The rites of spring: St. Valentine, Lupercalia, and the music of Jajouka

While most of us consider February 14th a date to celebrate or avoid all together, February 15th became an important date in ancient Rome as a time of rebirth and renewal -- and its human cousin, fertility. 

As springtime festivals go Lupercalia was a wild affair of debauch and drunkenness, not a bad way to chase off the dread spirits of winter or the very real threat of the wolves outside your door. Appropriately so:  It takes its name from the Lupercal, oldest Roman settlement -- on the Palantine Hill -- in which the wolf was supposed to have suckled Romulus and Remus. 

Hallmark won't mention it, but the flayed skin of a sacrificed goat was used by loincloth-clad men for lashing women in order to promote fertility and ease of childbirth. It seems clear that by classic times some ancient ritual had degenerated and its original significance had been lost, but because it involved a lot of nakedness and riotous running around and tomfoolery, the ancient Romans were loathe to abandon it.

But why February? February occurred later on the ancient Roman calendar than it does today so Lupercalia was held in the spring and regarded as a festival of purification and fertility. Each year on February 15, the Luperci priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins brought sacred cakes made from the first ears of last year's grain harvest to the fig tree. Two naked young men, assisted by the Vestals, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the site. The blood was smeared on the foreheads of the young men and then wiped away with wool dipped in milk.

The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility and also imparted a wish that the maidens would marry soon. Of course, with any Roman or pagan fertility festival, a 3-day orgy followed the initial festivities.  

By the time of Imperial Rome the celebration was in full flower: Mark Antony was master of the Luperci College of Priests. He chose the Lupercalia festival of the year 44 B.C. as the proper time to offer the crown to Julius Caesar.

As many a pagan custom in the Roman world, the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity altered the nature of such a free-spirited debauch. Lupercalia, with its lover lottery and more precisely lengthy orgy, had no place in the new Christian order.  Finally, in the year 496 AD, Pope Gelasius did away with the festival of Lupercalia, citing that it was pagan and immoral. 

He chose Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, who would be honored at the new festival on the fourteenth of every February. St. Valentine's feast day became associated with the more genteel and social aspects of courtship. The flailing of one's beloved and the wearing of goat-skins disappeared, and the forms of romantic love took shape that led Hallmark to its hearts-and-flowers domination of the once raucous holiday..

The rites and rituals of Lupercalia were not abandoned completely. In Morocco the springtime celebration is still an intense event of magic and fertility, wildness in honor of the god Pan -- with his goat-skin and dancing, shrill piping and midnight debauchery, he is the god of Panic in the tribes of the desert.

The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka is a field recording made in Morocco by Brian Jones and Brion Gysin in 1968, an edited document of ancient Lupercalia rituals dedicated to the god Pan that are hours, and sometimes days, long. These rituals echo through every springtime rite from the pre-Lenten celebrations of Mardi Gras and Carnival to Easter. Although the recording has been given a psychedelic gloss it doesn't really need, the result is powerful music, if the listener is open to it. 

This is an old, old trip -- and the album, recorded during a visit in 1968 and originally released in 1971 on the Rolling Stones' label, is considered the first of its kind. Since then the Master Musicians of Jajouka have recorded a wildly unique series of albums, produced variously by Bill Laswell and Talvin Singh, that are worth the shoe leather to track down -- short of a journey to Jajouka itself, of course.

A poem for Valentines Day: "Sweet Caroline" Sarah Beth Croteau

"Sweet Caroline"(Sarah Beth Croteau)

From the moment I said goodbye I wanted to say hello again to you. That goes for last year and tomorrow too. Even though tomorrow isn't promised. Even though promises are broken.
There's lists of words that I have. And they all fit inside of my head. When I stare out the car window, as the trees go by, and you take my hand, they fall around me, like leaves to the ground.
One time, in one of my many lives, I was the wind. And when I was the wind, you were the ocean. I tore storms into you. But I relinquished the wind. I gave it up so I could have this body. And you were still the ocean. I walked into you with saltwater tears and apologies and they swam away from me. You were warm, and I could feel my fingers thread through you like laughter and those moments of happiness that always seem too good to be true.
You could sink me. You might. But If anyone could claim me, it would be you. I would settle to the bottom there, my lungs useless and dying. But I know that I would be settled there, my tears, not a stranger to these saltwater depths.
There is a crisp promise that I can make. One that won't be broken. One that wont be bent. One that won't just fall away and crumble. One that just is.
It just exists. Like the wind and the ocean. And it's here in these bodies that it lays, twisted around this spine. In these veins. Written on my ribs. And in the palms of my hands and sleeps in my ankles. No wound that I would ever endure will break it. No death could ever claim it.
And it's that I love you.

Sarah Beth Croteau read "Sweet Caroline" at the monthly Word of Mouth gathering in Athens, GA and the poem with photo also appears online at the Word of Mouth website. (Photo by Michelle Castleberry).  

Philosopher Michel Serres on gay marriage: "the whole catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke"

 Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris's blog Nomadics is always a wonderful place to discover and revisit to reassure the reader there is entertaining writing on the internet if you know where to look in its endless hall of mirrors. Joris -- an educator, author, translator, raconteur and dapper dresser (not necessarily in that order) posts items of great interest to the academic and the amateur alike -- a trick very few can manage with Joris's wit and style.

He enjoys posting the work of others he finds illuminating, especially in translation, and which otherwise would go unnoted. Here, for example, is a recent contribution that bears on Biblical interpretation, marriage relationships, the structure of the family, and the current debate in France about gay marriage. The quote is by French philosopher Michel Serres, who takes an interesting path getting to his eminently logical conclusion.

Nomadics is worth a regular browse for anyone interested in literature, language, poetics, and travel.

Michel Serres

Our friend Cathie Fournier Facebook-forwarded a lovely quote by French philosopher Michel Serres, which I thought would be worthwhile to English. I don’t know the context in which he said or wrote it, except that the French parliament is discussing gay marriage right now! Here it is:

“This question of gay marriage interests me, given the answer the ecclesiastical hierarchy brings to it. Since the first century after Jesus-Christ, the model of the family has been that of the church, that of the Holy Family.

But let us examine the Holy Family. In the Holy Family, the father is not the father: Joseph is not Jesus’ father. The son is not the son: Jesus is the son of God, not the son of Joseph. Joseph, he has never made love to his wife. Concerning the mother, she is the mother indeed, but she is a virgin. The Holy Family, that’s what Levi-Strauss called the elementary structure of kinship. A structure that breaks completely with ancient genealogy, based until then on filiation: one is Jewish through the mother. There are three types of filiation: natural filiation, recognition of paternity and adoption. In the Holy Family, what is blocked is both natural filiation and recognition; only adoption remains.

Thus, since the Gospel according to Luke, the Church proposes as model for the family an elementary structure based on adoption: it is no longer a question of making children, but of choosing oneself, to the point where we are parents, you will be parents, father and mother, only if you say to your child “I have chosen you,” “I adopt you because I love you,” “ it is you I wanted.” And reciprocally, the child also chooses his parents because he loves them.

Thus to me the position of the Church concerning homosexual marriage is perfectly mysterious: this problem was solved some 2000 years ago. I suggest that the whole catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke. Or to convert.”