“Galenalia” – A Fake Roman Holiday

Today I came across a troll offering the following curious claims:

St Valentines – was Galenalia in the pre Christian time and Lupercalia in the Pagan Calendar and Easter – was the first festival of the Pagan year celebrating renewal or rebirth celebrating the god of fertility – Ostara, and for a bonus point – Christmas – was Saturnalia

Of course the author neither knew nor cared whether any of this was true.

But what on earth is “Galenalia”?  Well, I did what any modern would do, and Googled.  I got this sparkling bit of AI output:

Galenalia was a pagan festival that celebrated Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and trade. It was celebrated by the Celts after the midwinter festival of Imbolc. The festival was centered on the idea that being single is better than being with someone who is not a good fit.
Some of the ways women celebrated Galenalia included:

• Leaving home for weeks at a time
• Traveling with other women
• Gathering the animal pelts of their boyfriends
• Setting the pelts on fire
• Eating winter squashes and root vegetables
• Placing flowers on the graves of former lovers

In the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I combined the traditions of Galenalia with other holidays to create Valentine’s Day. The pope used the Roman love lottery, where men would draw the name of a Christian saint and live a year expressing that saint’s beliefs. Over time, Valentine’s Day became a holiday to celebrate love.

Thankfully Google now references this generated drivel to the source websites, which turned out to be:

• The Pagan Origins of Valentine’s Day – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency– 12 Feb 2016
• Vana Grimoire: Valentine’s Day – Castlefest

Plus an entirely irrelevant link – hey, this is AI – to an NPR article.

The first of these links appears to be the real source and … it is a satire site, subtitled “Daily Humor since 1998”.

The Pagan Origins of Valentine’s Day – By Kathryn Doyle

Chocolates. Wine. Romance. These are common elements of modern Valentine’s Day, but they’re a far cry from the holiday’s origins more than 2,000 years ago, when the holiday was first marked as a festival of breaking up with long-term boyfriends.

What we know as Valentine’s Day was celebrated by ancient pagans after the midwinter festival of Imbolc. The “Galenalia” festival was dedicated to Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, trade, and recognizing that being single is better than staying with a dead-end guy.

The worst of the winter had passed and women no longer needed to rely on a man as a source of life-saving body heat at night. Mothers and daughters would gather their boyfriends’ animal pelts, set them on fire, and feast on winter squashes and root vegetables until the fires burned out.

Thanks to the writings of Catullus and other Latin poets of the late Roman Republic, we know that women would celebrate Galenalia by leaving their homes for weeks at a time, traveling together on “gal-cations,” apparent sojourns in search of spiritual renewal following the death of old relationships. To the north, Iron Age Celts placed bouquets of flowers on the graves of sacrificed boyfriends.

In the 4th Century A.D., right when Christianity was starting to heat up, Pope Julius I sought to establish a new holy day to memorialize not one but several saints named Valentinus who were all brutally martyred in different, inspiring ways. He wisely chose to adopt and absorb the traditions of Galenalia as part of the new feast day, assigned to February 14th on the Julian calendar. This resulted in the short-lived transition holiday “Minervalentines’s Day” which became “Galentine’s Day” which became the “Valentine’s Day” of modern parlance.

Valentine’s Day was popularly embraced, but over the years church leaders worked to change the focus from pagan breakup customs. They downplayed dumping or sacrificing boyfriends, especially by the Middle Ages when the crusades were becoming a real PR fiasco. Instead, religious tracts encouraged women to “get back out there, mingle, not look for anything serious, necessarily, but be open to having fun.”

In later years, breaking up with boyfriends would actually be condemned as heresy, which historians attribute to the church’s desire to propagate as much as possible in the face of massive plague-related personnel losses.

You would have thought that joke was fairly obvious, but evidently not.

Just for safety’s sake, I did take the time to look at the RealEncyclopädie 13 / Bd. VII.1 (Fornax-Glykon), col. 576 (p.146 of the PDF that goes around).  Needless to say there was no entry.  The nearest was a poetic epithet “Galenaia”, applied to deities to whom sailors pray for a smooth voyage.

It’s a hoax, people.