AS we move towards 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 February 14 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 stylised into mostly red roses, or bouquets with red roses dominating, chocolates, or red heart-shaped boxes containing confections or other useful gifts such as jewellery, often featuring pictures of the Greco-Roman mythological god of love, Cupid, shooting his arrows into human hearts, engendering erotic or romantic love.

Saint Valentine’s Day has also developed its own language of colours, which sends messages covering the gamut of romantic relationships. For example, red denotes the wearer is already deeply in love; orange means they will be proposing; blue signifies the wearer is free and open to proposals; pink indicates they have already accepted someone’s proposal; and green means they are waiting for someone.

Owing to the commercialisation of the holy day, where, in the United States for example, over $18 billion worth of flowers and chocolates are sold, and couples engage 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 his later elevation to sainthood, is either completely forgotten or divorced from its connection with the celebration.

In ancient Roman religion, there was a festival known as Lupercalia, which celebrated human fertility, and also the she-wolf that nurtured Romulus, the founder of Rome. By the second century A.D., the festival had lost its solemnity, and deteriorated into a great orgy. Goats and dogs were sacrificed, skinned, and their skins cut into strips. 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 pairing unmarried men and women, who would then enter into short-term relationships lasting up to a year until the 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 A.D., 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, Claudius Gothicus, found that his armies were always short of men because married men could not be enlisted. Claudius, therefore, banned marriages, but Bishop Valentine secretly continued solemnising the marriages of young men. When the emperor discovered what Bishop Valentine was doing, he had him arrested and sentenced to death. The bishop became very friendly with his jailer, to whom he explained the Gospel. The jailer said he would publicly declare himself a Christian if the bishop’s prayers could cure his blind daughter. 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 canonised as Patron Saint of Marriage and Families in the fifth century A.D., February 14 was chosen as his feast day, enveloping Lupercalia and minimising its orgiastic excesses.

During the 19th and 20th Centuries, the religious aspects of Saint Valentine’s Day, which upheld the serious obligations of marriage and child-rearing, were ignored or neglected because the planet’s population was growing at a rate that the world’s resources could not sustain. The growth of the world population in these centuries was caused by revolutionary advances in medical science, improvements in nutrition, and the continuous betterment of public hygiene—for instance, in waste disposal—which resulted in greater longevity and a 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 where immigration is present, with South Korea and Japan being prime examples. The present logical demographic prediction is that Homo sapiens could again become a small minority of Earth’s creatures if creative efforts are not made to stabilise the situation. In this effort, the message of St. Valentine’s Day is of the highest importance and needs to be resuscitated.