guide to St. Valentine’s day
gifts & rituals
February is the red month. The month of feasting and fasting: Lent following Shrove Tuesday. The month ruled by Saint Valentine.
February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre
Margaret Atwood, from ‘February’
I am an acolyte of love — cynicism entirely evades me. But I believe in the romance of friendships: I grew up receiving valentines from the girls around me. Hearts on the breakfast table with my father’s handwriting. Snowdrops of the garden from my mother. And I believe in the private romance one has with oneself, that one can cast over the activity of being.
I think of the beginning of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the thrill over valentines and pink cake frosted with roses. They are devoted to St. Valentine: ‘Miranda had loved Saint Valentine. Miranda believed in the power of love over everything.’ When Rosamund prays she prays not to God but to him.
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpt of ‘Witch-Wife’
St Valentine’s Day was a favourable time for divination. Bay leaves sprinkled with rosewater were laid under the applicant’s pillow and, wearing a clean nightgown turned inside out, she went to bed, saying the rhyme: ‘Good Valentine, be kind to me,/In dreams let me my true love see.’
— Margaret Baker, The Folklore and Customs of Love and Marriage
I. a series of Valentine rituals
[to be published in the Valentine’s issue of ‘ODES’ zine]
for the lovelorn pilgrim
A teaspoon of honey under the tongue: for sweetness; for our bodies were made to be our altars; for Saint Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers.
Go an hour after dawn and acquire a new skin, of rose and chamomile oil: to touch the world and for the world to touch back, curious and reverent. Trace sigils at the points of your pulse, let them absorb and take root.
Cut locks of hair from your lover’s head.
Braid the hair; bind it with a red ribbon.
Enclose it in a locket; bake it into bread; swallow it whole.
Fridays are holy days — for Venus, Freya, Frigg. You must rest except in all matters of love.
Insert a key into the soil and watch and wait, kneeled upon the earth, for ‘Saint Valentine brings the keys of roots’.
Gather angelica at your chest, the green cloud mass, for it is ‘dangerous. It has the perfume of the chapel. It brings ecstasy. It recalls the Host. Many wish to eat it and fill their mouths with the intense sacred scent.’ [1]
Perfume is a language: study it. Wear it carefully. Think of the violence it takes to yield the essence of a flower from its petal. Think of Claudius in Hamlet and the scent of his sin that rose to heaven.
Wed two doves, as in Chaucer’s Parliament, the kind with blue caps and bloody breasts. They are the ideal lovers. Practise augury — observe omens in their wingbeat and span. Sleep with one feather underneath your pillow (the other underneath that of your desired).
A mouthful of dessert wine, sweet and red. Leave a libation for the earth. Partake in the economy of ritual liquids, of give and exchange. The lines of the body blur more and more.
Become a bride of the Earth, like Jane mad on the moors. Your dress shall be the wool caught on brambles. Your guests shall be the hare and the lamb.
Recipe for Saint Valentine: apple seeds, cloves, dragon’s blood and cinnamon (mixed), sealed in a vial with wax. I won’t tell you what it does.
꩜
[1] Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva.
Another well known ritual required the use of hempseed […] which a girl must throw over her shoulder as she walked through her garden, rake on shoulder. reciting: ‘Hempseed I set, hempseed I sow,/The man that is my true love,/Come after me and mow.’ In Devon the applicant must start homeward from the churchyard at half-past midnight on St Valentine’s Day and her lover would appear behind her raking into a winding-sheet.
— Margaret Baker, The Folklore and Customs of Love and Marriage
II. Valentine’s gift guide
for friend, lover or self
1. heart-shaped, mediaeval Book of Hours
2 & 3. jewellery:
lover’s eye with a halo of pearls
blood vial necklace (also makes for a good Valentine’s day activity)
silver ring inscribed (‘Til Death’); perfume ring [see @ebonnymunro]
4. pet lamb. or doppelganger doll (to guard you in your sleep)
(it is required also to purchase a matching wardrobe of clothing for your doll, and to dress her as you do herself… or vice versa.)
5. literature of Anaïs Nin
Journals of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I and II especially
Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories (esp. ‘House of Incest’)
and Delta of Venus, A Spy in the House of Love…
6. the heart-shaped cake from Picnic at Hanging Rock
7. shell (or chainmail) clutch (for the deep sea creature in your life)
8. love letter (embroidered; puzzle purse; wax-sealed)
9. inscribed penknife
also, flowers (must be according to the Victorian language of flowers)....
Jasmine is for lovers. It makes you want to put an ellipsis now. They walk holding hands, swinging their arms and giving each other gentle kisses to the fragrant almost-sound of jasmine.
— Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
with all the love in my heart —
Anna x