Showing Valentine's Day a Little Love

"O, know'st thou not his looks are my soul's food? Pity the dearth that I have pined in, By longing for that food so long a time. Didst thou but know the inly touch of love, Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow As seek to quench the fire of love with words."

Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II, Scene VII William Shakespeare

Since time immemorial, mankind has been absolutely busy with the job of keeping mankind around. Whatever our history of war and violence might have to say about us, looking back also reveals an equally rich a history of love and affection.

And no, I don't mean sex. Well, okay. I don't just mean sex.

Whatever modern pragmatists may say about our historical mate-selection processes, and however true many of the unglamorous realities have proven, the fact remains: sometimes you can't get someone out of your head - and this is ridiculously well-documented; romantic poetry is old. When our ancestors were cobbling together the first sets of stone tools, you can bet that somebody used them to carve whatever passed for initials back then into a tree, alongside the emblematic representation of their chosen paramour.

And yes, that is a lot of syllables to say that we humans are a romantic bunch, but you're in college now; suck it up. So here we are, 2010, and we in the United States are no different - in fact, we have a holiday dedicated to the concept of romantic love.

In theory.

"Now, wait just a minute," you say, being a helpful reader who engages your humble narrator in imaginary conversation so that he can hurdle over his writer's block. "I thought this was going to be a mushy, sappy, fluffy article, about how in love I am? Mr. Killstring, I feel so betrayed."

First of all, I'm glad we're on a first-moniker basis. Secondly, far be it from me to open with a Shakespeare quote, and then ignore it. Though we have the snow to try it with, attempting to actually set it on fire is not the smartest idea. Attempting to tell someone they're "not in love" is just about as practical.

So, okay. People fall in love, it's great - go love. Hoo-ray.

And now we find ourselves on the doorstep of a holiday dedicated solely to the celebration, if not outright glorification of the notion of romantic love. But what is Valentine's Day, exactly? The question would seem pretty straightforward - right? A day set aside to be mushy, in honor of a Catholic saint of some sort. So let's go back further - St. Valentine; who precisely the hell are you, and why should we care? You'd think somebody would know the answer - the man's a bona fide saint, with a multi-billion dollar holiday named after him. Finding out just who Valentine was should be easy, right?

Boy, you'd think that.

The truth is, nobody's really quite sure. When Pope Gelasius I christened the Feast of Saint Valentine at the end of the fifth century, he referred to Valentine as part of a group "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God." So basically, even he didn't know.

Still, good enough for the Gel-Man (Catholic hate-mail can be addressed to cauldroneditors@gmail.com, Attn: Killstring) to declare Valentine the Patron Saint of Lovers - which I think we can all agree, would be pretty nice to have on your resume.

So no, we don't know exactly who he was, but historians seem to agree on three theories as being fairly likely. Everyone seems to agree that he lived sometime around the third century in Rome, and did something that fell under a particularly sexy brand of awesome. Some say that he was killed for helping Christians escape Roman prisons where there was torturing, murder, and all sorts of unpleasant mistreatment. I suppose that's romantic, though it's a pretty big step from there to heart-shaped chocolates. Unless the Romans pulled his heart out, in which case, I will feel exponentially less comfortable buying said chocolates in the future. Thankfully, that little tidbit is lost to history.

Other accounts suggest that while in prison, our hero fell in love with a young girl - occasionally identified as the jailer's daughter - and before his execution, he wrote her a letter, ending with "From your Valentine." And then they killed him.

Which is sweet in its way, but also more than a little morbid.

So, do we have any accounts that don't creepily fetishize our romantic hero? Thankfully, yes. The most commonly accepted version is significantly more palatable - come with me, if you will, to the reign of Emperor Claudius II. Claudius, ever the pragmatist, decided that single men made for better soldiers than someone with a wife and family back home, so he opted to make marriage illegal for young men.

Valentine wasn't having it. So our boy went rogue, becoming a Stealth Love Commando - performing guerrilla marriages under constant threat of capture, imprisonment, torture, and every sort of threat that third-century Rome could cook up. Which, for the record, was a lot.

Eventually, Claudius's men discovered Valentine's actions, and the Roman Death Squad (they had 'em) captured the renegade matrimonial miscreant, severely beating him with clubs, and on February 14 of 270 A.D, beheaded him. Karma, if one believes in such things, seemed to have Val's side, as that's also the year that Claudius Gothicus passed away. In January.

All apologies to the many brilliant Roman Catholic historians - but that's some fuzzy math.

If this Valentine did exist - which he very well could have - he didn't die at the hands of Claudius's goons in the middle of February 270 - because Claudius didn't have any goons left, being dead. The most likely explanation for this is the common-but-rarely-admitted practice of replacing traditional Pagan holidays with newly-minted Christian ones by the young Catholic Church.

February 15, you see, was when Lupercalia was celebrated - a fertility and purification festival, which was thought to be important in cleansing a city. Lupercalia was celebrated, well, a lot. Faunus/Pan, and Lupa, the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus - for the mythologically challenged, they were brothers, sons of the god of war, and responsible for founding Rome. Well, Romulus was responsible; Remus got killed with a shovel.