The origin of Valentine’s Day, in 5th century Rome.

“The Catholic Church’s attempt to paper over a popular pagan fertility rite with the clubbing death and decapitation of one of its own martyrs is the origin of this lovers’ holiday.

As early as the fourth century BC, the Romans engaged in an annual young man’s rite of passage to the god Lupercus.  The names of teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men; thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another lottery was staged.  Determined to put an end to this eight-hundred-year-old practice, the early church fathers sought a “lovers’” saint to replace the deity Lupercus.  They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.”  From The Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati.

St. Valentine was martyred on February 24, 270AD, when he refused to stop practicing Christianity and worship the Roman gods.  He was arrested for performing illegal marriages after they were banned by the emperor Claudius II.  Valentine was clubbed, stoned, and then beheaded.

In AD 496 Pope Gelasius outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival but he kept the lottery in place, but instead of the names of women going the box, he placed the names of saints.  Both men and women drew names of saints whose lives they were expected to emulate for the next year.  With time Romans gave up the pagan festival and replaced it with the Catholic Church’s holy day.