St. Valentine’s Day is celebrated as a day of love and loved ones, without the majority knowing anything substantially valid about the person in question. Like almost a historical myth, Valentine’s Day is a lot like accredit some legendary and other almost factual qualities to a personality less known through the investigative lens. In this article, we would indulge deep into the history and life details of St. Valentine’s along with some weird, yet interesting, associations to ideas of love, desire, healing, and buzzing bees. These 10 interesting facts and legends about St. Valentine by Mypaperdone.com are bound to change your perspective about this seemingly benign holiday.
- History
February 14 is designated since the Middle Ages as the day of ‘the birds and the bees’. According to an old belief stated poetically refers to young lovers being united on this day by birds and bees. In literary history, Chaucer was the one who established the relationship between Valentine’s Day and romance. In Parliament of Fowls in 1381, he described the coming of summer after a brutally cold winter which meant all living creatures could breed and thaw into the spring of life.
- Saint of All Trades
St. Valentine has a versatile historical presence since he is believed to be the patron of young love and greetings. He is prayed to for health against seizures and fainting spells as well as epilepsy. Since plague was one of the major threats to life in those days, St. Valentine also serves as the patron saint of the plague.
- Execution
The history tells us that St. Valentine was arrested for going against the Roman Emperor Cladius the second’s commands. The emperor has strictly forbidden young people from marrying but St. Valentine continued to assist the youth in getting married. Hence the saint patron of romance was executed via beheading on February 14, 270 AD and buried in northern Rome.
- Body
Some two hundred years after his beheading, St. Valentine was made a saint in 469 AD but the personal details were still shrouded in mystery. In the 1800s, during the renovation of old churches in and around Rome, St. Valentine’s body was discovered along with a small vial holding his blood. Although the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints removed him from the list in 1969.
- Your Valentine
After his arrest, St. Valentine wrote a letter to the formerly blind daughter of his jailor, whom he has healed himself of blindness. At the end of the letter, he signed off as “From Your Valentine”. This sheds some light on the amorous possibility between the two and may have encouraged the kind of romantic myths regarding St. Valentine. Two thousand years later, the same practice is repeated every February 14 to honor and commemorate romance between kindred spirits.
- Two Valentines
Since most of the personal history of St. Valentine is missing from any records, it is often suggested that there might be two St. Valentines in Rome around that time. Both of them had a connection with the Catholic Church, one as a priest and the other as a bishop and both were martyrs. There is still no absolute way to distinguish who was the actual St. Valentine to be commemorated in the middle of February for romantic love.
- Lupercalia
Rome had a pagan past with an ancient festival called ‘Lupercalia’, celebrated on February 15, with sacrificial rituals dominating the event. The pagan priests, called Luperci, overseeing the sacrifices would put the blood of animals using the knives used for the sacrifices on their foreheads. With the conversion of Roman Empire to Christianity, Emperor Constantine is believed to establish Valentine’s Day as a Christian event to contend against Lupercalia.
- Repeat Offender
St. Valentine could very well be the same person being a repeat offender and breaking the Emperor’s law regularly. Although Cladius the second was colloquially known as ‘Claudius the Cruel’ for forbidding marriage but he had his reasons. In order to get young men to fight in the Roman Army, he saw marriage as a distraction and an obstacle against convincing young men to fight for their country. This encouraged St. Valentine to convert the young ones to Christianity and then marry then with whomever they loved.
- Healing
Like a lot of Christian figures gifted with healing powers, St. Valentine was a healer of many afflictions. Judge Asterious, later becoming the jailor of St. Valentine, had a blind daughter so he took her to the saint for healing just to assess the veracity of claims made by people around St. Valentine. He placed his hands on her eyes and the girl was able to see him and the world around. This overwhelmed the judge so much that he converted to Christianity.
- Bees
As discussed earlier, Chaucer talked about the ‘birds and the bees’ which might sound weird at first. But truly, St. Valentine is regarded as the patron saint of bees as well since honey is a natural aphrodisiac which makes all the sense for it to be associated with love and marriage (honeymoon?).
