While today’s teens may find love “overrated”, the ancient Romans saw it as an emotion worthy of lustful celebration and feverish fun.
Asked to define love, a teenaged cynic showed no hesitation in quipping, “Overrated.”
Queried as to why she thought this to be the case, she answered, “Because everyone thinks that’s the thing you have to have.”
The movies, she explained (listing that iconic staple of teen pop culture that magically dispenses the answers to all of life’s major questions) make love seem like a goal we all must achieve.
Movies are based on it.
Nay, it might be said that all life itself is based on love (and we thought life was based on carbon… or the movies). Certainly love, like the ultimate finality of death, is the crowning glory of our lives. Without it, we atrophy. Our senses dull. Our stamina wanes. We merely exist in some nihilist state of denial — like that Nietzschean emptying the world of value.
We become serial killers, sociopaths, or American Republicans.
Devoid of love, we are spiritually sterile. “Overrated” it is not.
This Monday should remind us of that — not that we need to be reminded of the one thing that separates us from the robots.
It is Valentine’s Day.
Excess is the rule.
Bacchanalian excess.
Love is all about excess. It is butter. Fat. Bacon-wrapped bacon. Period. There is no dearth of emotion when it comes to love. It’s the big thing. The all-consuming, suffocating, make-you-forget-all-about-the-HST, kick in the nuts sort of wonder.
When in love, you sit gape-mouthed, fumbling for a thought that will supersede the one in your head that sounds like a rapidly thumping heart.
Valentine’s Day, however, has grown a bit stale.
Rather than a frenetic paean to what John Donne called that “growing, full constant light”, it has devolved into a brief ceremony of consumer indulgence: buy flowers and heart-shaped box of chocolates, scrawl bad poetry on inside of card, make dinner reservations, smile with teeth, hope to get laid.
A few thousand years has wrecked everything.
When the civilization known as the Roman Empire sprawled across most of the known world, Valentine’s Day was a celebration of feverish excess.
Known as Lupercalia (and celebrated on February 15), it combined the wretched vulgarity of Caligula with the come-hitherness of The Bachelor. It was all about eroticism, fertility and — well, the eroticism you got by practising acts of rampant, pagan fertility.
Remember this for next year’s history exam. Lupercalia honoured Juno, the goddess of love (and patron saint of a Canadian music awards show). The Lupercai were two groups of Roman priests established by the canine-raised mythical twin founders of Rome: Romulus and Remus. They were devoted to the god Pan (who liked to be carved into a statue) and the deity of Lupus, the wolf (who liked to eat little girls in red riding hoods).
Just like it was a swingin’ ’70s “key party”, love notes would be selected by the town’s young men and women to create instant partners for the evening’s shenanigans. Then everyone would get naked, sacrifice some pets, smear themselves with blood and hurl themselves into a moist and energetic orgy.
But where would the world be without the intervention of some god-fearing Christian temperance?
To put the brakes on all this heavy breathing of Lupercalia, early Christians encouraged participants to embrace various saints (instead of drunk, naked people) and to emulate the ideals of the saints they’d chosen.
This proved unpopular and was quickly scrapped. But just like they did with psalms and laying waste to Sunday mornings for centuries to come, the Christians persisted with their “de-eroticization” and romanticized the day by selecting the chaste St. Valentine as the sole saint to be honoured.
Valentine (or Valentinus, as he was known) was an ordinary guy who ignored a third-century decree made by the Roman Emperor Claudius II that forbade marriage. Claudius decided that single men made better soldiers (you didn’t have to send a folded flag to a grieving widow), so marriage was out. Valentine snuck around and secretly conducted wedding ceremonies (just like gays have had to do with Stephen Harper running Canada), but was caught and imprisoned (just as they may be if Stephen Harper is elected to another term).
In jail, the future saint cured the jailer’s daughter of her blindness and she fell in love with him (Hah! Love at first sight?). On the eve of his execution, Valentinus slipped her the first Valentine’s Day card — a love note signed, “From Your Valentine”.
Instant martyr — just add violent death.
Everyone got all goo-goo eyed and then some dink at Hallmark began the commercial assault on what had once been just a lusty free-for-all. That’s when Valentine’s Day lost touch with the baser instincts that rule love.
Image Credits
Nicolas Poussin – A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term (1632-3)
Rubens – Romulus and Remus
Ancient woodcut of Valentinus
Any article that includes bacon, the Juno Awards, Pan and Valentine’s Day is alright with me. Thanks for the irreverent read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
An amusing and well written article as usual. I still do not understand why we need a special day to celebrate the one(s) we love. Surely November 20th or August 15th are acceptable days to tell someone we love them?
GREAT article… makes me feel a warm and fuzzy..
HA HA
This is a wonderful and very funny account of Valentine’s day through the ages. I’ve been a bit jaded when it comes to this Hallmark Holiday, but your article has made me think that maybe there’s a few things worth celebrating still.