Birthday Greetings! / Valentine's Day / Lupercalia

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston) <catlady@wicca.net>]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Mary Ann <macloudt at y...>" 
<macloudt at y...> wrote:
> :::::throws heart-shaped confetti around the room and places a
> double- sized cake with pink icing on the table:::::
> 
> We have two Valentine birthdays to celebrate today!  Our Valentine 
> babies are Brandon ( bak42 at n... ) and Lena aka CJK ( 
> lena at w... ).  Greetings can be sent to the List or to the 
> above email addies.

Happy birthdays, Brandon (why have you been away from chat so long?) 
and Lena!

> Mary Ann
> (who's been married too long to have a romantic Valentine's Day ;)

But you can still eat chocolate!

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Haggridd 
<jkusalavagemd at y...>" <jkusalavagemd at y...> wrote:
> Does anyone know whether Valentine's Day is celebrated anywhere 
> else other than the U.S.?  A Russian friend told me that is was not 
> celebrated in Russia, but March 8th, International Woman's Day, was
> a big holiday there.  I was wondering about other countries.

My wall calendar with pictures of White Tigers has the name of each 
month in four languages. I recognize English and French and guess the 
other two are German and Spanish. On it, today's little box is 
labelled Valentine's Day and San-Valentin and Dia del Amor y Amistad.

I've read that Valentine's Day was introduced to Japan by candy 
companies during the American occupation. Unable (in those days) to 
persuade Japanese men to give candy (or to do anything else) for 
women, they changed their advertising and it soon became socially 
compulsory for every working woman to give chocolate to each one of 
her male co-workers (bosses, etc) on Valentine's Day. Later, the 
advertisers were able to introduce a holiday in March named White Day 
on which men give white candy to each woman who gave them chocolate 
for Valentine's Day.

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Kelley <kelleythompson at g...>" 
<kelleythompson at g...> wrote:
> Hm, interesting coincidence here, I just came across this post on 
> another board:  
> 
> From: Kurt 
> Subject: Valentine's Day 
> 
> Can anyone attest to the veracity of this? Always the cynic, I have
> observed the following regarding this dubious day:
> 
> As early as 400 B.C. young Romans engaged in a rite of passage to
> their god Lupercus. Names of teenage women were placed in a box and
> randomly drawn; thus was born the Roman Hook-up. The two young 
> lovers were companions in the fullest sense for one year, until the
> next lottery. 

The drawing of the name of someone who would be your 'true love' 
until the next lottery wasn't part of Lupercalia, but part of 
'courtly love' in the Middle Ages, practised by rich aristocrats who 
were members of a Valentine Society that was described by Joseph 
Campbell somewhere in volume IV of THE MASKS OF GOD. 

The drawing of the name of someone who would be your lover for the 
next couple of hours is sometimes said to have been part of the 
celebration of Lupercalia, and it probably *was*, or else why would 
the priests have felt the need to make young people celebrate 
Valentine's Day by drawing names from a box .... names of a saint 
whom one should strive to emulate! (not necessarily st. Valentine)

For sure, the celebration of Lupercalia included young men who were 
priests of Lupercus running naked through the streets whipping women 
with goatskin straps. It was believed that any woman who was whipped 
would get pregnant, so women who were trying to get pregnant would 
strip off their clothes to encourage the whippers. I can't imagine 
why anyone thought that Lupercus was a goat-god, possibly Pan, when 
the *name* clearly refers to *wolves*. 

Mars and Venus (a famous pair of adulterous lovers) both were 
connected to wolves ... Mars had originally been an agricultural god 
and his priests dressed as wolves to ask the local wolves not to eat 
the Roman sheep (eat the Etruscan sheep instead) and he became the 
god of war because the earliest Roman wars were sheep raids ... Venus 
not only sent the wolf bitch who nursed her descendents Romulus and 
Remus, but Roman slang called prostitutes 'wolves' and the red light 
district was called The Wolf Den.

A girl I knew made cards of red construction paper with a rubberstamp 
of a wolf and the writing "To the Romans, February 14 was Lupercalia, 
the Feast of Wolves" and on the inside, they said: "Will you be my 
wolf?"