had you walked through rome in mid-february, you would have crossed paths with half-naked men, smeared in blood, running through the crowd and whipping people with strips of goatskin. and the most disturbing thing was not them: it was the women, who instead of fleeing stepped forward to receive the blow.
it was the lupercalia, one of the oldest and strangest feasts of the roman calendar, so old that not even the romans themselves agreed on which god it honoured: some said faunus, others a certain lupercus identified with faunus or with pan, others the capitoline she-wolf herself. it was held every 15 february, and for the archaic calendar february was no ordinary month, but the end of the year, the time consecrated to purification. the month’s name comes precisely from februum, the instrument of ritual purification.
the ceremony began in the lupercal, the grotto at the foot of the palatine hill where tradition placed the exact spot at which the she-wolf had suckled romulus and remus. there, the priests called luperci, organised in two ancient colleges (quinctiales and fabiani), sacrificed a he-goat and a dog; with the bloody knife they touched the foreheads of two youths, then wiped them clean with wool dipped in milk, and the youths had to laugh. then they cut the goat hides into strips — the februa — and set off running almost naked around the palatine, striking every citizen who crossed their path.
women stationed themselves deliberately along the route and offered their hands or their backs to the lashes. they were convinced that contact with the leather thongs guaranteed fertility and a birth without complications. it was not gratuitous violence, but contact magic: a ritual transfer of the fecundity of the sacrificed goats to the women of childbearing age. for a society obsessed with perpetuating itself, no superstition about offspring was trivial.
rome conquered the mediterranean with its engineers and its legions, but it kept running naked after goats so as not to die out.
modern historians read the lupercalia as a ritual fossil: a pastoral rite older than the city itself, designed to purify the flock and the territory, which rome preserved intact for centuries without fully understanding it. its political charge, however, was very real. in 44 bce, mark antony ran in the lupercalia as a lupercus and seized on the tumult of the festival to offer julius caesar a king’s diadem before the people; caesar refused it three times, gauging the reaction of the crowd. the rite of fertility also served as a stage on which to weigh power.
the lupercalia was so tenacious that it survived the very end of paganism. as late as the end of the fifth century ce, with rome christian for generations, pope gelasius i sent the celebrated letter to andromachus denouncing christian roman aristocrats who still practised it, because the city refused to give up the thongs. it is often repeated that the church replaced it with st. valentine to christianise 14 february, but that connection is more modern legend than documented fact. what is certain is the other thing: for nearly a thousand years, the most sophisticated civilisation of the west decided that the best way to ask for a child was to be whipped by a stranger bearing blood marks from the ritual.
