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Valentine’s Day

Ah, Valentine’s Day, giver of so much but a fickle square on the calendar that can leave the lonely feeling even lower. Did you know it’s the second-biggest gift-giving day of the year in the U.S. after Christmas? Commodifying love is a pretty sweet business model. The holiday actually traces its roots to the UK, by way of the Romans and pagans, of course.

Doing some of the crack investigative reporting that has made me a billionaire, I googled a bit and found this about the origins of the day we celebrate St. Valentine, “According to history, the festival was a bloody, violent and sexual celebration that incorporated the pagan custom of sacrificing a male goat (a symbol of sexuality), then using its skin to whip women, which supposedly warded off infertility.” This is from an article on the web site of the University of Ottawa and is talking about the Roman fertility festival Lupercalia that was big in the 6^th century B.C.

I love how it says, “According to history . . .” I mean, you could justify or say pretty much anything after that blanket intro, right? It sounds like something Walter Sobchak might say. And then the goat-skin-whipping-women stuff. It’s gotten better, people, can we all at least agree on that?

So the Catholic Church didn’t like the pagan stuff and Christianized the day, linking it to St. Valentine. Turns out, we don’t know much about him, even if you start with the sweeping “according to history…” It is pretty clear that he was killed for his religious conviction. There might have been two St. Valentines, we’re not quite sure, and then to round out the story there’s the blind daughter of St Valentine’s prison guard, whom he fell in love with. There’s also a Roman family of a judge that St. Valentine converted to Christianity by healing (the same?) blind daughter of the judge. Chaucer is also in the mix.  

Catholics really know how to multitask on their saints. This is the list of groups St. Valentine looks out for, according to Catholic.org:  “St. Valentine is the Patron Saint of affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travelers, and young people.”

Awww, young people. But did you catch the plague one? He’s the Parton Saint of Plague. How did Monty Python never get ahold of this one?

Back to Chaucer. He wrote a poem in 1375 that is said to be the link to how we celebrate Valentine’s Day today. It concerned a meeting of birds where mates were chosen. Thusly inspired, nobles at the time began sending notes to their lovers and crushes and here we are where $20 billion is spent on Valentine’s Day each year.

 That’s great, but the NFT market is worth $75 billion, according to Forbes. I feel like Valentine’s Day NFTs make total sense. Looking around on Rarible and OpenSea I don’t too much, however. It would be fun for someone to create a low-cost collection of the little Valentines we used to give to classmates in 1980 or so, they had the TO: and FROM: and a picture of baby angels with hearts all abloom. You could send them to your web3 degen posse.

I don’t have much to say about crypto this week, as you’ve by now realized. Some weeks it’s just not there, or my ideas bore me. If you have a special someone, I hope you share some time with them today. And if you don’t, I hope it’s a peaceful day. – Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.