Visit theallusionist.org/valentine to listen to this episode and find out more information about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, scatter language like rose petals in a honeymoon suite. Sorry to whoever has to clean up.
This episode is about Valentine, because the word has taken on a particular connotation, which is quite far from the eponymous saint.
Content note: this episode contains plagues, beheading, animal sacrifices, and bird sex, which can be quite violent.
On with the show.
HZ: Hi.
ST VALENTINE: Hi, hi, have you been waiting long?
HZ: No, no, it’s fine.
ST VALENTINE: Nice to meet you, I’m St Valentine.
HZ: THE St Valentine?
ST VALENTINE: A St Valentine, certainly…
HZ: The one from the cards, and the heart-shaped boxes of chocs and the red lace bras and stuff?
ST VALENTINE: Pffft, yeah, I guess? I kind of have a portfolio career.
HZ: Oh yeah?
ST VALENTINE: Yeah, I’m actually also the patron saint of beekeepers, epilepsy and plagues, but you don’t see beekeeper-shaped boxes of chocolates in the supermarkets in February, do you?
HZ: Huh! How do you get to be patron saint of beekeepers and epilepsy?
ST VALENTINE: Well I’m not the person to ask, really, that all got decided after I was dead, so… I did help out a few people who had epilepsy. But it’s really hard to remember all the good things I did, you know? I had range.
HZ: Did you help a beekeeper with epilepsy? So they didn’t know whether you were curing someone because they were a beekeeper or because they had epilepsy, so they had to make you the patron saint of both.
ST VALENTINE: Right! Yeah - all bases. They also sometimes make you patron saint of a disease because you had it or something you did reminded them of it. Like St Agatha being the patron saint of breast cancer.
HZ: Oh, because she had breast cancer?
ST VALENTINE: No, no, because when she refused to marry a non-Christian at the age of 15, they tortured her and cut off her breasts.
HZ: Oh! That is horrible.
ST VALENTINE: Yeah, it’s not the best.
HZ: And how’s the plague gig going?
ST VALENTINE: Right now? Oh yeah, totally chill, yeah.
HZ: Nothing much happening, right?
ST VALENTINE: Nailing it. It’s not at all like being Santa Claus on Christmas Eve every day.
HZ: So if you’re the patron saint of plagues, does that mean you’re on the side of people suffering from plagues, or on the side of the plagues?
ST VALENTINE: ...You know what... I don’t know! I should’ve checked the contract.
HZ: If I sacrifice an ox to you, will that make the plague better or worse?
ST VALENTINE: There’s only one way to find out! Are you feeling lucky?
HZ: No, not at all! I don’t like those odds.
ST VALENTINE: Yeah, don’t trust me; like I said, I got this job after I was dead, not on merit. Also, I’m not the only patron saint of plagues.
HZ: No?
ST VALENTINE: Nah, there are loads of us! Dozens at our last gathering - over a hundred, sometimes.
HZ: Wow! That’s a lot.
ST VALENTINE: Yeah well you want to have backups for something major like plagues. There’re also like forty epilepsy saints.
HZ: Oh, cool.
ST VALENTINE: Share the responsibility a bit.
HZ: But seriously, should I be praying to you until I get my vaccine or sacrificing an ox?
ST VALENTINE: Can’t hurt. Well, it’ll hurt the ox.
HZ: And just you? Or all of the plague saints need to get a dead ox?
ST VALENTINE: Mm yeah I don’t know. And you might manage to appease most of us, but yknow, if you forget St Gregory, or he doesn’t like his dead ox, that might wreck your whole plague insurance coverage.
HZ: Right.
ST VALENTINE: Just don’t expect miracles.
HZ: OK. But aren’t miracles what I’m supposed to expect from saints?
ST VALENTINE: Like I told you, I didn’t apply for this job.
HZ: Yeah, ok, fair.
ST VALENTINE: It is stressful. I’m spread pretty thin between plagues and romance, and if I do a bad job, they’ll take me off the beat and replace me with someone else. That’s what can happen with patron saints - like, if you’re the patron saint of not being chased by a bear, and someone gets chased by a bear on your watch, you can be reallocated to one of the rubbish patronages, like being patron saint of embarrassing noises when you sit on a chair and everyone thinks you farted but it was just the chair.
HZ: Oh, that’s rough. So no job security.
ST VALENTINE: But that’s why I’ve got the portfolio career - if I let the beekeepers down, there’s always romance to fall back on.
HZ: Yeah! That’s a good gig; how did you get it?
ST VALENTINE: It’s complicated. First of all, there are a lot of St Valentines.
HZ: Really?
ST VALENTINE: Yeah, yeah, Valentine was a popular name a couple of millennia ago, derives from the Latin word for ‘strength’, grrrr!
HZ: Oh wow, I wasn’t expecting a gun show!
ST VALENTINE: Well I wrestled the other Saint Valentines for supremacy. Jk, I didn’t. There are about a dozen, so together they could easily overpower me.
HZ: A dozen Saint Valentines?
ST VALENTINE: Yeah, although they’ve narrowed down the romance day one to just the three who died on 14 February.
TV SHOW:
HOST: Welcome back to Be My Valentine, and now it’s time to decide: who is going to be your Valentine? Will it be Valentine number 1, a hot priest just like what you wanted after you watched Fleabag, kept under house arrest by the aristocrat Asterius, restored sight to Asterius’s blind daughter, then the emperor cut his head off, but will he lose his head for you? Or will it be Valentine number 2: a bishop - oooh! Powerful - who healed his captor’s son and was, you guessed it, beheaded! Or will you choose Valentine number 3, man of mystery, all we know is he died on the north coast of Africa with 24 soldiers, but is he dying to meet you?
CONTESTANT: I’ll choose...Valentine number 1!
HOST: Valentine number 1! Come out here, come out here.
ST VALENTINE: Oh gosh, I’m so flattered!
HOST: But here’s the twist: are you going to tell or shall I?
ST VALENTINE: I may have been Valentine number 1 AND Valentine number 2. [Gasps!] I didn’t mean to catfish you, just nobody’s really sure if the St Valentine who was beheaded by a Roman emperor on 14 February is a different person to the St Valentine who was beheaded by a Roman emperor on 14 February, or the same one with the details a bit differently. The records from the period are a bit iffy, because Christianity wasn’t legal in the Roman Empire while I was alive, so either records weren’t kept in the first place or they were destroyed in the Great Persecution of the year 303, where the Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered the burning of churches and scriptures and the arrest or execution of religious officials and high-profile Christians, and it seems a bit of a coincidence that you’d have two Christian officials both called Valentine both beheaded on February 14, so, did the priest Valentine become the bishop Valentine then die, were the priest Valentine and the bishop Valentine separate people, nobody knows, not even me! Definitely dead though. Hey come back!
HZ: How did you get to be the romance saint again?
ST VALENTINE: Great question.
HZ: Was it some symbolic thing like St Agatha where they chopped your heart out and fed it to a crocodile?
ST VALENTINE: Nah nah nah, I think that was St Jeremy. Or was it St Bob?
HZ: Did you do any particularly romantic stuff?
ST VALENTINE: I had a reputation. For secretly marrying couples!
HZ: Oh yeah?
ST VALENTINE: Yeah! The emperor of Rome was really pissed off about it.
HZ: Sounds like the emperors of Rome were really pissed off about absolutely everything.
ST VALENTINE: Yeahhhhh. In this case it’s because, apparently, married men couldn’t be conscripted to the army.
HZ: Wow, why not?
ST VALENTINE: The emperor thought marriage made them inefficient.
HZ: Inefficient!
ST VALENTINE: Yeah, what’s his damage. There were some other rumours, that I used to pass love notes from Christian prisoners to each other, and that I used to cut heart shapes out of parchment and hand them out to soldiers, to remind them of love. God’s love!
HZ: OK… When you say ‘rumour’?
ST VALENTINE: All of this is a bit unclear, cos the records were all destroyed in the Great Persecution, and I’ve got a memory like someone who’s head’s been cut off! Which of course mine was. They also retconned stuff I did to be more romantic. Like when I was under house arrest at Judge Asterius’s house, and he was like, “Alright, if your Christian god’s so real, prove it: cure my daughter’s blindness!”
HZ: Oh, that was real? I thought that was just artistic license earlier.
ST VALENTINE: No no, it was a whole thing. But even though it was just me doing my miraculous duty, as a result of which I converted the whole household to Christianity and the judge released all Christian prisoners, in the retelling it’s been spun not as a religious thing but as a romance thing.
ROMANCE NOVEL:
As Valentine placed his hands over her eyes, she felt an uncontrollable shiver of excitement. As warmth spread through her body, golden light crept into the corners of her vision; she gasped as she felt Valentine’s miraculous hands leave her face and her eyes were flooded with a blur of colours and shapes, resolving into the smiling face of the soon-to-be saint in front of her. “But - but how?” she stammered. “I went all the way to heaven to fetch the stars to put into your eyes, babe,” he murmured. “But why?” she gasped. He placed a letter in her hands. “So you could read this. I’m afraid I have to go now. Forever.” Her eyes filled with tears, but when she blinked them away, Valentine was already gone. She picked up the letter. Her eyes were still waking after a lifetime of blindness, but through the blear, she saw the signature, “From your Valentine.”
HZ: That seems...tenuous?
ST VALENTINE: I know right! It’s a better story, though.
HZ: I guess. The first Valentine’s card.
ST VALENTINE: Although any card I send is technically a Valentine’s card. What’s weird, though, is I got my own day in the year 496, but it wasn’t a romance day till the 14th century.
HZ: What happened?
ST VALENTINE: Again, not sure, but several poets got hold of it, Chaucer wrote ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ about birds choosing their mates on St Valentine’s Day then going at it really loudly.
HZ: And then humans thought, “Why do birds get all the fun, where’s our day?”
ST VALENTINE: Birds do it, bees do it, even my precious beekeepers do it. Not with the bees. I hope.
HZ: Courtly love was all the rage in Chaucer’s time. But I don’t know why people would have associated birds with it, because anyone who’s been in the vicinity of birds mating knows that is not a courtly process.
ST VALENTINE: It’s squawky.
HZ: That’s definitely one aspect of it. Any idea why Chaucer would have chosen your day for bird matchmaking?
ST VALENTINE: Timing? Mid-Feb, the good time to choose your egg mate? There’s another theory to consider, which is, Valentine’s Day - sorry for referring to myself in the third person - Valentine’s Day like Christmas and Easter was a Christian festival plonked on top of a pagan one to stop people celebrating the non-Christian one?
HZ: Oh, what was the pagan one?
ST VALENTINE: Lupercalia? Celebrated in the Roman Empire 13-15 February? Where the Luperci order of priests would gather at the cave where the wolf raised Romulus and Remus? Then they’d sacrifice a goat and a dog? Then cut the goat’s skin into strips? And run through town naked, thwacking women and crops with the strips of skin, to make them fertile? Then all the single ladies would put their names into a big urn and the single men would pick one out and they’d pair off?
HZ: I am not familiar. Is that because Christianity stopped it being celebrated? Or because women and crops were like, “You know what, I’m sick of being slapped with a freshly flayed strip of goat skin and being told it’s for my own good?”
ST VALENTINE: Not documented, but either would be persuasive reasons. Fun fact: the strips of skin were called ‘februa’, and that’s also the etymology of ‘February’.
HZ: I did not know that!
ST VALENTINE: Yes! Februa were purification rituals or the implements thereof, and people were doing them on the ides of February, which were 15 February.
HZ: Fun fact for you: before English borrowed the word ‘February’, in Old English, the month was called ‘mud month’. Solmonað.
ST VALENTINE: You say mud month, I say purification month, let’s call the whole thing off.
HZ: Well, I have to get going, but I guess now if someone says “Be my Valentine,” I’ll know what to aim for.
ST VALENTINE: Will you though?
HZ: At least what to wear.
ST VALENTINE: Keep your head on, though. That would be too much commitment to the bit!
HZ: Ha! Yeah. Well good luck with all the cards. And the plagues.
ST VALENTINE: Thanks, appreciate it, yeah.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
rhyton, noun: an ancient Greek drinking container in the form of an animal’s head or a horn, with the drinking hole at the lower or pointed end.
Try using ‘rhyton’ in an email today.
Got any plans to send Valentine messages that are more suitable for plague-times than romance-times? Let me know on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @allusionistshow what you go with. How about:
Roses are red
My sputum is green,
I’ll declare my love
From behind a plexiglass screen.
For every topic covered in an episode, I put links on the website to more information - there are a lot of vague and disputed details about Saint Valentine, and I assure you I did not invent any of the things, even if they sound like bullshit. So read more, hear all the episodes, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
