--- title: Valentine's Day Origins and Lupercalia: What's the Link? description: Long before Valentine’s Day was celebrated, an Ancient Roman festival with ominous rituals was held on February 15. Are the two connected? canonical: https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/ author: Kat Moon article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2019-02-14T14:30:03.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:52:56.825Z article:section: History og:title: Valentine's Day Origins and Lupercalia: What's the Link? og:description: Long before Valentine’s Day was celebrated, the Ancient Roman festival took place on Feb. 15 og:url: https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcbb4bb9c4021dac2/698944fb4ee262ebda313fc4/lupercalia.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Valentine's Day Origins and Lupercalia: What's the Link? twitter:description: Long before Valentine’s Day was celebrated, the Ancient Roman festival took place on Feb. 15 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcbb4bb9c4021dac2/698944fb4ee262ebda313fc4/lupercalia.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Truth About the Connection Between Valentine's Day and the Ancient Roman Festival of Lupercalia > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Here’s Why We Give Roses on Valentine’s Day—And What the Flower Really Means [Watch (HLS stream): Here’s Why We Give Roses on Valentine’s Day—And What the Flower Really Means](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/xFXiGKUv.m3u8) (1:48)  _Published 2019-02-13. Every year on Feb. 14, millions of people exchange the flower to express their love — and an estimated 250 million roses were produced for Valentine’s Day in 2018, according to the Society of American Florists._ by [Kat Moon](https://time.com/author/kat-moon/) ## Kat Moon Feb 14, 2019 2:30 PM UTC  A mosaic depiction of Lupercalia rituals A mosaic depiction of Lupercalia ritualsAd Meskens/Wikimedia Commons by [Kat Moon](https://time.com/author/kat-moon/) ## Kat Moon Feb 14, 2019 2:30 PM UTC Long before Valentine’s Day was celebrated, a festival that had nothing to do with love took place around the same time of the year. It was called Lupercalia, and it occurred on February 15 each year in ancient Rome. Instead of flowers and chocolates, the festival was marked by more ominous rituals. Centuries later, that coincidence of the calendar has led to [frequent](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120213-valentines-day-gifts-cards-history-facts-naked-romans/) [speculation](https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-potentially-pagan-roots-of-valentines-day) that the Lupercalia festival is one of the earliest ancestors of Valentine’s Day. The ancient festival’s association with fertility rituals has only added to that idea. But in fact, the relationship between Lupercalia and Valentine’s Day remains unclear — and some historians argue that there is no relationship at all. What is known about Lupercalia is that it started with an act of sacrifice. Priests of the god Lupercus, called the Luperci, would take off their clothes and slaughter goats in [the Lupercal](https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/lupercalia), the cave that Roman legend held to have been the location where city founders Romulus and Remus were nursed by a wolf. The Luperci would then cut the goat’s skin into strips and run around the Palantine Hill in Rome, striking women with the goat’s skin. “The festival was to enable or facilitate fertility,” says Kresimir Vukovic, a postdoctoral fellow at the Catholic University of Croatia who has studied Lupercalia. “If you were struck by a Lupercus, one of the priests, it was considered that you would give birth to more children,” he explains. “I don’t think it was a sadistic beating, it was a symbolic beating.” Vukovic says that mosaics and reliefs from the period [depicted](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sousse%5Fmosaic%5Fcalendar%5FFebruary.JPG) instances of women, sometimes stripped naked, accepting the blows — which he says is unsurprising, “given the sexual aspect of the festival.” The most plausible theory for the whipping was that it served as an initiation, he says, as ritualized “sexual play” that marked a boy’s transition into adulthood. Nevertheless, the historian emphasizes that modern scholars have different theories about the practice and that there’s even evidence that the Romans themselves were puzzled by the naked priests’ behavior. One presumed aspect of the festival is the idea that there would have been [a matchmaking lottery](https://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day) associated with Lupercalia, a supposition that is often cited as further evidence of the connection between the ancient festival and Valentine’s Day. But Vukovic says there is no record of men being paired randomly with women for participation in the ritual, and that the math on that idea wouldn’t make sense anyway. “The number of women must have been much greater than that of the men,” he says, noting that there most likely would only have been around two dozen Luperci at the celebration. [_Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter_](http://time.com/newsletter-history) In his book _America’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories,_ Bruce David Forbes echoes the same opinion regarding matchmaking during Lupercalia. “Although there probably was wild partying, there is no reliable evidence that it involved a ritualized time when men drew the names of women, or that it involved the pairing of lovers,” [he writes](https://books.google.com/books?id=iZ2FCgAAQBAJ&q=lupercalia#v=snippet&q=lupercalia&f=false). Without this ritual at the Roman festival, there appears to be little correlation between the Lupercalia and Valentine’s Day. Nor is there conclusive evidence that the date of Lupercalia influenced Pope Gelasius I when, in the 5th century, he made February 14 into a day that would honor the Christian martyr [Saint Valentine](http://time.com/4219425/true-story-valentines-day/). Though pagan holidays were sometimes co-opted by the Church, this doesn’t appear to have been one of those times. “There is a calendar overlap, but there’s no indication that one was replaced by another,” Vukovic says. The earliest historical record of the Lupercalia was from the 3rd century BCE, while the last record was from the end of the 5th century CE — around the same time Pope Gelasius I created a day for Saint Valentine. But even though they weren’t far apart chronologically, the supposed symbolic overlap between the two took centuries more to develop, as Valentine’s Day [hadn’t yet](http://time.com/5143563/real-st-valentine-valentines-day-history/) acquired the romantic meaning it has today. “The earliest record of Valentine’s Day as a celebration of love and fertility so far as I know is from the 14th century (CE),” Vukovic says. “There is a big gap between the two.” Forbes’ book presents a similar observation, noting that “throughout the next eight or nine hundred years, there is no substantial evidence of romantic couples in Europe doing anything special annually on or around February 14.” While the author makes references to a letter in which Pope Gelasius I criticized the Lupercalia, he writes that there is no indication of Gelasius making a concerted effort to replace it. Instead of Valentine’s Day having its roots in Lupercalia, it appears that the two events have little in common besides sharing a calendar date in mid-February. Long gone are the days of goat sacrifices — and those mid-February days are [no longer anything special ](http://time.com/5528415/valentines-day-pregnancy-conception-babies-births/)when it comes to fertility. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/"},"headline":"The Truth About the Connection Between Valentine's Day and the Ancient Roman Festival of Lupercalia","datePublished":"2019-02-14T14:30:03.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:52:56.825Z","description":"Long before Valentine’s Day was celebrated, an Ancient Roman festival took place on Feb. 15","url":"https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/","keywords":["Holidays","History"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcbb4bb9c4021dac2/698944fb4ee262ebda313fc4/lupercalia.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Kat Moon","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/kat-moon/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcbb4bb9c4021dac2/698944fb4ee262ebda313fc4/lupercalia.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons","caption":"Lupercalia","creditText":"Ad Meskens/Wikimedia Commons","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/holidays/","name":"Holidays"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/","name":"The Truth About the Connection Between Valentine's Day and the Ancient Roman Festival of Lupercalia"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Here’s Why We Give Roses on Valentine’s Day—And What the Flower Really Means","description":"Every year on Feb. 14, millions of people exchange the flower to express their love — and an estimated 250 million roses were produced for Valentine’s Day in 2018, according to the Society of American Florists.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/xFXiGKUv/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2019-02-13T22:23:38.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/xFXiGKUv.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/","duration":"PT1M48S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/5527259/valentines-day-lupercalia/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```