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What is the story behind Valentine’s Day?The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day.

From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.

The Roman romantics “were drunk. They were naked,” says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.

The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival — or longer, if the match was right.

The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day.

Modern Valentine named after the Roman Christian Saint Valentine, carrying on the rituals of the old physical Roman Empire into the new spiritual Roman Empire we know today as Catholicism, the mother of the protestant Churches and the religion we now call Christianity whether in orthodox or unorthodox form. Prior to the rebirth of Rome into an international religious institution Valentines day (like all “Christian” holidays) was actually a pagan astrological and fertility ritual based in blood and sacrifice. This day was called Lupercalia from the Latin root “Lupus” meaning “Wolf.”

Well here you go. Happy Valentines Day (and make sure you cover yourself in animal blood and lash her with a bullwhip this year instead of giving her some crummy card in memory of our completely fucked ancestors

Lupercalia was a very ancient, possibly pre-Roman^[2] pastoral festival, observed on February 13 through 15 to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. Lupercalia subsumed Februa, an earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February (Februarius) its name.

The name Lupercalia was believed in antiquity to evince some connection with the Ancient Greek festival of the Arcadian Lykaia(from Ancient Greek: λύκος — lukos, “wolf”, Latin lupus) and the worship of Lycaean Pan, assumed to be a Greek equivalent toFaunus, as instituted by Evander.^[3]

https://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day