Paranormaland – Haunted Hearts
Modern Valentine symbols include the heart-shaped outline and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten notes have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards and in the mid-nineteenth century; Valentine’s Day trade was a harbinger of further commercialized holidays in the United States to follow.
‘The Night of Sevens’, is a Chinese holiday that also relates to love and ‘White Day’, is a similar holiday celebrated in Japan and Korea one month after Valentine’s Day.
Then we come across February’s fertility festivals though popular modern sources link random Graeco-Roman February holidays, said to be devoted to fertility and love to St. Valentine’s Day. Jack Oruch showed that prior to Chaucer, no links between the Saints named Valentinus and romantic love existed. Thus whether or not in the ancient Athenian calendar, the period between mid-January and mid-February was the month of Gamelion, was dedicated to the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera is immaterial.
If Zeus were around now I think he’d be a little angered at that proclamation and ask for a new ceremony with Hera being that now is a great time for love, as we are in much need of it. Could you imagine that ceremony in today’s times? Oprah certainly would cover it along with every media outlet known to man as were talking beaucoup flowers, gold and silver ornaments, food as far as the eye can see and let’s not forget the incredible mountainesque views the guest would have.
Chaucer’s love birds is a portrait of the English poet named Geoffrey Chaucer by Thomas Hoccleve (1412). The earliest known link between Valentine’s Day and romance is found in Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules. The first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer:
“For this was on seynt Volantynys day Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese [choose] his make [mate].”
This was a poem written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. A treaty providing for a marriage was signed on May 2, 1381. They married eight months later as they both were around the age of fourteen.
The earliest surviving valentine is a fifteenth-century rondeau written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his “valentined” wife, which commences.
” Je suis desja d’amour tanné Ma tres doulce Valentinée… (Charles d’Orléans, Rondeau VI, lines 1-2)”
In 1415, at the same time the duke was being held in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt.
In 1600-01, Valentine’s Day is also mentioned ruefully by Ophelia in Hamlet : “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day.”
In American culture in the 1840s, Saint Valentine’s Day was remade as a writer in ‘GFTraham’s American Monthly’ said “Saint Valentine’s Day is becoming, nay it has become, a national holyday.”
