Valentine's day is a day of ribald revelry. It is day when crystalline champagne flows through the soul and creates an effervescence of the spirit. On this day legions of chocolate fountains pay homage to the great prophet Hershey, and untold millions of blood-red roses form a sanguine tapestry that celebrates the color of life. It is a day when lovers and lunatics come to crave the raging irrationality and forceful strength of love. The word Valentine itself derives from the Latin Valentinus and means literally strength. Valentine's day is strong meat, and the church's attempts to gloss over this fact have been futile. From a recent historical perspective, it was also the day when a dozen hoods bumped off a dozen other hoods in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The result was a dozen blood-red hoods. In truth, this day was intentionally chosen to carry out this hit as a sacrifice to the entity whom gangsters and plutocrats worship as their one true, sociopathic deity.
The truth about Valentine's day is that the name is quite apocryphal. The church fabricated a story about a kindly priest named Valentinus in an attempt to expunge the original celebration, which was the Bacchanalian Lupercalia, The Day Of The Wolf. The Lupercalia was part of the mythos encompassing the origin of Rome itself. The legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were said to have been born of the god Mars and the archetypal Vesta, the eternal virgin. Vesta feared that Romulus and Remus would be murdered, so she put them in a basket on the Tiber. The she-wolf, Reminus, found the infants and raised them. Their feral survival marked the beginning of the eternal city, Rome. The pre-spring rites of passion and catharsis came to be celebrated in honor of Romulus and Remus and the great wolf that raised them in the den of strength, the Valentinus. The Lupercalia was a prelude to the dance of spring, and it was filled with numerous rituals of blood and terror; rites that would seem incomprehensibly barbaric to the modern eye. However, they were attempting to purge their society of all the negative forces that plagued it, and such a titanic catharsis requires the invocation of The Great God Pan, god of primordial nature. This celebration was originally a week long Rite Of Spring but was later reduced to the evening of February 14th and the day of the 15th.
An element of this mythos that is particularly striking is the concept of a wolf raising human infants that had been abandoned by humanity. They had been thrown to wolves, and these wolves nurtured them. Over the ages there have been a number of fairly well-documented incidences of cast-off human children being raised by wolves. Possibly humanity can learn something about its own humanity from these wolves that would take in the defective children of humanity. In truth, the human race is tremendously indebted to these totem animals that taught our Paleolithic antecedents the art of the hunt and who showed them that passionate, primal nature was to be revered, which was the origin of the Great Lupercalia.
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