So, as I am writing this post it is currently Valentine’s Day. You know, the feast day of St. Valentine, a celebration of romantic love, and all that jazz. But what if I told you that the reason for the season used to be running around smacking people with goat skins?

Today, we’re going to talk about the Roman festival of Lupercalia.

Lupercalia is a super old festival, that was celebrated around the Palatine Hill near the city of Rome. It’s believed that it may have been related to the god Faunnus, who is basically the Roman version of the Greek god Pan (you know, the half-goat, half man nature god). It may have also had something to do with wolves, as the base seems to be the Roman word for wolf. Wolves were really big in Rome, because the two guys said to have founded it were raised by a wolf.

As for the events of the festival, it would kick off with a priesthood called the Luperci sacrificing some goats and one dog. Then the priests would touch the bloody knives to their foreheads, then would wipe the blood off with wool soaked in milk. Apparently laughing was involved, which isn’t creepy at all.

Then there would be this huge feast, followed by the sacrifices being skinned and thongs being made from the skins. By which I mean leather strips, not the underwear. This is where the real fun would come in: the Luperci would then run around Palatine Hill, smacking any women they came across with their goat leather thongs. This was believed to render the women they struck fertile.

As for the purpose, the rites listed here were largely the aforementioned fertility, but there was also a an element of purification. Like Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia typically fell around February 14th, and may actually be where the name of the month came from as the tools used in the rituals where called februa.

As happened with a lot of pagan rituals and festivals, Lupercalia was eventually banned by Pope Gelasius I around 494 CE. There’s also speculation that he may have placed St. Valentine’s feast day on the 14th, but that may have actually come about later. Either way, early Christians did have a tendency of placing their feast days around the same times as the non-Christian ones to make converting the locals easier.

I think we should bring Lupercalia back, though. It actually sounds like a lot of fun.