Lupercalia

This is also the Greek homeland of the god Pan.

where the forerunner to the Lupercalia was celebrated.

And this was done to, at least part of the ritual and the festival was done to protect the flocks of sheep and goats against wolves and other predators, but specifically wolves.

Hence the name that it becomes known as in the Roman world, Lupercalia.

And... during the Republican era and probably even going back to the monarchical roots of Rome, it wasn't just wolves that the Lupercalia rites were designed to keep away.

It was, in fact, werewolves in addition to the wolves that peoples are trying to keep away.

And The first historian that I ever saw link this together and make a good case for it was the late Dr. Gary Forsyth.

He was a specialist in the Republican history of Rome.

I mean, he did squander his whole entire inheritance just partying.

But he got to be lead butt smacker in the Lupercalia.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I'm not saying that all of Ovid would be like not also a Bacchanal at times.

Everybody knows that.

There's also another festival called, uh, Lupercalia, if I'm saying that correctly, and I, I wasn't familiar with this until recently.

It's, uh...

Basically, I think these, these festivals are memories of rituals, and the practice has been modernized and watered down and bec- and n- now it's a festival, where it used to be, it used to be a full-blown ritual.

Um, he, he managed to patch things up.

Um, and just before Caesar's assassination, there was this really key moment, um, at a festival called the Lupercalia, um, where, um, I think the youths of Rome run around naked and whip women with belt, uh, strips of goat skin or something.

[laughs] I think that's the-

Yeah.

yet that layering is more a backdrop for Christian worship than a direct recipe for Halloween costumes.

Modern historians also point to the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which celebrated fertility and purification as another potential symbolic source.

But again, the dates and themes diverge sharply from what we now recognize as Halloween's seasonal mood.

What we do see is a cultural palimpsest where Roman religious vocabulary seeped into Latin, which in turn influenced early English church liturgies.

...

if they're in rut, they can go out like Lupercalia and go do heinous things, which happens sometimes in fic.

[smacks lips] Um-

Yeah

Yeah, that's what everybody is aware of on Valentine's Day.

February 14th, it marks the eve of the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, I guess.

which was the culmination of a series of winter festivals.

So, again, this is kind of taking the pagan and making it somewhat religious.

Under the month of February, the book talks about the Luperci.

In ancient Rome, these were priests who celebrate the festival of the Lupercalia every February.

But the Irish text knows nothing of that anymore.

In its version, the Luperci are people who swim through a particular pond and turn into wolves as they do.