Arrowsmith February 2024
Probably nothing. It’s about fertility and reproduction. Everything would stop if the food chain broke. It’s easy to see that starvation would kill us all if we could not get the things we eat, and we wouldn’t get them if they couldn’t reproduce because they could not get the things that they consume.
Back in the 1800s, Augustus de Morgan – a British Mathematician, born in India, came out with the observation:- big fleas have smaller fleas upon their back to bite ’em, and they too have smaller fleas, and so on ad infinitum. Whether you’re an animal or a vegetable (and I’m pretty sure you aren’t a vegetable, because they don’t read much) you depend on fertility. We do, and vegetables do too. Their reproduction is just another version of the process we call sex.
It’s a powerful thing. We wouldn’t be here without it. It’s what that bloke from Stratford meant when he got Hamlet to mention “country matters” to Ophelia. Shakespeare would probably get ‘cancelled’ for that sort of sexism nowadays, but no matter how much city folk pretend sex isn’t the sort of thing nice people can’t do without, the fact is – from microcopic to gigantic – all living organisms rely on sex to be going on all around them, all the time.
It’s been so forever. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. And if it ever stops, we won’t survive.
Before the Romans arrived in Ciren, the Dobunni had been doing sex for as long as they could remember. And they had to. They needed children. It wasn’t something they thought about, but they were quite happy to make fertility into a religion.
The local Celts had a Goddess they called ‘Cuda’. There’s a limestone carving of her in the Corinium Museum. There are lots of speculations about what’s on her lap. Some say apples, others – maybe three babies. But experts seem to agree she’s all about fertility.
The Romans may have adopted Cuda in Corinium (they adopted Sulis Minerva in Bath), but it’s certain that eventually Pagan deities would have been subject to Christianisation when the Roman Empire slowly allowed Christian belief to infiltrate from the third century onward.
Roman culture was just as concerned with the need for children as were the pagan societies they invaded, and it’s possible the formalisation of monogamous partnerships began to spread throughout the conquered people of the Empire, deriving from the legal importance of paternity, marriage, inheritance, and many of the paternalistic principles which remain in Western society today. Of these influences, the notion of the position of women remains in the idea of ‘romance’. It’s no coincidence that the word itself is derived from ‘Roman’. Their idea of a fertility festival – Shakespeare describes it in Julius Caesar – was Lupercalia which took place from the 13th to 15th of February. Young men would run about the city naked, striking women with goatskin whips, which was supposed to help the women bear children! Not quite what we’d think romantic on Valentine’s Day.
St Valentine was born in Italy and martyred by the Romans in about 270 CE because he was a Christian clergyman. Although he’s now the traditional patron of love, he’s also been associated with beekeepers. The practice of marriage for love with hearts and flowers didn’t really start until the late nineteenth century. Before that marriage was about bearing as many children as possible.
Love and marriage don’t really go together like a horse and carriage. Today almost 10% of couples get unhitched. But Tina Turner isn’t wrong when she questions the role of love in the natural drive of fertility. Country matters unite us with the birds and St Valentine’s bees.
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