Imbolc, Lupercalia, Valentine's Day, and the birth of civilisation.
Imbolc is all about fertility and getting back to nature.
After a long dark and cold winter, it’s now that we begin to see some colour appearing back in the trees as the light of the Sun God becomes stronger each day. Snowdrops, crocuses, and daffodils begin to make an appearance and it’s time to start sowing your garlic, sage, summer salad vegetables, sweet peas and root vegetables such as beetroot, parsnips and carrots. Whilst our hands are busied with preparation work, our hearts are renewed with optimism and promise.
It’s quite a while until we enter the full abundance of spring, summer and the harvest months, but Imbolc is the time that our Earth Mother shows her fertility, she shows us hope and she fills us with excited anticipation, as she’s done so for thousands of years.
There once was a cave, surrounded and protected by a grove, that lay at the foot of Palatine Hill, the centremost of seven hills. While not magickal in itself, I like to think of it as the womb of Western civilization.
Every year on the morning of February 15th the priests of Lupercus (the God of harvest, fertility among sheep and protector of shepherds and their flocks) would congregate at the cave’s entrance. They bought with them two male goats, to be sacrificed on the altar within the mouth of the cave, to appease and ask for fertility blessings for the year to come from Lupercus. This was followed by a purification ritual involving the sacrifice of a dog, a dog was used here as they often guarded shepherds’ flocks.
Two young men from the Luperci (priests of Lupercus) born from noble blood and wearing nothing but the hide of the sacrificed goats had their foreheads painted with the sacrificial blood and would run around Palatine Hill striking women with strips of flayed goat skin. Although this sounds barbaric to us looking through a modern lens, we have to accept that this was a very different time and the women, especially those without children or who were pregnant at the time, would gladly come to meet the Lurperci and be whipped by the priests as they rushed past, for this was a sign of great fertility and easy childbirth to come. As the Roman poet Ovid once wrote of it ‘neither potent herbs, nor prayers, nor magic spells shall make a mother of thee, submit with patience to the blows dealt by a fruitful hand’. The sacrificial blood would be cleansed from the knife with wool dipped in milk and lots of feasting and general merriment would follow. Couples would be paired up during the festival and would often remain together, or at least until the following years’ festival.
This festival was known as Lupercalia, a festival that is still celebrated to this day.
Later as Christianity swept through the lands during the 5th century, Pope Gelasius banned Lupercalia and in 496 AD the Catholic Church declared February 14th as a day to celebrate the martyred Saint Valentine. Valentine was a third century minister who had been executed on that very day as punishment for conducting outlawed marriages in secret, against the decree of the then Emperor Claudius II. While Valentine was awaiting his fate in jail, he fell madly in love with the jailer’s daughter and on the day of his execution he left her a note signed ‘from your Valentine’ before he was led away to be beaten and beheaded.
It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower linked this day to romantic overtures and declarations of love, which were later backed up by the writings of Shakespeare. Once the Industrial Age bloomed, so did Valentine’s Day, massed produced romantic cards could then be purchased and used to send notes of love and devotion to sweethearts.
We’re all aware of Valentine’s Day and what it has become, the striking colours of red and white (blood and milk) and depictions of Cupid, the Roman God of desire, erotic love and attraction, fill our shops from January onwards.
But not all of us are aware of its origins, in a cave called Lupercal at the foot of Palatine Hill as far back as the 6th century BC.
Why do I refer to the Lupercal cave as the womb of modern-day civilisation? Because it’s the very cave where Romulus and Remus, the earthly sons of the God Mars, were said to have been cared for by the she-wolf Lupus after they had been stolen from their mother and thrown into the river Tiber (but saved by the god Tiberinus - father of the river).
When both men where grown, they returned to the hills where Romulus built a civilisation complete with institutions, a military, a government, and religious traditions. This is the city we now know as Rome.