The Spanking Feast of Lupercal

Okay, it’s Elizabethan and not ancient Roman. Still captures the feeling.

We were talking about winter holidays and festivals, Groundhog Day for one, in the comments to the last post, so I thought I would enlarge on another holiday that’s very special to the folks around here.

This of course is the Roman Lupercalia, which Shakespeare calls the Feast of Lupercal in ‘Julius Caesar.’ The festival is, or was at any rate, held every February 15th to honor both Faunus, god of fertility, and Luperca, the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.

On this delightful day, the good women of Rome turned out naked to run through the streets, whilst having their bare bottoms spanked with thongs of sacrificial goat hide. The point of the exercise was to make those not pregnant more fertile, and to ease the delivery of those who were.

I think we really ought to revive this beautiful custom, though as I mentioned elsewhere, hold the festivities indoors, say in a gym or coliseum, because most of us don’t live in Rome where it generally is somewhat warm in February.

However, after having given you my version of ancient history I feel it necessary to pass on a few spoilers gleaned from various online sources.

It appears my take on the Lupercalia amounts to a lot of wishful thinking, plus a few odds and ends of rumor and myth I picked up here and there.

In the earliest recorded festivals, two goats and a dog were sacrificed in a cave at the base of the Palatine Hill where Romulus and Remus supposedly lived with their wolf-mother. The hides of the animals are cut into strips and given to two young boys, the Luperci, who run around the edge of the old Palatine city, blessing everyone they come to by striking them with the hide thongs. Again, the intent was to encourage fertility and increase, but in men as well as women.

As the ages passed the festival changed, and by the time of Julius Caesar, large numbers of grown men were running naked through the streets wielding these fertility-making whips. In the Shakespeare play, Caesar tells his wife Calpurnia to “stand in Antony’s way when he runs his course” so that he could smack her with his thong and help give Caesar an heir.

We still can assume if we want that the women offered their bottoms, clothed or otherwise, to the goat-skin hiding, but having a bunch of guys running around naked while the women stand and wait quite sours the whole enterprise for me, the true historical part anyhow.

But since I’m an old hand at rewriting history to suit my own purposes, I strongly suggest we forget these inconvenient facts and concentrate on the real, that is MY, version of events –

From the 5th century BC until the dissolution of the Festival of Lupercal by some prissy Christian emperor in the 4th century AD, all the women in Rome of childbearing age ran naked – though some were said to mosey – through the streets every 15th of February. Men and boys lined up along the route to urge their womenfolk to greater fertility by swatting their bare bottoms with goat-hide thongs.

It is said that for nine hundred years, a statistically improbable number of Romans had birthdays in mid November.

That’s enough.

Devlin out.