Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples under Christian law which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written tonight a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 