The festival named Lupercalia predates the founding of Rome in the 8th century BC, a survival of a time when the site of one of the major cities of the world was nothing but wilderness of hills populated by wild animals like wolves. Any creature that is feared is also revered, worshiped in an attempt to appease the collective spirit of the animal. Therefore the wolf was defied in many parts. The god Lupercus was known as "the one that drives out the wolves" & so there was an element of the festival there was literally about driving the wolf from the door. Lupercus is also identified with Faunus (Pan), the God of
Shepherds. Later, the wolf would reappear as a protective symbol in the legend of the
founding of Rome; a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus in a cave on the Capitaline Hill. Lupercalia traditionally took place on February 15th, with the intention of purifying the city by driving out evil spirits & demons, therefore bringing the compounded benefits of fertility & good health.
It was also called the Februa, from the Latin word meaning "to purify"; this in turn gives us the name of the month. The festival celebrants were priests called Luperci, the "Brothers of the Wolf." The Luperci wore only the skins of goats, in common with Faunus. Priestesses made cakes from the grain harvest of the previous
year and brought them to the Lupercal Cave on the Palatine Hill where the
ritual sacrifice of two goats & a dog was the first item on the agenda. These sacrificial animals
were called Februa. Their blood was smeared on the foreheads of the two wolf brothers,
who were meant to laugh, & the sacrificial knife washed with wool soaked in milk. After the sacrificed animals had been cooked and eaten in a shared feast, the Brothers dressed themselves in some of the goat skin and hacked the rest into strips. Then they ran around the walls of the town, using the bloody thongs to lash the girls that lined the route; since goats were a powerful symbol of sexuality and fertility, the women hoped to absorb these qualities. It is possible that the word Lupercalia owes its
origins to the phrase "luere per caprium" meaning to "purify by means of the goat."; When the Romans invaded Europe, they brought some of the Lupercalian rites with them. One of these customs was a sort of love lottery in which the young men pulled the names of available girls out of a box. The pair coupled up for the duration of the ceremony, perhaps longer. (Presumably if love or pregnancy resulted.) Obviously, the wildly Pagan aspects of Lupercalia simply did not fit the requirements of the freshly minted Christian faith, and so in AD 496 the Pope outlawed the festival, installing St. Valentine as the patron saint of lovers & inaugurating his feast day
on February 14th, Valentine's Day. Many of the aspects of the ancient festival of
Lupercalia were absorbed into the new religion, albeit in the highly diluted form.
