Valentine’s Day is the sweetest holiday of the year, full of love and sugar-coated chocolates. Even though this holiday has been celebrated for so long, not many people know about the origins of Valentine’s Day. In a Q&A, NC State history professor Thomas Parker disclosed the dark and strange origins of Valentine’s Day.

Q: How has Valentine’s Day evolved throughout the years? Throughout history?

 A: It begins as a purely Christian festival in an attempt to compete with this pagan festival called Lupercalia. Then it begins to have a life of its own, and is more widely celebrated over the years along with other days that were associated with specific saints, and so it grows in popularity through the medieval period.

Q: How did Valentine’s Day start?

A: The origins of this festival go back to the origins of Rome itself … Each year in Rome, on Feb. 15 … there was a really wild kind of festival that the Romans practiced. Basically what happened was priests would sacrifice a dog and a goat, maybe several goats … and they would take the skin of the goats, which often had blood on them, and they would wrap these around the loins of young men and older boys.

Sometimes their faces were smeared with blood, too, and they would run around in near-naked condition around the base of the Palatine Hill. And as they ran, they would try to whip people they encountered with the flayed skin of the goats that they were holding in their hands.

People were not trying to avoid them; in fact, people eagerly sought the chance to be whipped by these boys, because it was thought to be a great omen of good luck. In fact, women in particular were attracted to this because of fertility associations here and the belief that it would enhance their fertility …

The pope at that time complained that many people who were not only Christians were still celebrating this pagan festival … so what the church needed was a festival of its own, a Christian festival, to celebrate about this time to compete with Lupercalia, and so that’s why the Valentine’s Day became celebrated during this time…

Q: Who do you believe started the original Roman traditions of Valentine’s Day?

A: No one knows for sure, but the celebration of St. Valentine is obviously connected with this. There are actually three St. Valentines known in the Catholic church today, and which one of these is the St. Valentine we associate with the festival of Feb. 14, no one knows for sure.

Q: How did St. Valentine get involved in Valentine’s Day?

A: One tradition is that he was a priest who was marrying young soldiers and young women at a time where the emperor, who was Claudius II, forbade marriage by his young soldiers, thinking that unmarried soldiers would be more effective … He learned that Valentine was marrying these soldiers in secret to their lovers, and so to put a stop to this, he arrested and then executed this priest.

There’s another story where Valentine had a crush on the daughter of a jailer who was keeping these Christians in prison; in the 3rd century, Christianity was still an illegal religion. He was then caught and executed, that’s another explanation.

Q: Even though Valentine’s Day has such strange origins, how do you believe it became so romanticized in the modern era?

A: Around the middle of February, and in the old Lupercalia, the Romans’ festival, there were connections about young men meeting young women at this time and entering into romantic relationships. So, the romantic connection really has some origins in the very beginning of the story, but they really become pronounced in the late medieval period, I’d say around the 15th century and later.