Word: lupercalia
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...origins of our tacky celebrations apparently derive not from the martyr but from one of two other sources. Historians place the Roman festival of Lupercalia in the middle of February and suggest that a pagan bacchanal might have developed over the course of centuries into our tamer celebration of romantic love. Alternatively, a poetic mistake might have placed the dawning of spring in the middle of winter...
Honoring the Roman god of fertility, Lupercalia celebrated the wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, providing the luckier brother with the martial vigor to found a great city on the body of the unluckier brother. The holiday celebrated not only unrestrained sexuality but the martial spirit of Romulus' descendants in wild days of drinking, games and orgies. Greeting cards were not required...
Unlike Christmas cards, which everyone knows were instigated by a Swiss job printer in 1856 to tide him over the slack season, Valentine's day cards can be traced back to historical origins. Specifically, they come from the ancient Roman Feast of the Lupercalia where youth men and women put cards with their names on them into a large box, and couples were paired by chance drawings. The pairings lasted all year, which clearly shows that the Romans knew how to make more of a good thing than...
...Romans, who first gave February 14 a special significance, celebrated the day with a dine and dance routine. The event was called the Feast of Lupercalia. After several generations, the Romans stopped the annual merry-making and called it a day, Valentine's Day to be exact, after a martyred bishop of the same name...
Against the realistic but poetically envisaged background of yesterday's Paris, in a political climate heavy with the Stavisky scandals and the riots of Feb. 6, 1934, swarms a crowd of fantastic figures in a kind of Lutetian Lupercalia. Outlines of the story are mundane enough. Elvira, pretty and discontented, has left her stodgy British husband to join her lover, Oliver, in Paris. On the train from Calais she meets Marpurgo, a cultured lace-buyer, an opaque fellow who grows more sinister with acquaintance. He describes himself as "a virtuoso in decadence, disintegration, mental necrosis. . . ." His hearers are usually...
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