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Ghosts of Valentine's Past - TPM 12
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Before Valentine’s Day became a celebration of romance, and even before it was associated with a Roman Catholic saint, this was a time of celebration and feasting in Rome. From February 13th through the 21st, the Romans observed the overlapping festivals of Parentalia, Lupercalia, and Feralia to celebrate fertility, life, and honor the dead so their ghosts wouldn't haunt the living.
Join me to compare the mythological and historical versions of St. Valentine and explore these Roman festivals of ancestor worship and their links to older Etruscan traditions.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Exploring Death's Historical Relationship
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to the past macabre, where we journey through history to uncover how our relationship with death reflects the values, fears, and hopes that shape the way people live. I'm your host, Stephanie Rice.
The Myth of St. Valentine and Roman Festivals
00:00:42
Speaker
Thank you for joining me for episode 12, Ghosts of Valentine's Past. In this episode, we'll briefly look at the myth of St. Valentine and the origin of Valentine's Day,
00:00:53
Speaker
Then we'll explore the Roman festivals of Parentalia, Lupercalia, and Pharelia. From February 13th to February 21st, the Romans celebrated life through fertility rituals, honored their deceased ancestors, and tried to appease the restless spirits that were said to roam freely during this time of year. I'll share some of the evidence that archaeologists have found that suggests that these festivals originated in even older Etruscan traditions.
00:01:24
Speaker
Now, let's journey back to a time when this month belonged not just to lovers, but to the ancestors and spirits who walked among them.
00:01:39
Speaker
Since Valentine's Day just passed, I wanted to celebrate its ancient roots, or at least the myth of its ancient roots. According to the widely told Valentine's Day origin myth, Saint Valentinus was an early Christian priest in Rome in the 3rd century CE.
00:01:59
Speaker
It's said that he secretly performed Christian wedding ceremonies when they were banned in Rome, which is the inspiration for our modern holiday centered around romance. In some versions, he was condemned to death for that. In other versions, it was because he tried to convert the emperor directly, but in all versions, he died as a martyr on February 14th, 269 CE.
00:02:22
Speaker
A feast day was then established in his honor and that evolved into our modern Valentine's Day celebration. But the historical St. Valentine is a little harder to trace. The earliest source in surviving Catholic documents that definitively names a Valentinus is from the 9th century. There may have actually even been multiple people named Valentine or Valentinus that all became combined into a single mythological saint.
00:02:52
Speaker
But for the sake of time, I'm going to treat them as one because this is not an episode about Saint Valentine. As far as the official Catholic documentation goes, he was the patron saint of the city of Terny and the patron saint of epilepsy, the plague, and beekeepers. He later became the patron saint of the island of Lesbos, which still houses some of his relics even today.
Valentine's Day: Romance and Historical Origins
00:03:19
Speaker
His connection to epilepsy is really unclear, but in the 15th century, art began depicting him healing people with epilepsy after it was mentioned in that ninth century source. Bees, honey, honeycomb, and wax also became a part of his iconography around this time. And one myth about him says that he was a beekeeper and had a very compassionate, gentle nature that bees particularly appreciated.
00:03:47
Speaker
The myth goes on to say that one day he came across a blind girl who we taught how to care for the bees. After she began beekeeping herself, her site was miraculously returned. The city of Terny claims him as the birthplace of St. Valentine, and there are documents that show there was a bishop named Valentinos in Terny.
00:04:11
Speaker
And the island of Lesbos claimed him much later as their patron saint. There's a large cathedral there that has several relics that are from his bones and various body parts. He didn't become associated with romance until Jeffrey Chaucer and several of his peers began including him in their romantic poetry in the 14th century CE.
00:04:34
Speaker
It's not even truly clear if any of the potential historical figures named Valentinos actually died on February 14th. So it's still unclear about why the date was chosen. As with many Christian feast days, the day was a pagan holiday celebrated long before the patron saint was born.
00:04:56
Speaker
But in this case, there's no direct evidence of the Feast of St. Valentine being intentionally associated with the previous pagan holiday celebrated during this time.
Rituals of Parentalia and Lupercalia
00:05:09
Speaker
In ancient Rome, up through the time that Valentine was said to be alive, this time of year was originally spent celebrating the cycle of life and death.
00:05:19
Speaker
Most of what we know of these celebrations come from Roman accounts that were written between 200 BCE and 200 CE, but there is evidence that they go back even to the Etruscans before the Romans celebrated them. The first off is Parentalia, which was held from February 13th to February 21st. According to ancient Roman writers, the spirits of the dead were free to roam during the days of Parentalia.
00:05:47
Speaker
This was a time when people would celebrate their dead ancestors and loved ones and they would come together in large family gatherings. And those wandering spirits of the dead weren't automatically malicious, but precautions of sorts were taken against them and certain rituals were performed by the family on different days.
00:06:12
Speaker
Another precaution taken against them was that all of the temples were closed during this period. One writer, Ovid, says that this was to screen the gods from their malicious spirits or potentially malicious spirits. And it was specifically seen as bad luck to be married on any of the days during Parentalia.
00:06:34
Speaker
Now, the marriages weren't outright banned, but maybe this was the inspiration for St. Valentine's secret wedding ceremonies that he became associated with later. During the Parentalia celebrations, Lupercalia was held on February 15th. It was also known as Februalia, which is partially the source of the month named February.
00:07:02
Speaker
It was a festival of purification and fertility. And similar to some of the other episodes where I've gone over gods of death, a lot of these gods of death of ancient times were also associated with the full cycle of life, rebirth, and fertility. Over time, Lupercalia became associated with the founding myth of Rome and was eventually dedicated to the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus.
00:07:30
Speaker
The main part of the Lupercalia rituals began at the Lupercal, which was a cave that was said to be where the she-wolf found Romulus and Remus and fed them for the first time. priests who were called Luperky during this festival would sacrifice goats and then cut their hide into strips called February, which meant purification. The priests would then run through the streets, mostly naked, whipping anyone they caught in their path until they reached the forum. And it was said that any woman touched by the February while they were on their run would be blessed with a child in the year ahead.
00:08:08
Speaker
The fertility aspect of Lupercalia is why a lot of people try to link St. Valentine and romance with this ancient tradition because often it's easy to just associate fertility equals sex. But Lupercalia also was a celebration of agricultural fertility as well and as well as for the flocks.
00:08:33
Speaker
There were also rituals performed that were intended to increase the amount of lambs that were born to flocks of sheep.
Feralia's Closing Rituals and Community Feasts
00:08:42
Speaker
And there were rituals that were performed where libations of milk were poured onto the ground in order to essentially ask for the blessing of fertile earth and things like that.
00:08:57
Speaker
A large feast would have been held at the end of the day of Lupercalia as well. And this is where everybody would have come together as a large community and they would have eaten the meat of the sacrificed animals as well as essentially a potluck of goods brought in by everyone.
00:09:13
Speaker
In the following days, the Parentalia celebrations would continue back to the smaller family-oriented feasts and celebrations and visits to tombs. On the day after, the 16th of February, the Parentalia celebrations would continue with more of those private family feasts and celebrations, and then on February 17th.
00:09:37
Speaker
Kyrenalia was celebrated, which was said to be the day that Romulus died. The Romans celebrated him like a shared ancestor on this day. But before that, it was also known as Stulturium feriae, or Feast of Fools. It was tied to the festival of Fornicalia, which was what we call a floating holiday sometime in early February.
00:10:04
Speaker
While that likely sounds like a very scandalous celebration, it was an agricultural festival dedicated to the goddess of ovens, Fornax. February 17th was called the Feast of Fools because it was the day that people who missed the main celebration of Fornacalia were forced to make public offerings to the goddess Fornax, and then everyone would know that you missed the proper celebration day.
00:10:30
Speaker
The private celebrations for Parentalia would then continue on the following days. The final day, February 21st, was known as Feralia, and that was when the public celebrations for the dead were held on much larger scales.
00:10:47
Speaker
There were large community feasts that would have been held and much larger gatherings to celebrate larger lists of people like many impactful community members or even just neighbors instead of just limiting it to family. Anyone who knew someone within the neighborhood, it extended all over throughout the entire day.
00:11:10
Speaker
According to the writer Ovid, in roughly 8 CE, Feralia was a necessary closing ritual to the celebrations of Parentalia. He wrote that there was one year that the Romans didn't celebrate Feralia properly, and all of the dead rose from their graves as ghosts and wandered through both the city and the countryside howling in the night.
00:11:37
Speaker
It makes sense then that people would want to make Feralia such a large celebration in order to make absolutely sure the dead are happy enough to return to their graves peacefully and not have any howling nights lingering.
Etruscan Influences on Roman Rituals
00:11:52
Speaker
Even though most of our sources for what we know now of these festivals comes from the Romans, it's most likely that all of these celebrations with Parentalia, Pharelia, and you even Fornicalia all started as Etruscan celebrations. After this break, we'll take a look at some of the evidence.
00:12:15
Speaker
Many of the iconically Roman institutions and celebrations that we know were actually of Etruscan origin. I go into more detail about it in episode 10, Etruscan Death and Divination, but essentially there's a lot of intertwined history between Etruria and Rome.
00:12:34
Speaker
Evidence of specific parts of the celebrations within Parentalia, Lupercalia, and Pharelia have been found in Etruscan tombs that date to hundreds of years before the Roman celebrations began.
00:12:48
Speaker
Honoring the dead was very important to the Etruscans, and so it's very easy to connect the dots between their celebrations and Parentalia. They held feasts and games to celebrate their dead that's shown in their tomb art, and they would create large family tombs that looked exactly like homes that held generations of different family members.
00:13:12
Speaker
Many tombs were built to also include areas where the family could come join in feasts that included the dead. And there were inscriptions and offerings left to the ancestors at these tombs that were similar to the descriptions of the private family celebrations that happened during Parentalia.
00:13:31
Speaker
A lot of these examples come from the necropolises at Cerverteri, which is not too far from Rome, but it's an Etruscan necropolis, and here there were several Etruscan settlements.
00:13:45
Speaker
One specific tomb that's been nicknamed Tomb of the Reliefs is a fourth century BCE tomb that's one of the most famous Etruscan tombs. It's carved to resemble a house, one of the most iconic and well-preserved ones, and it's complete with very detailed stucco reliefs that are three-dimensional of everyday objects like tools, weapons, household items, and then also like food offerings, kitchen utensils, even their pets. Anything that they believed that the deceased would have needed in the afterlife from their home life was included in these murals.
00:14:27
Speaker
The tomb belonged to the Metunas family and they were very clearly elites based on the objects that they actually have depicted very realistically of their various statuses in life. There are also over 32 places for bodies to have been laid out and most likely they were all filled. This would have been a very large generational tomb that would have most likely included some of the extended family as well.
00:14:53
Speaker
The tomb of the Tarkna family, which is also nearby, just in a different necropolis, was from the sixth century BCE, and it was also a very large one that encompassed a very elite family.
00:15:10
Speaker
It's been confirmed that at least eight generations were buried in this family tomb, and they show a lot of depictions of people dancing, playing music, boxing, riding horses, and just having a great time on the frescoes within their family tomb.
00:15:28
Speaker
The inscriptions along these frescoes are what gave the tomb its nickname, the Tomb of Inscriptions, and they all identified the dancing revelers as the members of this elite family. Everyone is either nude or mostly nude in essentially a very festive, sort of animalistic way of celebrating life and their togetherness.
00:15:58
Speaker
The descriptions of those later celebrations of Parentalia, Feralia and Lupercalia included a lot of these similar activities, such as the mostly nude people dancing and reveling and having a great time. A lot of the music playing as well. Boxing and riding horses were also seen as some events that could be held during this time period, depending on who you were and how elite you were.
00:16:28
Speaker
Ultimately, anything that would have been seen as a way to celebrate the deceased ancestors. Another example of these Etruscan celebration depictions comes from what's nicknamed the Tomb of the Triclinium, which is a tomb that dates to about the fifth century BCE. And it's named for the type of dining room that had three banquet couches or clean eye that was very common in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world.
00:16:59
Speaker
It was a single room tomb instead of being the larger multi-room tombs that we see in most of the family tombs of Etruria, but it was painted very vividly in a dining room scene that would have basically felt like the deceased in the center of the tomb were part of the entire dining celebration, as well as any of the family members who came to visit them.
00:17:26
Speaker
The very interesting thing about this tomb is the way that its ceiling is shaped and the fact that it was chosen to be just a single room tomb makes a lot of researchers think that it might have been intentionally made to look like the tents that would have been erected for the celebrations for the dead.
00:17:44
Speaker
For example, a lot of the paintings that are on this tomb, especially on the ceiling, are very vibrant colored patchwork patterns or checkered patterns similar to quilted style fabrics and very brightly colored celebratory things that would have been used during the period.
00:18:04
Speaker
The frescoes that line each wall depict the banquet and everyone is happy at it. There's dancers and musicians. Everyone is drinking and eating and having a great time, which is exactly what the intentions of the later Roman versions of Parentalia and Lupercalia were intended to evolve because they brought the family together and included the deceased loved ones as well.
00:18:31
Speaker
One last example of the tomb art that we'll look at, even though there are plenty of examples out there, is a sixth century BCE tomb that's been nicknamed Tomb of the Augurs. The paintings within this tomb show scenes of mourners that are bringing the offerings to the deceased, including food and drink, instead of a completely celebratory scene that reflects what it would have been in life.
00:18:59
Speaker
The offerings depicted match very closely the offerings that are described as part of Parentalia and especially Pharelia, that final celebration. This tomb does also depict celebrations and there are funerary games like wrestling and foot races that are on the art within the tombs. There's also a depiction of a prisoner who's being forced to fight an enraged beast to the death.
00:19:27
Speaker
Many researchers have interpreted this tomb, the Tomb of the Ogres, as the evidence of the origins of the gladiatorial games being Etruscan. This tomb specifically mirrors a lot of the things that were done during the gladiator games, as well as some of the things that later became part of Lupercalia, Parentalia, and Pharelia, linking all of that evidence of the Etruscan to Roman ritual connections.
00:19:56
Speaker
It isn't only tomb art that we have this evidence from. We also have some information on other rituals of Etruscan origin that are very similar to the core of Lupercalia, for example. The Hyrpi Serrani, or Wolves of Serranos, were priests of the Etruscan god of the sun and underworld, who was known as Suri Calusta.
00:20:20
Speaker
also known as just Kalu in some inscriptions, his name was Latinized as Serannus. I went over a lot of information about Suri and the Etruscan gods and goddesses of death in episode 10. So as just a very, very quick overview, most of Suri's underworld aspects were associated with wolves. But as Kalu, he was most often depicted as a wolf man.
00:20:47
Speaker
During the celebrations that the hirpi sarani held, they would dress as wolves, perform various purification rituals on behalf of the entire community, sacrifice a goat, and then walk across burning embers carrying the goats in trails.
00:21:03
Speaker
Once the priests were on the other side, a fortune teller called a Haruspex would read the entrails of the sacrificed goat and they would determine if the gods considered the community acceptably purified. Several researchers have theorized that Lupercalia began as a very similar celebration, but evolved over time to reflect political and religious changes in Rome.
00:21:27
Speaker
The core similarities within the two celebrations are the wolf imagery, which is easily adapted from a wolf man related to a god, to the she-wolf related to the founding of Rome itself, and then the emphasis on communal purification. Additional evidence of the Etruscan origins of these celebrations can be found in the background of the ancient writers who are the source of most of our modern knowledge of the festivals.
00:21:54
Speaker
For example, Ovid specifically says that Pharelia was a custom introduced into thy lands, righteous Latins by Aeneas. And the author Virgil had written the Aeneid just a few years before Ovid began writing. And that's the most detailed source of information about the mythological hero Aeneas.
00:22:17
Speaker
Previously, he just kind of played a bit of a background role and was mentioned in some Greek myths, but the Romans really took the Aeneas myth to heart and they tied a lot of their origin stories to him. Virgil was a Roman poet who likely had Etruscan ancestry. His family name, Mauro, is Etruscan in origin, and he was born near Mantua, which is an Etruscan city before the Gauls conquered it, and then Rome took it from the Gauls.
00:22:46
Speaker
A side fun fact is many scholars think that Mantua was named for Manth, an epithet of the Etruscan solar and underworld god Suri, in his specific aspect as ruler of the underworld and father of demons.
00:23:03
Speaker
The Lupercal cave that is central to Lupercalia celebrations was likely an Etruscan sanctuary associated with the underworld. The archaeological evidence bound around Palatine Hill where the Lupercal cave is show that there was a very early Etruscan settlement here before the founding of Rome.
00:23:23
Speaker
It was common for Etruscans to sacrifice goats and dogs in caves that they associated with the underworld, as both were associated with Suri's underworld aspects. And there's even some depictions of very wolf-like dogs that were associated as either being offerings or receiving offerings as on behalf of Suri.
00:23:46
Speaker
We don't know exactly when these Etruscan celebrations would have happened, whether they were annual or if they were just something done when someone died. But it's very plain to see a lot of the connections between these annual Roman festivals. And considering the many things we do know that Rome got from Etruria, it is very, very likely that these festivals have Etruscan roots as well.
00:24:13
Speaker
And even if Valentine's Day wasn't originally connected this far back to these ancient celebrations of life and death, I'd consider leaving a small offering for the dearly departed next time I'm preparing my Valentine's Day cards, just in case Ovid was right about the restless spirits wandering around this time of year.
Episode Conclusion and Future Topics
00:24:34
Speaker
Thanks for joining me on this look at the ancient Roman and Etruscan festivals that were celebrated during this time of year.
00:24:41
Speaker
In the next episode, I'll share info on the Candaces of Moreau, Nubian queens who ruled in their own right and stood firm against the Roman expansion. And then we'll explore some of their impressive pyramids. Until next time.
00:25:00
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe to keep up with new releases. Please leave a rating and a comment that helps the show reach others who may be interested in the past macabre. For access to bonus content from all archaeology podcast network shows, become a member at a arcpodnet dot com slash members.
00:25:26
Speaker
You can find show notes for this and other episodes at arcpodnet
00:26:06
Speaker
The Archaeology Podcast Network is 10 years old this year. Our executive producer is Ashley Airy, our social media coordinator is Matilda Seabreck, and our chief editor is Rachel Rodin. The Archaeology Podcast Network was co-founded by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in 2014 and is part of CulturoMedia and DigTech LLC. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.