirth. In order to test the notion, names were drawn from a box to assign romantic partners for the following year.
Oh heck, why not tell it straight? The Romans did not have the sort of notion of courtly love inflicted on us by the bored aristocrats at the end of the Dark Ages. Rome was about the Flesh, not the heart. That may be why their empire lasted eleven centuries. The way things are going, we may not get that many decades.
In imperial times, the young men were normally members of the equestrian classes. The ritual was later Christianized, though remnants of its pagan origin survives in the spirit of the little plaques found on large power yachts that announce “Marriages performed by the Captain are good for the Weekend Only.”
The timing of the event was propitious; in Rome at this time of year, Spring is lurking around the corners; the festival had very much the sort of seasonal association with new birth that Easter does in Northern Europe.
With the rise of the Christian state in Rome, the old association of the flesh was considered untoward, and the festival renamed for an early martyr, St. Valentine, who restored the sight of his jailer's daughter right before being decapitated by the Emperor Claudius.
Thereafter, names were still drawn from a box, but in the new ritual, they were those of the Saints, whose sacred lives the young people were encouraged to emulate through the next year.
Predictably, interest faded. It was only the intervention of Geoffery Chaucer, the great writer of Middle English, who restored the day's association with love in his tale “The Parliament of Fooles.”
Other aspects of the ancient tradition have also been restored, including the lashings. Ask someone who forgot the significance of the day.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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