Today is the festival of Lupercalia, the ancient Roman observance of fertility and the coming of spring. Not to be confused with a the overly commercial celebration held yesterday, Lupercalia is a holiday sacred to the god Faunus, and the mythical she-wolf who reared Romulus and Remus the semi-mythical founders of Rome. It was considered an important holiday of religious observance and purification.
!["Representation of Lupercal" From the portico of the Piazzale dei Corporazioni in Ostia, Antica. (98-117 CE). [Public Domain]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/622px-Altar_Mars_Venus_Massimo-500x386.jpg)
“Representation of Lupercal” From the portico of the Piazzale dei Corporazioni in Ostia, Antica. (98-117 CE). [Public Domain]
There are many lurid accounts of what goes on during Lupercalia, some make it seem like an excuse for copulation and frivolity. One description comes from W. J. Kowalski’s Roman Calendar page.
The rites of this day included the sacrifice of a goat or a dog at the cave-grotto known as the Lupercal. With the sacrificial blood wiped across their foreheads, the youth partaking in this ceremony would then run the circumference of the Palatine hill, perhaps about 5K, tracing the traditional route of the city boundary traced by Romulus the day he founded Rome. In the process, girls who approached the runners would be brushed or splattered with the februa, thongs of sacrificial goatskin, presumably bloody, symbolically blessing them with fertility. Red is the color of the day as it is with Valentine’s Day, the day invented to replace the Lupercalia. Fertility and sexuality were likewise replaced with the puritanical pipedream of sexless Love.
Most (non-Pagan) people wouldn’t even know about Lupercalia if it were not for the constant stream of Valentine’s Day articles in the press. The favorite trend amongst news-writers and editorial columnists seems to be talking about the ancient pagan influences of a particular holiday. While this has increased awareness of Lupercalia, P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, a modern expert on the festival and its celebration, has pointed out that the two holidays actually have little in common.
The fertility here involved is not necessarily sexual fertility in women, though it was often thought to be such when the origins of the festival were eventually forgotten. It was fertility represented by the goat skin itself, a fertility of an agricultural and livestock sort. The young men running the race were symbolically committing themselves to the protection of their communities, thus their race around its boundaries which indicated their area of influence and the “home territory” they were protecting. The young men who were Luperci underwent a part of the ritual earlier in which the blood from the sacrificed goat and dog were mixed together, dabbed on their foreheads with a knife, and then wiped off subsequently with wool dipped in milk, signifying their transition from a lawless, wild state into a settled and civilized mode of life. The founders of Rome, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, were raised by the Lupa (“she-wolf”) in the cave where this ritual took place, and in their lives after this, they were lawless hunter/raider warriors until their eventual foundation of the city. This ritual commemorates this entire situation. The success by speed and martial prowess that used to come to Romulus and Remus when they were hunter-warriors in taking anyone and everyone’s livestock–including goats!–while in that phase of their existence becomes the success of those same skills and abilities being put toward the protection of their community in their settled state. The fertility of the community’s resources, through this protection, is what is being celebrated, not necessarily (nor exclusively) the fertility of humans in reproduction.
The distinctions between Valentine’s Day and Lupercalia are also touched on by scholar Leonhard Schmitz.
“Modern attempts to relate the Lupercalia to Valentine’s Day because of the mere (approximate) date are at best very suspect. That the two occasionally get equated seems rather to be an indication of late 20c mentality, according to which a lovers’ festival must necessarily derive from the titillations of ancient fertility and flagellation by goats. More to the point, there is not the slightest shred of historical evidence for the connection.”
As for modern celebrations, Ekklesia Antinoou will be holding a public Lupercalia celebration at 3:30 today at PantheaCon in San Jose.
A very blessed and fertile Lupercalia to you all!
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This post is misdated; it should be the 15th.
“The fertility here involved is not necessarily sexual fertility in women, though it was often thought to be such when the origins of the festival were eventually forgotten. It was fertility represented by the goat skin itself, a fertility of an agricultural and livestock sort. The young men running the race were symbolically committing themselves to the protection of their communities, thus their race around its boundaries which indicated their area of influence and the “home territory” they were protecting.”
Ah, I see. It was all about the men.
Unfortunately “everything” is about “men”. Sigh…
I’m also curious to know what resources P. Sufenas Virius Lupus used to explain the origins of the festival, and what his academic background is.
PSVL is a bit busy right now. When I’ve seen him this weekend, he has been nattily attired, and seldom by himself.
more like it was all about the livestock.
In the version of the origin of the festival that I’m familiar with, the actions did *specifically* have to do with the sexual fertility of women. When the war-bands of Romulus and Remus stole the Sabine women, those women were found to be infertile, thus damning the nascent Roman state before it started (perhaps due to the crime of stealing them?). An oracle was contacted, which said that these women would be infertile until they had been “penetrated by a goat”. In order to preserve the women from the ignominy of bestiality, a solution was concocted that would, theoretically, fulfill the demands of the oracle: the women would be whipped with thongs of goatskin.
Perhaps PVSL is familiar with a different origin-theory of this festival than I am. The one that I’m familiar with is the one that the Romans themselves put forth, however, which may be the one that PVSL is alluding to in the sentence ending with “the origins of the festival were eventually forgotten.”
Now, the origin-tale of Lupercalia given above is not “nice”, nor are roaming bands of wild or semi-wild men whipping people to induce fertility particularly “nice”: but these things are also not without parallels in other cultures, and therefore I think it likely that Lupercalia actually included a part where people were *whipped* with februa of goatskin, rather than “brushed or splattered”.
None of this is to cast aspersions on the scholarship involved here, of course. From what I’ve read, PVSL is quite the scholar, and I doubt that there is any sort of bowdlerization of ancient sources going on, so as to make them more palatable to modern tastes.
I am happy to say that I have encountered many of the Wild Hunt staff this weekend: founder Jason P., PSVL (sighted more like), Alley Valkyrie, Rhyd Wildermuth, and Heather Green. If Eric Scott, Cara Schultz, or Terrence Ward were present, I haven’t seen them. Please forgive any name misspellings–can’t do much on this phone, and what memory? No one has been willing to upgrade mine.
I honored Rhyd’s natal anniversary by distributing unsalted peanuts in shell for corvids, both at home and at the con hotel.
I’m glad to know more about Lupercalia–I’ve never known much at all about it–as well as the origin of the name of this month, which seems to have been left out of any month-name origins I’ve ever read.
The British Beltane celebrations, at least in Padstow and Maidstone or Maidenhead (hey, you –could– live in Barking!), feature an ‘Obby ‘Oss, under whose mantle young (usually) women go, seeking fertility of the bed (aka husband) or body. In NROOGD tradition, brought to us from non-religious British tradition by Rowan Fairgrove and Russell Williams. When each maiden emerges, the Sootwife marks their foreheads with you guessed it–soot!–to show they’d visited. The Sootwife in NROOGD tradition, is often a man in a dress, and being a bit of a clown. It is emphasized that one needn’t focus on bodily fertility, as fertility can be found in many other forms.
NROOGD follows with a Maypole dance, where the Queen of the May and Jack in the Green hold the pole and are bound by the ribbon weaving. We don’t have Morris Dancers in the afternoon ritual, but in the SF Bay Area, there are several teams who assemble well before dawn, to dance the sun up & the summer in.
As you can see, there are similarities in the public celebrations of Lupercalia & Beltane, just in different months.