What day can put the fear of a woman’s wrath into any man’s heart?

Who is to be blamed/thanked for this holiday?  

There are many stories circulating on who and why Valentine’s Day came about.  One of the most popular is about a priest named Valentine.  He married many young couples behind a Roman Emperor’s back.  The Emperor wanted the young single men for his army.  The Emperor learned of the priests treason and put him to death on February 14, 269 A.D.

Valentine’s Day has been celebrated in England for more than 500 years.  Today, girls and boys get money or candy for singing on Valentine’s Day. The English liked paper Valentines.  They wrote poems and decorated them with lace and ribbons.  In the 1700’s Americans received Valentine’s from their friends in England.  The work was hard in America and the Americans had no time to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  Most of hte first Valentines were marriage proposals.  Popular Valentine designs were ‘true-love knots’ or ‘pinkprick’ (made with a sewing needle).

Italians have a feast.  They sing romantic songs and recite poems.

Germans, Austrians and other European countries send Valentine cards.

Canada and America celebrate Valentine’s Day the most.  Children all around the country exchange Valentine cards.   Teachers get the most Valentine’s!  Children come in second. Valentine’s Day is the most popular day to get married.

There are many symbols of Valentine’s Day:

• Hearts
• Red flowers
• Doves
• Cupid

A kiss on Valentine’s Day brings good luck all year!

The biggest chocolate kiss ever made by Hershey weighed 400 lbs.

image by author

In the ancient world, doves were often associated with prophecy. In The Voyages of the Argo, Apollonius of Rhodes told how the Greek heroes in search of the Golden Fleece found their way through a sea barred by the Clashing Rocks, which would continually open and close. They released a dove. It passed between the rocks, so the heroes knew they could navigate unscathed. In Virgil’s Aeneid, doves guided Aeneas through a forest to a golden bough, which he needed to enter the world of the dead. Even Christianity, which often took a dim view of pagan oracles, was full of stories in which doves assist in divination, perhaps because doves seemed above every suspicion of evil. One apocryphal gospel had a dove from heaven alighting on the staff of Joseph and anointing him as the husband of Mary. Of course, whatever pleased the gods would be offered up to them in the ancient world. For the Hebrews, doves and pigeons were the only birds that might be offered for sacrifice (Lev. 1:14), and they were the favorite sacrifice of people who could not afford sheep or oxen.

The biblical book of Genesis states that “God’s spirit hovered over the water” (1:2). This image certainly suggests a bird, and it has usually been depicted as a dove. During the Flood, Noah sent out a dove. When it returned with an olive branch, he knew that the waters had begun to subside. In Christianity, the dove represents the Holy Spirit. A dove descended on Jesus at his baptism. In pictures of the Annunciation, the dove has traditionally been portrayed descending to Mary from God the Father as she becomes pregnant with the infant Jesus. The scene recalls the amorous adventures of Zeus, for example, when the god assumed the form of a swan to impregnate the maiden Leda. The dove, usually painted directly between Mary and God the Father, seemed to shield Mary with its purity. The dove was sacred to many goddesses of the ancient world.

Doves drew the chariot of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Though sometimes thought promiscuous, Aphrodite became a guardian of chastity when the hunter Orion attempted to break into the home of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. She changed the girls into doves so they might escape by flight, and Zeus later transformed them into stars.

Doves fed the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis, daughter of the goddess Derceto, when she was abandoned as an infant in the desert. They were also closely associated with the Roman Venus, the Babylonian Ishtar, and the Semitic Astarte. The following amorous symbolism enters the Judeo-Christian tradition through the biblical “Song of Songs,” which probably referred to turtledoves Jews and Christians have interpreted this song of love as an allegory of the longing of the soul for God. The image of the dove has always served to spiritualize erotic desire. It is also a symbol of conjugal fidelity. According to the medieval German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in his epic Parzifal, a dove that has lost its mate would always perch on a withered branch.

The Holy Spirit is traditionally spoken of with a masculine pronoun. Nevertheless, it is hard to think of it in that way. The Trinity and the very concept of God seem unbalanced without some feminine element. Several heretical groups have identified the dove with the feminine concept of “Sophia,” or divine wisdom, as well as with Mary herself. The wings of a dove, spread out and pointing downward, are sometimes stylized in Christian art to form an M for Mary.

When Christianity was introduced into Russia, people were forbidden to eat the flesh of doves. The dove is also important in the Grail romances. In Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written in Germany around 1200, a dove visited the Castle of the Grail every year on Good Friday to bring the Host from Heaven. The dove was also the badge of the Knights of the Grail. European folklore made the dove the one shape that the Devil could not assume. The dove was also one of the very few common animals that were never mentioned as familiars of witches.

In the ancient world, several cultures sometimes portrayed the soul as a dove. There is an enormously moving sculpture in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from the grave of a Greek child who died in the mid-seventh century B.C. The young girl holds a pair of doves or pigeons in her hands, and her lips touch the beak of one. The doves are to go on and have the marriage and family that were denied the maiden. The dove was the symbol of Saint Scholastica, founder of a convent and the patroness of rain. Her twin brother, Saint Benedict, visited her on her deathbed. When she died, Saint Benedict saw her soul ascend to Heaven in the form of a white dove.

The dove is also holy in Islam. Christian polemicists sometimes tried to discredit Islam by claiming that Mohammed had a dove feed from his ear. This was allegedly a trick to make his followers believe that the Holy Spirit was giving him advice.

In their collection of German legends, the Grimm brothers tell how a dove saved the town of Höxter. This community had held out valiantly against the mighty army of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. At last, when other attempts had failed, the imperial generals ordered their troops to bring in the heavy artillery and bombard the town into submission. In the evening, a soldier was about to light the fuse of the first cannon when a dove flew down and pecked his hand, forcing him to drop the kindling. The soldier took this as a sign from God, and he refused to fire. This delayed the bom-bardment long enough for Swedish troops to arrive and lift the siege. The dove, particularly in a drawing by Pablo Picasso, was a symbol of the peace movement during the Cold War. Is the dove a little too perfect? It suggests eroticism without lewdness and virtue without self-righteousness. It is rare, indeed, for any symbol to be accepted with so little ambivalence. Perhaps it is possible in this case because the pigeon functions as a sort of double to the dove, deflecting any resentment.

When people do distinguish between doves and pigeons, the rock doves become the black sheep of the family. The urban pigeons descended from the rock doves, which originally came from the northern coasts of the British Isles. People have not always distinguished very sharply between pigeons and doves. Pigeons were often trained to carry messages in the Roman Empire. This probably contributed to the role of a dove in Christianity as a sort of messenger from God. In Christian paintings the dove of the Annunciation was often portrayed as a white rock dove, with a very broad fanlike tail rather than the narrower tail of the turtledove and related varieties. The passenger pigeons of North America, once so numerous that they darkened the skies, were driven to extinction in the early twentieth century. Now they are remembered as a symbol of human rapacity and the lost bounty of the New World. Poet Wallace Stevens probably had the passenger pigeon at least partially in mind when he wrote “Sunday Morning” in 1915.

But pigeons generally blend in so well with our urban environments that most people hardly even notice them. The few who do pay attention find much beauty in their enormous variety of patterns and tones, caused largely by the mixing of urban and feral birds. Pigeons thrive in cities because the facades of buildings resemble the stony landscapes of their original homes. People sometimes call pigeons “rats with wings.” It is now illegal to feed them in New York City, though many people, especially immigrants from the Mediterranean, do anyway.

There are small but devoted circles of pigeon fanciers who race the birds and display them at pigeon shows. While lovers of many animals, such as horses and cats, tend to be female and aristocratic, pi-geon enthusiasts are generally male and blue-collar. They identify with the toughness of these birds, which can survive easily in the roughest of neighborhoods.

Mourning doves are also found in New York and other cities, although they are not as common. They are a bit smaller, have a delicate call, and often seem like feminine counterparts to the more masculine pigeons. Most of the time, mourning doves are even more unobtrusive. Few people ever even think, at least consciously, of a connection between the dove on the street and the one in church. But isn’t it like that with many religious symbols?

Picture Source

This article is dedicated to the great importance of true friendship. While it takes much time and often many years to truly know you have a true, true friend, the magic that occurs when you have one is incredible. This article is about some of my fond thoughts regarding a lady I admire greatly and whom I know I am lucky to call my friend.

I have a girl friend that I have been friends with for about eight years. She and I laugh about this because for the past few years we have been saying we have been friends eight years. Truth is I cannot remember the exact number of years, but through these years she and I have gotten to the point where I truly feel like we can say anything to each other and we will always be there for the other. She is someone who I truly believe only has my best interests in mind and vice versa.

Throughout the years she and I have opened up about the other people in our lives that have hurt us, were unkind to us, etc. We have shared things with each other that no other person knows about us. We have even shared some of the most spiritually amazing experiences I have had in my life.

For example, on a road trip back from Las Vegas were talking and I looked just outside her window and two white doves were flying beside the car. I was completely amazed. I had driven to Las Vegas, from California, more times than I can remember and never once had I seen any doves flying through the desert much less right next to my car! I felt like it was a sign from above, two angels sent to reflect the two angels sitting in the car. It was beautiful, moving and just one of the many experiences I will always hold closest to my heart.

Though much in my life has taught me to be more cautious with people than maybe most people are, everyday she is in my life, I know deeper in my heart that I am beyond blessed to be able to call her my friend. While you never know what life brings and if and when people will change, when you continue to follow your heart, you do end up with the very best things in life, including friends.

I wish you all the very best things in life always.

Joie Schmidt © Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved.

==================================================================

Dreams of the Heart – volume I by Joie Schmidt is available:

  * Volume I: Amazon Kindle, Adobe Reader, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad and iBooks

Dreams of the Heart – volume II is available:

  * Volume II: Amazon Kindle, Adobe Reader

———> Stay tuned . . . vol. II will soon be available on iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad and iBooks!

(*In memoriam of the tragedy in Japan all proceeds from – volume I – sales will go to the relief efforts until 3/11/12)

==================================================================

For more great reading:

• Run Away With Me
• Love is Worth the Risk
• If I Tell You I Love You
• Quotes to Lift Your Spirit
• Tie a Knot and Hang On
• Boost Your Self Esteem Easily
• You Must Lift Others to be Successful
• Secrets for Finding Love and Commitment