There is no more simple Magickal charm in the universe than… “Blessed Be.”

Magickal Winds

Posted by Magickal Winds
Author: Ariel

Probably the most common phrase that we use in the Craft is “Blessed Be.” This phrase is possibly the major common denominator in all of the different Craft traditions.

It is something that is a unifying principle within Witchcraft and although it is the most often articulated saying we have, it seems to me to be the least understood one I know of.

When we say “Blessed Be, ” all too often it is simply new jargon, or a substitute for “Hi, ” “How are you?” or “Good Bye.” Yet, these two words comprise one of the most powerful and sophisticated sentences in the English language.

“Blessed Be” is an ultimate Zen phrase, “Blessed be that which is”; “All that is, is blessed”. We are recognizing a truth that all is inherently blessed. We are reminded that in the present moment, everything is perfect. There is nothing that needs to be changed, and nothing that needs to be improved.

In this moment, everything is sacred. Being at one with the sacred now is a blessed state indeed, and saying “blessed be” from that point of view is a potent statement of recognition of the perfection of this moment. There is no future to obsess about, and no past to regret.

There is only this moment; it goes on forever, and all is truly blessed.

Another important facet of this gem of a saying is that it is a constant reminder of our function in the Craft: We are here to bless.

Once we develop a significant relationship with Spirit, in whatever way it presents itself to us, we eventually come to recognize that what the world needs from us is our blessing. The only significant contribution we have to offer the world is blessing.

In any situation, with any person or group of people, we are here to say (and mean) “Blessed Be, ” either silently or aloud.

When we take an honest look at any problem in the world, it becomes apparent that the problem stems from a lack of blessing, and the only cure is to bless.

I know for myself, I can honestly say that anytime I have been less than loving or compassionate in my life, it was in response to a great deal of pain I was experiencing at the time.

What I didn’t need in order to turn my life around was more judgment, anger and criticism. What I needed was love and blessing.

I needed someone to say “Blessed Be” and mean it.

We are children of divinity–children of the Mother and Father, of Spirit, of God, or whatever you choose to call it. As divine children, we are here as expressions of our parents. We are here as lights in a dark world. Our function is to recognize the light and divinity in everyone else.

“Blessed Be” can also be another way of saying “The divine love in me recognizes the divine love in you”. We are here as healers of this world. Whether we take this job seriously or not will determine what direction our world takes.

We have the power to transform the world in every moment just by seeing any situation from the point of view that we are divine beings here to bring blessing.

It isn’t a question of whether or not we have the power to bless, it is a question of whether we choose to use it or not.

If we say “Blessed Be” consistently and mean it, this planet can heal very quickly.

One thing that I have learned in my life is that there is enough pain in this world. We all know what pain is. We have been to hell already; we don’t need to indulge in pain any longer in order to know we want something else.

I can honestly look at my life and say that what I really need is not more misery. I see that what many of us are doing is indulge in misery out of habit, or addiction. It takes a great deal of determination to understand that our addictions are not serving us any longer and then decide that we are going to relinquish our investment in them.

Unfortunately, like any addiction, we often wait until we hit rock bottom before we realize that we have a problem. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to sobriety is for the alcoholic to recognize that they are powerless over alcohol, and that there is a higher power who can restore them to sanity.

This is what blessing is all about. Whatever our wound, the healing comes about from blessing.

If we have a strained relationship with another person, our greatest work to bring us happiness in that relationship is the honest blessing of that person.

If we have a problem with our job, the healing comes about from blessing the job, and all the people in it on every level.

The act of blessing that I describe is not an abdication of power; it is a reclaiming of power.

Some might worry that we need to protect and need to defend ourselves, and that if we are blessing all the time, it will just leave us vulnerable to attack. This worry comes from the erroneous point of view that Spirit is ineffectual. We would do well to remember that the power of love is fierce.

Spirit is intelligent. It knows what to do. When we bless the world, we are in a position of ultimate power. Just as when our physical immune system is healthy, it takes care of all the viral and bacterial activity without us needing to know what is happening.

The Craft of blessing results in building a spiritual immune system that is so strong that nothing can touch us. It is not necessary for us to carry out punishment (curses) on others in order to be safe and protected. In fact, cursing is a domain in which we leave ourselves the most open and vulnerable to attack.

Cursing is very subtle stuff. Curses aren’t necessarily consciously cast. Anytime we desire the pain and destruction of another person for any reason, we are withholding our blessing, and are by default cursing.

Resentments and grudges do come up however, and I am not suggesting that we are supposed to just suppress our feelings and pretend like we are not feeling rage when we are feeling it.

What I am suggesting however is that when we are feeling anything other than love for people that we recognize it and bring it to Spirit to heal.

This is the ultimate magic: transformation.

When we are feeling anger toward another person, we can say “Goddess, I am really pissed of at so-and-so, and want to crush their big fat head right now. Please heal this situation. Please bring me back in harmony with your compassion. Show me what I need to do in this situation, let me know what to say in order that this situation be healed.”

We aren’t denying our rage, but we are embracing our ability to move beyond it. A curse is when the rage and desire to destroy are kept within us to fester.

Curses are psychic malignancies.

Blessing is a silent art. Just because we bless someone doesn’t mean we have to have lunch with him or her.

Blessing is not about forcing our personal wills on any situation. It is simply recognizing the people and situation before us as divine, and seeing the love at the heart of whatever is going on regardless of the drama that is being played out.

We simply access the Spirit within us and ask for its will to be done in our presence. We withdraw our preconceived notions of what is supposed to happen, or what we think we want to have happen, and allow ourselves to invoke the presence of pure love.

When we are facing a problem, and we think we have tried everything, it is very important that we ask ourselves whether or not we have given our blessing. Often this is something that we have overlooked.

I can’t count the number of times I have been in the throes of misery and the one thing I have NOT tried is asking Spirit directly to take the problem and heal it for me. Once we renounce our addiction in the pain, we are transformed.

We have shifted our plane of experience from one of cursing, to one of blessing.

There is no more simple, or more powerful magical charm in the universe than “Blessed Be.”

Posted by Magickal Winds

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Friday the 13th

[THESE ARE NOT MAGICKAL WINDS’ VIEWS! …As a matter of fact, I happen to love the number thirteen and have found the number 13 to be exceptionally Magickal and the date (Friday the 13th) to be especially lucky for me! As mentioned before, we like to share research with the public; this does not mean we agree with everything we research and post!]

Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky

by David Emery

Posted and edited to fit MySpace’s format by: Magickal Winds

Well, Friday the 13th is upon us! We all know that Hollywood uses this day to release new horror movies, but we wanted to share some of the Friday the 13th lore with you!

Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky

From David Emery,

Paraskevidekatriaphobia: Fear of Friday the 13th

I just finished reading the abstract of a study published in the British

Medical Journal in 1993 entitled “Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your

Health?” With the aim of mapping “the relation between health,

behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United

Kingdom,” its authors compared the ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.

Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently

fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of

hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly higher

than on “normal” Fridays.

Their conclusion: “Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital

admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as

much as 52 percent. Staying at home is

recommended.”Paraskevidekatriaphobics — people afflicted with a morbid,

irrational fear of Friday the 13th — must be pricking up their ears just

now, buoyed by seeming evidence that their terror may not be so

irrational after all. But it’s unwise to take solace in a single

scientific study — the only one of its kind, so far as I know —

especially one so peculiar. I suspect these statistics have more to

teach us about human psychology than the ill-fatedness of any particular

date on the calendar.

Friday the 13th – The Most Widespread Superstition?

The sixth day of the week and the number 13 both have foreboding

reputations said to date from ancient times, and their inevitable

conjunction from one to three times a year portends more misfortune than

some credulous minds can bear. Some sources say it may be the most

widespread superstition in the United States. Some people won’t go to

work on Friday the 13th; some won’t eat in restaurants; many wouldn’t

think of setting a wedding on the date.

Just how many Americans in 2007 still suffer from this condition?

According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a psychotherapist specializing in the

treatment of phobias (and coiner of the term “paraskevidekatriaphobia”),

the figure may be as high as 21 million. If he’s right, eight percent of

Americans are still in the grips of a very old superstition.

Exactly how old is difficult to say, because determining the origins of

superstitions is an imprecise science, at best. In fact, it’s mostly

guesswork.

13: The Devil’s Dozen

It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner together, all will die

within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it was

practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894). Many cities

do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue. Many buildings don’t have a

13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the

devil’s luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore

Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters in their names). There are

13 witches in a coven.

Though no one can say for sure when and why human beings first

associated the number 13 with misfortune, the belief is assumed to be

quite old, and there exist any number of theories — all of which have

been called into question at one time or another, I should point out —

purporting to trace its origins to antiquity and beyond. It has been

proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number 13 are as

ancient as the act of counting. Primitive man had only his 10 fingers

and two feet to represent units, this explanation goes, so he could

count no higher than 12. What lay beyond that — 13 — was an impenetrable

mystery to our prehistoric forebears, hence an object of superstition.

Which has an edifying ring to it, but one is left wondering — did

primitive man not have toes?

Despite whatever terrors the numerical unknown held for their

hunter-gatherer ancestors, ancient civilizations weren’t unanimous in

their dread of 13. The Chinese regarded the number as lucky, some

commentators note, as did the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs.

To the ancient Egyptians, these sources tell us, life was a quest for

spiritual ascension which unfolded in stages — 12 in this life and a

13th beyond, thought to be the eternal afterlife. The number 13

therefore symbolized death — not in terms of dust and decay, but as a

glorious and desirable transformation. Though Egyptian civilization

perished, the symbolism conferred on the number 13 by its priesthood

survived, only to be corrupted by subsequent cultures who came to

associate 13 with a fear of death instead of a reverence for the

afterlife.

Anathema

Other sources speculate that the number 13 may have been purposely

vilified by the founders of patriarchal religions in the early days of

western civilization because it represented femininity. Thirteen had

been revered in prehistoric goddess-worshiping cultures, we are told,

because it corresponded to the number of lunar (menstrual) cycles in a

year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The “Earth Mother of Laussel,” for example —

a 27,000-year-old carving found near the Lascaux caves in France often

cited as an icon of matriarchal spirituality — depicts a female figure

holding a cresent-shaped horn bearing 13 notches. As the solar calendar

triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated civilization,

it is surmised, so did the number 12 over the number 13, thereafter

considered anathema.

On the other hand, one of the earliest concrete taboos associated with

the number 13 — a taboo still observed by some superstitious folks

today, evidently — is said to have originated in the East with the

Hindus, who believed, for reasons I haven’t been able to ascertain, that

it is always unlucky for 13 people to gather in one place — say, at

dinner. Interestingly enough, precisely the same superstition has been

attributed to the ancient Vikings (though I have also been told, for

what it’s worth, that this and the accompanying mythographical

explanation are apocryphal). The story has been laid down as follows:

Loki, the Evil One

Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil One,

god of mischief, had been left off the guest list but crashed the party,

bringing the total number of attendees to 13. True to character, Loki

raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter, to attack Balder

the Good, who was a favorite of the gods. Hod took a spear of mistletoe

offered by Loki and obediently hurled it at Balder, killing him

instantly. All Valhalla grieved. And although one might take the moral

of this story to be “Beware of uninvited guests bearing mistletoe,” the

Norse themselves apparently concluded that 13 people at a dinner party

is just plain bad luck.

As if to prove the point, the Bible tells us there were exactly 13

present at the Last Supper. One of the dinner guests — er, disciples —

betrayed Jesus Christ, setting the stage for the Crucifixion.

Did I mention the Crucifixion took place on a Friday?

Bad Friday

It is said: Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring bad dreams.

Don’t start a trip on Friday or you will have misfortune. If you cut

your nails on Friday, you cut them for sorrow. Ships that set sail on a

Friday will have bad luck – as in the tale of H.M.S. Friday … One

hundred years ago, the British government sought to quell once and for

all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting sail on

Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named “H.M.S.

Friday.” They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday,

selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be her

captain. To top it off, H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a

Friday, and was never seen or heard from again.

Some say Friday’s bad reputation goes all the way back to the Garden of

Eden.

It was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden

fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in Sunday School, and they were both

ejected from Paradise. Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began

on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a

Friday; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a Friday; and, of course,

Friday was the day of the week on which Christ was crucified. It is

therefore a day of penance for Christians.

In pagan Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman’s Day in

Britain), but in other pre-Christian cultures it was the sabbath, a day

of worship, so those who indulged in secular or self-interested

activities on that day could not expect to receive blessings from the

gods — which may explain the lingering taboo on embarking on journeys or

starting important projects on Fridays.

To complicate matters, these pagan associations were not lost on the

early Church, which went to great lengths to suppress them. If Friday

was a holy day for heathens, the Church fathers felt, it must not be so

for Christians — thus it became known in the Middle Ages as the

“Witches’ Sabbath,” and thereby hangs another tale.

The Witch-Goddess

The name “Friday” was derived from a Norse deity worshipped on the sixth

day, known either as Frigg (goddess of marriage and fertility), or Freya

(goddess of sex and fertility), or both, the two figures having become

intertwined in the handing-down of myths over time (the etymology of

“Friday” has been given both ways). Frigg/Freya corresponded to Venus,

the goddess of love of the Romans, who named the sixth day of the week

in her honor “dies Veneris.”

Friday was actually considered quite lucky by pre- Christian Teutonic

peoples, we are told — especially as a day to get married — because of

its traditional association with love and fertility. All that changed

when Christianity came along. The goddess of the sixth day — most likely

Freya in this context, given that the cat was her sacred animal — was

recast in post- pagan folklore as a witch, and her day became associated

with evil doings.

Various legends developed in that vein, but one is of particular

interest: As the story goes, the witches of the north used to observe

their sabbath by gathering in a cemetery in the dark of the moon. On one

such occasion the Friday goddess, Freya herself, came down from her

sanctuary in the mountaintops and appeared before the group, who

numbered only 12 at the time, and gave them one of her cats, after which

the witches’ coven — and, by tradition, every properly- formed coven

since — comprised exactly 13.

There’s a very simple reason for that — nobody really knows, though

various explanations have been proposed.

The Knights Templar

The Unluckiest Day of All

The astute reader will have observed that while we have thus far

insinuated any number of intriguing connections between events,

practices and beliefs attributed to ancient cultures and the

superstitious fear of Fridays and the number 13, we have yet to happen

upon an explanation of how, why or when these separate strands of

folklore converged — if that is indeed what happened — to mark Friday

the 13th as the unluckiest day of all.

One theory, recently offered up as historical fact in the novel The Da

Vinci Code, holds that it came about not as the result of a convergence,

but a catastrophe, a single historical event that happened nearly 700

years ago.

The catastrophe was the decimation of the Knights Templar, the legendary

order of “warrior monks” formed during the Christian Crusades to combat

Islam. Renowned as a fighting force for 200 years, by the 1300s the

order had grown so pervasive and powerful it was perceived as a

political threat by kings and popes alike and brought down by a

church-state conspiracy, as recounted by Katharine Kurtz in Tales of the

Knights Templar (Warner Books: 1995): “On October 13, 1307, a day so

infamous that Friday the 13th would become a synonym for ill fortune,

officers of King Philip IV of France carried out mass arrests in a

well-coordinated dawn raid that left several thousand Templars —

knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — in chains, charged

with heresy, blasphemy, various obscenities, and homosexual practices.

None of these charges was ever proven, even in France — and the Order

was found innocent elsewhere — but in the seven years following the

arrests, hundreds of Templars suffered excruciating tortures intended to

force ‘confessions,’ and more than a hundred died under torture or were

executed by burning at the stake.”

A Thoroughly Modern Phenomenon

There are drawbacks to the “day so infamous” thesis, not the least of

which is that it attributes enormous cultural significance to a

relatively obscure historical event. Even more problematic, for this or

any other theory positing premodern origins for Friday the 13th

superstitions, is the fact that no one has been able to document the

existence of such beliefs prior to the 19th century. If people who lived

before the late 1800s perceived Friday the 13th as a day of special

misfortune, no evidence has been found to prove it. As a result, some

scholars are now convinced the stigma is a thoroughly modern phenomenon

exacerbated by 20th-century media hype.

Going back a hundred years, Friday the 13th doesn’t even merit a mention

in E. Cobham Brewer’s voluminous 1898 edition of the Dictionary of

Phrase and Fable, though one does find entries for “Friday, an Unlucky

Day” and “Thirteen Unlucky.” When the date of ill fate finally does make

an appearance in later editions of the text, it is without extravagant

claims as to the superstition’s historicity or longevity. The very

brevity of the entry is instructive: “A particularly unlucky Friday. See

Thirteen” — implying that the extra dollop of misfortune attributed to

Friday the 13th can be accounted for in terms of an accrual, so to

speak, of bad omens:

Unlucky Friday + Unlucky 13 = Unluckier Friday. If that’s the case, we

are guilty of perpetuating a misnomer by labeling Friday the 13th “the

unluckiest day of all,” a designation perhaps better reserved for, say,

a Friday the 13th on which one breaks a mirror, walks under a ladder,

spills the salt, and spies a black cat crossing one’s path — a day, if

there ever was one, best spent in the safety of one’s own home with

doors locked, shutters closed and fingers crossed.

Written by David Emery

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The True Origins of Saint Valentine’s Day

By: Wendy Brinker
Posted by: Magickal Winds

Lupercalia is uniquely Roman, but even the Romans of the first century were at a loss to explain exactly which deity or deities were being exalted. It harkens back to the days when Rome was nothing more than a few shepherds living on a hill known as Palantine and was surrounded by wilderness teeming with wolves.

Lupercus, protector of flocks against wolves, is a likely candidate; the word lupus is Latin for wolf, or perhaps Faunus, the god of agriculture and shepherds. Others suggest it was Rumina, the goddess whose temple stood near the fig tree under which the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. There is no question about Lupercalia’s importance. Records indicate that Mark Antony was master of the Luperci College of Priests. He chose the Lupercalia festival of the year 44BC as the proper time to offer the crown to Julius Caesar.
According to legend, the story of Romulus and Remus begins with their grandfather Numitor, king of the ancient Italian city of Alba Longa. He was ousted by his brother Amulius. Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, was made a Vestal Virgin by Amulius and forbidden to marry since her children would be rightful heir to the throne. Mars, the god of war, fell in love with her and she gave birth to twin sons.

Fearing that the boys would grow up and seek revenge, Amulius had them placed in a basket and thrown into the freezing flooded waters of the River Tiber. When the waters receded, the basket came ashore on Palantine Hill. They were found by a she-wolf who, instead of killing them, nurtured and nourished them with her milk. A woodpecker, also sacred to Mars, brought them food as well.

The twins were later found by Faustulus, the king’s shepherd. He and his wife adopted and named them Romulus and Remus. They grew up to be bold, strong young men, and eventually led a band of shepherds in an uprising against Amulius, killing him and rightfully restoring the kingdom to their grandfather.

Deciding to found a town of their own, Romulus and Remus chose the sacred place where the she-wolf had nursed them. Romulus began to build walls on Palatine Hill, but Remus laughed because they were so low. Remus mockingly jumped over them, and in a fit of rage, Romulus killed his brother. Romulus continued the building of the new city, naming it Roma after himself.

February occurred later on the ancient Roman calendar than it does today so Lupercalia was held in the spring and regarded as a festival of purification and fertility. Each year on February 15, the Luperci priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins brought sacred cakes made from the first ears of last year’s grain harvest to the fig tree. Two naked young men, assisted by the Vestals, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the site. The blood was smeared on the foreheads of the young men and then wiped away with wool dipped in milk.

The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility.

Long after Palentine HIll became the seat of the powerful city, state and empire of Rome, the Lupercalia festival lived on. Roman armies took the Lupercalia customs with them as they invaded France and Britain. One of these was a lottery where the names of available maidens were placed in a box and drawn out by the young men. Each man accepted the girl whose name he drew as his love – for the duration of the festival, or sometimes longer.
As Christianity began to slowly and systematically dismantle the pagan pantheons, it frequently replaced the festivals of the pagan gods with more ecumenical celebrations. It was easier to convert the local population if they could continue to celebrate on the same days… they would just be instructed to celebrate different people and ideologies.

Lupercalia, with its lover lottery, had no place in the new Christian order. In the year 496 AD, Pope Gelasius did away with the festival of Lupercalia, citing that it was pagan and immoral. He chose Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, who would be honored at the new festival on the fourteenth of every February. The church decided to come up with its own lottery and so the feast of St. Valentine featured a lottery of Saints. One would pull the name of a saint out of a box, and for the following year, study and attempt to emulate that saint.

Confusion surrounds St Valentine’s exact identity. At least three Saint Valentines are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of February 14th. One is described as a priest in Rome, another as a Bishop of Interamna, now Terni in Italy, and the other lived and died in Africa.

The Bishop of Interamna is most widely accepted as the basis of the modern saint. He was an early Christian martyr who lived in northern Italy in the third century and was put to death on February 14th around 270 AD by the orders of Emperor Claudius II for disobeying the ban on Christianity. However, most scholars believe Valentine of Terni and the priest Valentine of Rome were the same person.

Claudius’ Rome was an extremely dangerous place to be Christian. Valentine not only chose to be a priest, but was believed to have been a leader of the Christian underground movement. Many priests were caught, one by one and imprisoned and martyred. Valentine supposedly continued to preach the word after he was imprisoned, witnessing to the prisoners and guards.

One story tells that he was able to cure a guard’s daughter of blindness. When word got back to Claudius, he was furious and ordered Valentine’s brutal execution – beaten by clubs until dead, and then beheaded. While he was waiting for the soldiers to come and drag him away, Valentine composed a note to the girl telling her that he loved her. He signed it simply, “From Your Valentine.” The execution was carried out on February 14th.

Another legend touts of a well loved priest called Valentine living under the rule of Emperor Claudius II. Rome was constantly engaged in war. Year after year, Claudius drafted male citizens into battle to defend and expand the Roman Empire. Many Romans were unwilling to go. Married men did not want to leave their families. Younger men did not wish to leave their sweethearts. Claudius ordered a moratorium on all marriages and that all engagements must be broken off immediately.

Valentine disagreed with his emperor. When a young couple came to the temple seeking to be married, Valentine secretly obliged them. Others came and were quietly married. Valentine became the friend of lovers in every district of Rome. But such secrets could not be kept for long. Valentine was dragged from the temple. Many pleaded with Claudius for Valentine’s release but to no avail, and in a dungeon, Valentine languished and died. His devoted friends are said to have buried him in the church of St. Praxedes on the 14th of February.

The Feast of St. Valentine and the saint lottery lasted for a couple hundred years, but the church just couldn’t rid the people’s memory of Lupercalia. In time, the church gave up on Valentine all together. Protestant churches don’t recognize saints at all, and very few Catholic churches choose to celebrate or observe the life of St. Valentine on a ‘Valentine’s Sunday’. The lottery finally returned to coupling eligible singles in the 15th century. The church attempted to revive the saint lottery once again in the 16th century, but it never caught on.

During the medieval days of chivalry, the single’s lottery was very popular. The names of English maidens and bachelors were put into a box and drawn out in pairs. The couple exchanged gifts and the girl became the man’s valentine for a year. He wore her name on his sleeve and it was his bounded duty to attend and protect her. The ancient custom of drawing names on the 14th of February was considered a good omen for love.

Arguably, you could say the very first valentine cards were the slips of paper bearing names of maidens the early Romans first drew. Or perhaps the note Valentine passed from his death cell. The first modern valentine cards are attributed to the young French Duke of Orleans. He was captured in battle and held prisoner in the Tower of London for many years. He was most prolific during his stay and wrote countless love poems to his wife. About sixty of them remain. They are among the royal papers in the British Museum.
By the 17th century, handmade cards had become quite elaborate. Pre-fabricated ones were only for those with means. In 1797, a British publisher issued The Young Man’s Valentine Writer, which contained suggested sentimental verses for the young lover suffering from writer’s block. Printers began producing a limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called “mechanical valentines,” and a reduction in postal rates in the next century ushered in the practice of mailing valentines.

This made it possible to exchange cards anonymously and suddenly, racy, sexually suggestive verses started appearing in great numbers, causing quite a stir among prudish Victorians. The number of obscene valentines caused several countries to ban the practice of exchanging cards. Late in the nineteenth century, the post office in Chicago rejected some twenty-five thousand cards on the grounds that they were not fit to be carried through the U.S. mail.

The first American publisher of valentines was printer and artist Esther Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870’s cost from five to ten dollars, some as much as thirty-five dollars. Since then, the valentine card business has flourished. With the exception of Christmas, Americans exchange more cards on Valentine’s Day than at any other time of year.

Chocolate entered the Valentine’s Day ritual relatively late. The Conquistadors brought chocolate to Spain in 1528 and while they knew how to make cocoa from the beans, it wasn’t until 1847 that Fry & Sons discovered a way to make chocolate edible. Twenty years later, the Cadbury Brothers discovered how to make chocolate even smoother and sweeter. By 1868, the Cadburys were turning out the first boxed chocolate. They were elaborate boxes made of velvet and mirrors and retained their value as trinket-boxes after the chocolate was gone. Richard Cadbury created the first heart-shaped Valentine’s Day box of candy sometime around 1870.

By: Wendy Brinker
Posted by: Magickal Winds

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