This is #4

 St Valentine’s Day Mascara

  Eyewash! The silliest puns are always the most irresistible and, no, I haven’t suddenly taken to using eye make-up. With my non-existent skills in applying cosmetics the most likely outcome would be the appearance of a demented, undead, panda. So let’s put aside the eyeliner and the war-paint – I’m talking about saints here, not ‘masquerades’, ‘mascara’ or even ‘massacres’.

   The founding fathers of the Christian churches in Europe were remarkably ingenious in flexing the Christian Story to accommodate the rituals, beliefs, traditions and festivals of the polytheistic societies they were seeking to convert. In Judaism there is, and can only be, one God. Christianity departed from Judaism not because it claimed that the Messiah had arrived – presumably that can be proposed by any Jew at any time – (subject to certain stringent conditions being met – let’s not go there just now.) No, the Christian ‘heresy’ which ultimately took it away from Judaism, lay in the Nicene belief in a Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To the rabbis this sounded like three Gods, not one. Anathema.

   The Greeks and the Romans, by contrast, had gods for all occasions and natural phenomena. Their pantheon encompassed, inter alia, the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, rivers, the sea and the trees. Pagan gods were more functional than spiritual. They were required to keep the tribe healthy, the soil fertile and the seasons processing. They don’t seem to have been heavily prescriptive as regards morality. A failure to observe the proper rituals, or make the necessary sacrifices, might prolong winter or ruin the harvest with fire, drought or flood. How barbarically or otherwise the average heathen behaved when that particular deity wasn’t watching was mostly left to individual tastes and preferences.

   The Christian calendar adapted itself perfectly to the cycle of seasons in the northern hemisphere. The further north you went the more important became the need for a mid-winter Festival of Lights with candles, log-fires and feasting. They called it Christmas. Two months later, the land remains barren, spring is still weeks away and food-stocks from last year’s harvest are running miserably low. A period of fasting is called for; they called it Lent. In pagan times a blood sacrifice seemed persuasive for easing the spring and ensuring the return of fertility to the land. Well that fixes Easter, doesn’t it? The Green Man, chocolate bunnies, Easter eggs – not to mention Xmas trees and Santa Claus in mid-winter – these are purely pagan and happily co-exist with the Nativity and the Passion of Christ.

    If you Google the BBC Religions website (that’s their plural for religions not mine) you’ll learn that “…St Valentine’s Day embraces a time of year that is historically associated with love and fertility. It encompasses the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera in Ancient Athens and the Roman festival of Lupercus, the god of fertility.” Elsewhere, I read that in the Middle Ages there was a belief that birds begin to pair on 14^th February. There may also have been a Roman custom that, in mid-February, boys picked out girls by name in honour of the sex and fertility goddess Februata Juno.

   There seem to have been more than a dozen martyred saints of ancient Rome named Valentinus. His name and the fact that his feast day falls on 14^th February, are all that is reliably known about St Valentine. In the Eastern Orthodox Church his feast day is 6^th July. Comforting if you messed-up or forgot on 14^th February - you can try again in July. There has to be an explanation of how Valentinus became the patron saint of lovers. The most convincing I can find is that Valentine was an underground priest (sometimes described as a ‘bishop’) who secretly conducted Christian marriage ceremonies during the reign of the Emperor Claudius – around 270 AD. Claudius believed that married men made poor soldiers and therefore banned marriages of younger citizens. Valentine continued to conduct his weddings “in the name of love” and this brought about his martyrdom. Before he was beheaded, tradition has it that St V fell in love with his gaoler’s daughter and smuggled a note to her which of course he signed “…from your Valentine.” An alternative, arguably less romantic, version has the saint miraculously curing the gaoler’s daughter of her blindness…

   Whichever thread one chooses to follow, St Valentine has accumulated not just the patronage of love and romance. For reasons that evade me, he is also credited with protection against fainting and the spiritual supervision of bee-keeping. It would be as well to have St Valentine on your team – or at least on the substitutes’ bench – if you are likely to need to ward-off bubonic plague or heresy. (You can’t be too careful, can you?) My favourite amongst the Holy Helpers remains St Vitus - feast day 15^th June. Apart from holding up his particular corner of the sky for all these centuries, St Vitus is venerated as the patron saint of dancers, entertainers and epileptics. He is also variously held to be effective against lightning strikes, animal attacks and oversleeping. Work those activities into a coherent legend if you can. Answers on a postcard…

Next week: ….surprise me.