The romantic holiday known as Valentines Day may have been named after several martyed saints named Valentinus. One saint in particular stands out among the rest. This saint was arrested for marrying Christian couples in secret. The ruler at the time was Claudius II, who had him beheaded. There’s also another story about how Saint Valentine was imprisoned. The daughter of the jailer was blind and Saint Valentine had restored her sight before he was executed by Claudius. Whichever the story is, Saint Valentine is today a recognized saint by the Catholic church.

The association of the saint with romantic love was invented in the Middle ages by the author Geoffrey Chaucer. The tradition of writing hand written valentines started in the 19th century. The widely circulated story about how valentines came to be goes back to the story of Saint Valentine and the jailer’s daughter. Supposedly Saint Valentine had written the first valentine to the jailer’s daughter, and the tradition of giving valentine cards stemmed from that event. However, there is no historical record of this, so it could just be mere speculation.

There’s also another theory that suggests that the Catholic Church had manufactured a day dedicated to the Saint to discourage an ancient Roman holiday called Lupercalia. The festival of Lupercalia celebrated fertility and partly honored the she-wolf Lupa, who suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Supposedly, the priests of this festival would go around whipping young women, who lined up to be whipped. After the whipping, the young women were thought to be more fertile. In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius I outlawed the celebration of the festival.

However, the personification of love, Cupid is still alive in contemporary times. Cupid is the ancient Roman god of erotic love. He is depicted as winged, with the standard bow and arrow. The most famous story involving Cupid is the story of Cupid and Psyche. Venus, the goddess of love, was jealous of Psyche’s beauty. She ordered Cupid to shoot Psyche with his arrow, so that she would fall in love with a man and become ineligible for the other men to desire. When Cupid was about to shoot Psyche, he was startled by her awakening and accidentally shoot himself. Cupid then fell madly in love with Psyche and Venus’s plan backfires. The idea that Cupid’s arrows can cause frenzied love stems from this story.