February Tales
The Gospel at Mass on February 2 is the story of the Presentation of Jesus and the ritual Purification of Mary required 40 days after the birth of a male child.
February 2, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae
Candlemas, the Mass of Candles, is celebrated 40 days after Christmas on the 2nd of February. Today, we call this The Presentation of the Lord recalling Mary bringing Jesus to Simeon in the Gospel of Luke (2: 22-35). It was the fulfillment of a tenet set down in the Book of Leviticus (12: 2-5). Forty days after bearing a male child, a Jewish woman had to present herself in the temple for a rite of purification. Thus, Candlemas, once also called the Feast of the Purification, was set forty days after Christmas. It may even have been the other way around.
In the time before Christ in ancient Rome, February marked the Roman feast of Lupercalia. It was a pagan fertility festival celebrated in honor of Lupercus, the mythological Roman god of flocks and shepherds. The legend began with the mythical founders of Rome, the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus.
Abandoned at birth, and left — with shades of the story of Moses — to float in a basket down the Tiber River, Romulus and Remus were nurtured and raised by a wolf. The Latin word for wolf is “lupus.” Thus the Lupercalia was a ritual celebration of the coming spring emphasizing the need to guard flocks from hungry wolves as winter slowly turns toward spring.
The Lupercalia celebration began with a parade of torches. Then two boys, representing Romulus and Remus, would be smeared with the blood of a goat and chase people through the village with a sheath of the sacrificial goat’s skin. The ritual was seen as a purification of the flocks, the fields, and the village itself. The goat skin was called a “februa,” from the Latin word for purification. The month of February took its name from that word.
The torch festival that marked Lupercalia was absorbed, along with some of its symbols, into the Christian liturgical celebration of Candlemas when candles for the year’s Masses are blessed. Both the Roman and Jewish festivals of ritual purification are linked to Candlemas.
The day after Candlemas, February 3rd, the Feast of Saint Blaise also draws from Candlemas as throats are blessed with the candles that were blessed the day before. According to the tradition, St. Blaise, in the late third century, saved the life of a child choking on a fish bone.
Even the American celebration of Groundhog Day – which shares February 2nd with Candlemas / Purification / Presentation — is linked to these same traditions. A part of the Lupercalia ritual of preparing the flecks and fields for Spring also marked the emergence of hibernating animals from winter sleep.
The Old World equivalent of Groundhog Day was symbolized by a bear in Germany and a badger in Britain. In America, these were replaced with Punxsutawney Phil by the German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania. An old Scottish verse links the Groundhog Day tradition to the Feast of Candlemas:
“If Candlemas Day be dry and fair,
The half o’winter’s come and mair;
If Candlemas Day be wet and foul,
The half o’winter was gone at youl.”
In 494 AD, Pope Gelasius I set the date of the Feast of the Purification of Mary – later, Candlemas, and now the Presentation – at the same time as the Roman Lupercalia to absorb that popular celebration into Christianity with Christian instead of mythological meaning.
So, welcome to February! May our hearts and souls begin to thaw with the Earth and prepare us for our own ritual purification during Lent.
“And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him; and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, ‘Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.’ ”
— Luke 2: 33-35