Love, roses and history

This Saturday is Valentine's Day, but do you honestly know where Valentine's Day comes from? While we've all heard the holiday has something to do with a "St. Valentine," few people realize the holiday's origin is a bit of a mystery. \nIn fact, historians believe it is the culmination of various traditions that emerged during the last 2,700 years.\nThe earliest element contributing to modern Valentine's Day was the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia. Every Feb. 15, the Romans would go out to a cave in the Palatine Hill called the Lupercal to feast and dance and sacrifice goats. To this day, goats do not celebrate Valentine's Day. The highlight of the festival was when two teams of naked men would race around the hill hitting people with goat-hide whips. Women struck by the whips were said to become fertile. This tradition holds today, except, of course, it is the guys who end up whipped.\nIn the third century A.D., "St. Valentine" made his historical debut. Actually, there were two St. Valentines, one a Roman priest and doctor, the other the bishop of Turni, a town near Rome. In a show of bureaucratic redundancy, the Romans executed both. As legend has it, Emperor Claudius II whacked one for violating an imperial order by conducting secret marriages for soldiers. \nClaudius apparently thought marriage made his soldiers into sissies, whereas leather skirts were dead butch. Besides being the patron saint of lovers, St. Valentine (either one, presumably) is invoked to cure epilepsy. This is why so much of Valentine's Day is spent in the hope of swallowing a tongue.\nIt was also in Roman times that Cupid, the son of Venus, became a symbol of love -- because, of course, nothing says love like a projectile-weapon toting, bare-arsed flying baby. According to myth, Cupid flies around invisibly, shooting people with gold-tipped arrows, which makes them fall in love, or shooting them with lead-tipped arrows, which makes them die of lead poisoning.\nAn English tradition, dating back to the time of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, holds that Valentine's Day was a holiday of love because it happened to be the day birds chose their mates. One can only wonder how the English learned this. The 14th century must have been a very slow century indeed.\nBy the 1700s, a variety of Valentine's Day-related customs had emerged. According to the 2003 World Book Encyclopedia, young women hoping to summon their true loves would circle their church at midnight chanting things like "I sow hempseed. / Hempseed I sow. / He that loves me best, / Come after me now." \nToday, this tradition finds expression in the work of the contemporary poet, Mr. Snoop Dogg: "A-ha, niggaz be brown-nosing these hoes and shit. / Takin bitches out to eat, and spendin money on these hoes knowwhatI'msayin?" ("Chronic Break"). Amazing how little has changed over the \ncenturies.\n The 19th century saw the emergence of mass-produced valentines. While some decry the commercialism that has crept into Valentine's Day ever since, I personally think this development was a boon for humanity. After all, shelling out $2.99 for a card of a teddy bear that says "I wuv you" is often far less costly than telling someone what you really think of them.