From Ritual To Romance; The Real Valentine

We trace Valentine’s Day from Rome’s Lupercalia to saintly legends, medieval poetry, and modern marketing to ask how a blood-soaked festival became a billion-dollar ritual. Along the way, we question who profits from love and how to choose meaning with intent.

• Lupercalia’s fertility rites and public rituals
• Church replacement of pagan festivals with saints
• Multiple Saint Valentines and martyr legends
• Medieval poetry linking February to courtly love
• Printing press and mass culture shaping romance
• Hallmark, consumer pressure, and profit motives
• Cupid’s roots in Eros and pagan symbolism
• Choosing self-love and community over spending
• Identity, colonization, and reading history critically
• Concerns about youth, education, and hustle culture

Transcript

Why February 14 And Its Symbols

Lupercalia: Rituals And Blood

From Lupercalia To Saint Valentine

Medieval Rebranding Through Poetry

Hallmark, Capitalism, And Cupid

Modern Meanings And Cautions

Broader Reflections On Identity And Youth

SPEAKER_00 0:36

We will be talking about the history of Valentine's Day. Oh a joy. Why do I choose to bring such ruckus and such a I don't know, spicy topic on Valentine's Day? I don't know. I just wanted to know. And I didn't want to ruin my V Day yet. Because normally when I research these pagan holidays, it don't be but a crapper. It just be a bunch of PS. If you know what Valentine's Day started from, put it in the chat. And if you don't, you're in the right place. We talk about the real history of Valentine's Day, pagan rituals, power, and rebranding love. Now I'm all for Valentine's Day. I got engaged on Valentine's Day. A special day before I became cheap this Dr. Cheap this sunflower. So today it's the first day I'm actually digging into this. And I'm allowing you to join me on my research journey about Valentine's Day. Now, some people probably don't know what I'm about to dig into, and I don't know it either. So we're gonna be learning together, and that's what this podcast is all about. We debunked the history. Every holiday that I've researched so far has had sent me into I don't know what the hell. So I'm expecting what the hells as I learn about Valentine's Day. Of course, is not the thing that we know it to be today, but either way, hope you spread in love every single day. Did y'all ever wonder why February 14th became the day of love? If you like me and you need you, then you probably have, or you probably already know how it became the day of love. Why February 14th became the day of love? Who chose that date? That's what we want to know. Why hearts? Why red? Why Cupid, a naked baby with a weapon? Who chose Cupid and a naked baby with a weapon? I don't know. But what if I told you Valentine's didn't start with just roses? It started with blood. I knew we was gonna go down this road, but whatever. Sometimes you gotta go down these weird roads to learn the truth. So that we are ever bamboozled. What's going on, Joseph High Smith? Happy Valentine's Day. Valentine's, of course, started with blood. Most of the pagan holidays they have been rebranded to really get money from people. And we just tell the truth. It's all about money. Love should be spread every day. If you're married, whatever. You should be loving all each other every single day. Now, maybe today we treat this extra special, but I don't know what we're gonna uncover. I'm just taking my time with this topic, too, because Roman rituals, saints, church power, and capitalism. How does this have anything to do with Valentine's Day? I don't know. So the first thing that we are researching, it says the pagan roots of Valentine's Day started with lupercalia. What the fuck is that? What is lupercalia? I don't know. Let's find out. Before Valentine's Day, there was Lupercalia. Have y'all ever heard of Luperkalia? That is L-U-P-E-R-C-A-L-I-A. Luperkalia. So obviously Valentine's Day used to be called Luperkalia in Rome. Because y'all know all of these pagan holidays, this pagan religion, even the Bible, these things were instituted by the Romans. Now they stole the roots of the Bible from Ethiopia and different places and they put it into a list. This was Constantine back in 313 who legalized the Bible or he legalized Christianity. And then they created the Bible after they had legalized Christianity to control the state. This is all over there in Rome. But that is something different. But some kind of way I know it ties to this because it's the Roman people again. Who would have knew? We're doing a Roman holiday. That's what Valentine's Day is coming from. The Romans, these are colonizers. We got that part. So Lupercalia was an ancient Roman festival celebrated February 13th to February the 15th. So it honored Faunus, Roman god of fertility and agriculture, and the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Valentine's Day is basically a holiday to celebrate the Roman gods that they created, the Roman god of fertility and agriculture. This was before they colonized the United States. But here's the part most hallmark cards don't mention. Goats and dogs were sacrificed during Lupercalia. So what else would happen during lupercalia? Young men would strip naked. What? They would cut strips from the animal hives and then run through the streets striking women with them. This is getting weird already, y'all. This is getting weird. I gotta read that again. It said during luperkalia, I don't know how this got anything to do with love. Wait a minute. That just threw me all the way off. So luperkalia, which is what Valentine's Day used to be called when Romans created this holiday, and they were celebrated for three days, not one day, and it was from February the 13th to the 15th, and it celebrates Faunus, the Roman god of fertility and agriculture and the founders of Rome. But the weird thing is they were sacrificing goats and dogs. The young men were stripped naked and they would cut strips from the animal hides, then run through the streets striking women with them. I don't understand that shit at all. But it says why? Because it was believed to promote fertility and easy childbirth. It kind of reminds me of Christopher Columbus and when all of these pirates and immigrants came to Turtle Island and they created all of these different lies about what they thought about science. It's just weird. So it was considered romantic in their eyes. Getting totally weird. This wasn't about candlelight dinners like it is today. You probably booked a reservation, going to dinner, got some hearts, but I don't know. Back then it was about fertility, survival, agriculture, reproduction, and ritual. So we already see that Valentine's Day has roots in fertility rights, not soft love. Yeah. But where does this change? So we going, so that was the beginning of how it started. It was called Looper. Y'all remember Looper Kalia, right? And then it changed to Saint Valentine. This is when the church got involved with Valentine's Day. You will find a lot of the church involvement when it comes to these holidays. And I'm not talking about the church as we know it right now. I'm talking about Roman Catholic Church and the Pope and Papal Bulls and people who are basically saying if you weren't part of the church and white, might I add, then you weren't really human in that they could basically seize you, unalive you, and they control your soul. And then if you didn't convert to their religion with the church, then they could just take care of soul according to their God in the name of their Lord, remember. So we're gonna fast forward to the third century. If you don't know what the third century is, this is gonna be the years of 200 AD, right? This is before they made Christianity legal in 313 CE. This is before Constantine started, this is before the Bible, really, right? That's disgusting. Facts. This disgusting behavior that we celebrate and we don't even know. That's why it is so important to know history, not just from today, but going back to the second and the first and the third century that they try to restart time with. Right now, we fast forwarding from luperkalia and we go into the third century, which is the 200s, to talk about what happened to Luperkalia. A lot of the times when they started time over at zero, they wanted to get rid of a lot of the crazy rituals and disgusting things that they were doing and the animal-like behaviors, such as, like we said, sacrificing dogs and goats and running naked and getting drunk and doing drugs and being dirty, and you you know, y'all know. I was like, y'all know what I'm talking about. So they were trying to get away from that, so that's why they had to clutch on to the church and try to hide the church, will hide their evil under the church, which is why a lot of people are lost right now, because they put everything that was good and they turned to evil. And they put everything that was evil into was good, and that's what we call the matrix. When you be like, damn, they got me, they bamboozled me, right? So Saint Valentine, this is the way Valentine's Day come in at, and they get a little funny. It said, There were multiple Saint Valentine's. There were multiple, more than one. The Catholic Church, what do I know? The Catholic Church, hear your ass go again, always involved with something. Y'all really should just name y'all self the Catholic Demons at this point. So the Catholic Church recognizes at least two martyrs named Valentine. The most popular legend says under Emperor Claudius II, young men were forbidden to marry because unmarried soldiers were considered better warriors. Valentine was a Christian priest? Oh my god, what the f Valentine was a Christian priest, secretly performed marriages, anyways. He was arrested and executed around 269 A.D. Wait, so y'all got a holiday named after somebody y'all who was a priest that y'all underly because he was marrying soldiers because confused. Before his execution, the legend says he wrote a note signed from your Valentine. And wow, the troll the church had a problem. Luperkalia was wildly popular. We just talked about Luperkalia. Yes, the irony, right? They didn't, they tried to erase it. Just like Christmas. Christmas used to be called Saturnalia. Thanksgiving, this was the day that they unalive all of our people and renamed us and stuff. Everything that is celebrated as a holiday normally stems from some type of evil ritual, right? Which is what we're finding out about Valentine's Day. It says Luperkalia was wildly popular. They tried to erase it, but they couldn't. They had to replace it. This is where Valentine's Day comes from. Alright, so it says they replaced Luperkalia with Valentine's Day. After they unalied this man and made it a holiday. What the hell? That's weird. So around the fifth century, pleasure to listen to you. Thank you. Around the 5th century, Pope Galatius I officially replaced Luperkalia. Now think about this. This is all the way in the fifth century. So all the way up into the fifth century, they were doing all those sacrifices, running in the street naked as a ritual from the 13th of February to the 15th. Weird as hell. And they got us celebrating this. I'm sorry. So during the 5th century, the Pope, this is a Pope again. These are the same popes now that created the Papal Bulls. These are the same popes that created all these evil things that seize land, eminent domain. The same popes are creating these evil holidays and changing and rebranding things. So remember that. This is a Pope who did this. He replaced Luperkalia with St. Valentine's Day. The same time of year with new branding and Christian overlay. Crazy, right? Here's the twist. Valentine's Day wasn't originally about romantic love. The shift happened much later. So even then, when it was St. Vince Valentine's Day in the 5th century, it still wasn't about love, how we think about it today. No way these people are crazy. Facts. If you look up any holiday, you're gonna find out it's crazy. But what do we do? We here in America, we just look at it for the noun. We look at a lot of things for the noun. That's why we always stuck in the matrix. Because it's like, well, that was on that was so long ago. Why do I care? But for me, I care because this has a lot to do with us spending money, us doing the same thing here at the year. We worshiping people who dead. Valentine is somebody who was murdered. You get what I'm saying? It's evil, right? Valentine's Day wasn't originally about romantic love. That shift happened much later. In the Middle Ages, writers like Jeffrey Chaucer connected February 14th to Courtly Love and Bird mating season. This is getting a little weird. Poetry made it romantic, literature made it dreamy, and then the press printing made it viral, right? So that's the history of basically Valentine's Day. And some kind of way in 1913, y'all. Now, 1913 is interesting because this is the year they started with taxing and trying to prevent us from really making wealth and starting to destroy all the melanated Wall Street. So they started to create these holidays because they still wanted to extract money from us. So 1913, everybody has heard of the company Hallmark. Hallmark began mass-producing Valentine's Day cars. Now this shift the holiday from fertility ritual. Remember, they were sacrificing goats and dogs and all that, religious martyr, all that stuff to now carts and candy and billions of dollars spent annually for flowers, jewelry, chocolate, social media pressure, relationship comparison. Cupid comes from Eros, the Greek god of desire. Some people don't know that. This is again a pagan root, the Greek god of desire. So even the symbols of love trace back before Christianity, guys. So we are actually celebrating today, made money out of it. Facts. It's all about money at this point. We are actually celebrating Saint Valentine, where they took off Saint, which was a Pope who was murdered for marrying soldiers against the law. I don't know why he was doing it, but he was marrying the soldiers against the law. They unalive him and then they made a holiday after him. And they made this holiday in the name of an older holiday, which was evil. It's all very weird. So when you are celebrating these pagan holidays, you gotta remember these are pagan rituals, wicked facts. This is church rebranding, this is literary romanticism and corporate monetization. So Valentine's Day is truly layered, it comes from immigrant culture, has a lot of symbolisms that we don't really pay attention to right now, and capitalism is always involved. This isn't about attacking love, this is about understanding the narrative. It's really just the pagan holiday, like most holidays. And eventually we have to even stop giving these things. This is my first time really understanding Valentine's Day because I didn't want to ruin my Valentine's Day, but now that I know it just take the whole meaning away from it. It's all made up. Yes, it's all made up to take money from us every freaking holiday that I'm discovering. I don't know what holiday is next, but I'm sure what is it? St. Patrick's Day, Easter, it's all gonna be the same thing. It's always gonna lead back to the Vatican, to the church, to these popes, trying to control people, trying to cover up some evil ass ritual that they did. So if you see these holidays stem from rituals that they used to do every year, but in order to continue doing these rituals, they had to cover it up with the church and make everybody do it so it doesn't seem like it started off as something bad, but it did, and now we just celebrate it, we just give it life, you know what I mean? It's crazy. So Valentine's today means romantic love, it means self-love, it means family love, community love, roses, but always understand the history so you don't just consume a culture that is not really true to who you are. We went from goat sacrificing to greeting cards, from pagan fields to profit margins. So Valentine's Day did not start off sweet, and it definitely evolved into something else. I hope y'all learned something. What's going on in the Southeast with the Mary Indian, with the laws changing? I saw something today where they are trying to open up a new black history museum in Florida after all these years. And I said, damn, why y'all waiting all these years? Is it because the Appalachian and the Seminole and the Tamikua and the Creek and the Chawtaw and the Semino and the Muscogee and the all these people, our tribes are waking up. Now y'all want to do an African-American museum? Why is that? But I ain't gonna get into that right now, but we already know why that is. So today, guys, know who you are. The best thing you could do when it comes to self-love is knowing who the hell you truly are, and never letting the colonizer, never letting a history book, never letting a pretendian try to trick you out your spot or gaslight you or make you hate who you are. That's the purpose of colonization is to make you hate who you are, to break your spirit, to take your soul, to make you feel worthless. And now they got this hustle culture where the kids coming out of high school, they didn't learn shit in high school, they didn't learn on financial literacy, they didn't learn any wealth-building tips, they didn't learn about business, they didn't get prepared for college, which is a waste of money all of a sudden because it's so high, and people graduating with degrees and can't even afford basic life necessities, the hustle culture that is ruining the getting people out of high school where they just gotta go to work and work 40 hours and be stuck in this cycle where they can't even have a quality of life. We are ruining the youth. We're not preparing them, and what is going to happen to our world if we don't get this shit together?