The kinky origins of Valentine’s Day are really about relinquishing fear
Because you contain multitudes
My love! If you didn’t know, you can have this whole article read to you! In the Substack app, a lovely female bot who doesn’t sound like a bot at all will read the whole thing whilst you fold laundry/wash dishes/drive your car/nurse your baby/have sex/take a bath. I often read with the audio version. You won’t see all the cool pictures, but that’s okay—you can check them out later.
Okay! Today, we’re talking about Valentine’s Day.
Pause. What was that visceral reaction you just experienced at the mention of the “love holiday”? Did you feel warm pudding like Elizabeth Gilbert does on the hourly? Or did lightning strike your very marrow?
Whether it’s giving love fest or cringe feels, you might be interested in knowing that Valentine’s stems from the Roman holiday Lupercalia when men stripped down to their loincloth and ran around the village drinking and slapping women with thongs from sacrificed animals—you know, as one does. Getting slapped promised a woman fertility and ease in childbirth. I don’t know about you, but nothing gets my ovaries excited like getting spanked by a bloody slab of butchered lamb hide.
Isn’t our Valentine’s Day soooooooo pedestrian in comparison?!!
❤️🔥
My college friend Achintya Devi, who helps women embody their ancient feminine power through ancient pagan rituals, does not mention any of the binge and spank I discovered with my very thorough 15-minute internet search. Rather, she frames the holiday as an opportunity where women would run with wolves to “honor and reawaken [their] primal nature” and “cast away fear.”
Achintya talks about running with the wolves as an act of love (flagellation and kinky sex acts optional). In fact, the festival name Lupercalia comes from the Latin word for wolf. It wasn’t until Catholicism came in and got their devotional scapulars all in a bunch (what, you don’t like my blottoed sacrificial animal carcass-whipping orgy holiday?!) and decided to make wolves something to be feared. (I did some Internet sleuthing and wasn’t able to find anything about this festival of women running with wolves. But who cares? I love the metaphor, and it’s a great book.)
So, maybe the root of Valentine’s is an ancient S&M party. Or perhaps an opportunity to cast off the shackles of fear?
Love as freedom from fear
When I think of love, I think of the rainforest outside my door. Where every little microorganism is different and needed, and diversity is its strength. I feel no fear in the rainforest because I belong, despite that my multitudes are majorly alien.
Then again, maybe freedom from fear is facing our monsters, having them over for tea, showing them love and compassion, and sending them on their way.
It’s kind of like therapy. (Note to husbands and queer wives: the best way to show your wife you love her is with couple’s therapy.)
Love/letting go of fear is softening—being sensitive and vulnerable so we can hear and see each other not as exterior versions of ourselves but as our core humanity.
Love is…
Lighting a cigarette with the flames of a burning world
A purpose / a porpoise
Funding public education
When someone takes the time to respond to my posts, even if just to argue
When someone says they feel seen by my words
Therapy
Buying ourselves the flowers but not the chocolate because exploitation of child labor in cocoa production, even though we will feel guilty the rest of the week for not doing so because our kids love chocolate
Writing songs, poems, and memoir
Being in a play and becoming other people
Softening, becoming sensitive and vulnerable to hear and see each other not as exterior versions of ourselves but as our core humanity
Loving humanity in all its fallibility, starting with ourselves
I love you in all your multitudes! ❤️🔥
Xo,
Summer
P.S. Make sure to revisit this post for amazing comments that could write their own newsletter, and smash that heart button so more people can discover it!
P.P.S.: how much do you want me popping up in your inbox? Is 2x weekly 2 much? (I’ve been housebound with COVID-19, so I’ve had more time to write this week. See Welcome To Your Writing Retreat: The COVID Isolation Room, satire I wrote for Slackjaw a while back.)
Sideways affirmation of your essay/song:
WHAT YOU FEED WILL GROW.
And...a James Baldwin quote:
"Love takes away the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
“Love is being in a play.” Yes, I did that .. many years ago. It was children’s theater. I played a magpie. It was delightful.