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Origins of Valentines
As early as the fourth century B.C., the Romans engaged
in an annual young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of
teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men.
Thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment
and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another
lottery was staged.
Determined to put an end to this 800-year-old practice, the early
church fathers sought a "lovers" saint to replace the deity Lupercus. They
found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some
200 years earlier.
Traditionally, mid-February was a time for Romans to meet and court
prospective mates. Young men offered women they admired and wished to court
handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards acquired St.
Valentine's name.
As Christianity spread, so did the Valentine's Day card. The earliest
one was sent in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was a
prisoner in the Tower of London. It is now in the British Museum.
The first American publisher of Valentines was printer and artist
Esther Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870s cost from five to ten
dollars, with some selling for as much as thirty-five dollars. Since that
time, the Valentine card business has flourished. Except for Christmas,
Americans exchange more cards on Valentine's Day than at any other time of
the year.
Excerpted from "Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday things,"
Charles Panati, Harper & Row, NY 1987 pp 50-52.
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