SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY

Feb 09, 2025 Consumer Concerns, Features / Columnists, News, Waterfalls Magazine

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CONSUMER CONCERNS

By PAT  DIAL

Kaieteur News- As we move toward Saint Valentine’s Day in the next five days, we reflect upon the genesis of that unique holy or festive day which is commemorated or celebrated on 14th February every year.  In the 21st century, Valentine’s Day is widely celebrated in Western Countries as a day of romantic love, with the United States being the capital of such celebrations.  Couples, married or unmarried, exchange tokens of love which are now stylized into mostly red roses or bouquets with red roses dominating, chocolates or red heart-shaped boxes contain confections or other useful gifts of jewelry and often with pictures of the Greco-Roman mythological God of Love Cupid, shooting his arrows of love into human hearts engendering erotic or romantic love.

Saint Valentine’s Day has also developed its own language of colours which send messages covering the gamut of romantic relationships, for  example red denotes the wearer is already deeply in love; Orange, will be proposing;  Blue- the wearer is free and open to proposals;  Pink -has already accepted someone’s proposal;  or Green – waiting for someone.

Owing to the commercialization of the holy day where, in the United States for example, over $18 billion in flowers and chocolates are sold and couples engage themselves in dinners, dances and picnics, the religious significance of the Day, which involves the martyrdom of Bishop Valentine of Rome in the third century A.D. and who was later elevated to Sainthood, is either completely forgotten or divorced from connection with the Day.

In the ancient Roman religion, there was a festival known as Lupercalia, which celebrated human fertility and also the she-wolf, which succoured Romulus, the founder of Rome. By the second century A D, the festival had lost its solemnity and had deteriorated into a great orgy.  Goats and dogs were sacrificed, skinned and their skins were cut into strips and the celebrants would dip these strips into the blood of the animals and frenziedly run around Rome naked, striking women who were infertile after which they were believed to become childbearing.  There was also a lottery of unmarried men and women who were then paired off and went into short term relationships, or at most for a year until next Lupercalia. The Lupercalia festival was celebrated between 13th and 15th February.

The next strand of the origin of St Valentine’s Day is Christian.  In the second century AD, Valentine was a Bishop of the Catholic Church in Rome when Rome was still a pagan empire and city.  The Emperor of Rome at the time was Claudius Gothicus, who found that his armies were always short of men because married men could not be enlisted. Claudius therefore banned marriages but Bishop Valentine secretly kept on solemnizing the marriages of young men.  When the Emperor found out what Bishop Valentine was doing, he had him arrested and sentenced to death. The Bishop became very friendly with his jailer to whom he had explained the Gospel and who said he would publicly declare himself a Christian, if the Bishop’s prayers could cure his blind daughter of her blindness.  Bishop Valentine placed his hands over the girl’s eyes, prayed and miraculously she regained her sight. Before his execution on the same day, he left a note for the cured girl ending with the words “Your Valentine” which was adopted over the centuries in all Valentine correspondence.

When Bishop Valentinus was canonized as Patron Saint of Marriage and families in the Fifth Century AD, 14th February was chosen as his Feast Day enveloping Lupercalia, minimizing it of its orgiastic excesses.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the religious aspects of Saint Valentine’s Day, which upheld the serious obligation of the importance of marriage and the rearing of children, were ignored or neglected because the population of the planet was growing at a rate which the resources of the world could not sustain.  The growth of world population in these centuries  was caused by the revolutionary advances of medical science, the improvement in nutrition and the continuous betterment of public hygiene, for instance, in waste disposal, which resulted in greater longevity and the reduction in the rate of infant mortality.

In the 21st century, however, the populations of several parts of the world are in net decline and could logically become extinct, except there is immigration, with South Korea and Japan being prime examples.  The present logical demographic prediction is that homo sapiens could again be a small minority of the earth’s creatures if creative effort is not made to stabilize the situation. In this effort, the message of St Valentine’s Day is of the highest importance and needs to be resuscitated.

(SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY)

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• CONSUMER CONCERNS, exchange tokens, language of colours, Saint Valentine's Day

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