Lovestruck
St Valentine’s Day, named after an early Christian martyr, almost certainly has its origins in the Graeco-Roman holidays devoted to fertility and love such as the Lupercalia (the feast of Lupercus, the wolf hunter) on the 14th and 15th February, of which Plutarch wrote: ‘At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank get in their way deliberately, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery and the barren to pregnancy.’
# May Day The holiday around 1 May has been observed since ancient Gaelic and Celtic times in honour of Bel, the Celtic god of light, fire and sun. Bonfires marked purification while leaping over flames was said to increase fertility. Celebrants also danced around a phallic maypole and enjoyed sexual activity in the woods.
* The Easter Bunny
Hiding chocolate eggs for children wasn’t really the point of the original mythical rabbit.
As one of nature’s fast breeders, it was an obvious symbol of fertility, but, when the pagan goddess Eostre saved a bird which turned into a rabbit that still laid eggs, it became the Easter Bunny, aka the Spring Bunny in the US.
# Stonehenge Among numerous explanations given for the ancient
English site in Wiltshire, a researcher from the University of British Columbia suggested in 2003 that it is actually making a big statement on fertility. Apparently, the shape of the stones resembles the female sexual organ, the opening of Mother Earth.
Ф The rite stuff During the Neolithic period the finger and ring symbolized the phallus and the vulva, signifying the earth goddess
|
|
and the underworld god during sexual intercourse. • At Cantonese funerals, daughters-in-law cover their abdomens in green cloth symbolizing rebirth/fertility — and rub themselves against coffins to extract the last vestiges of life from the dead. • In ancient Europe, women drank a potion made of powdered hare’s womb, sparrow’s brain or wolf’s penis to increase fertility; to decrease it, they swore by the teeth and fingers of a dead child, or the testicles of a weasel. • Women who want to conceive sleep on the 27-foot-long erect penis of the Ceme Abbas Giant, a 180-foot figure carved in chalk in the Dorset hills.
|
|
|