Hail to Lupercus!
We honour thee today an our request to augment all our creative endeavours.
May we bring this year to a sanctified close!
May we be pure and honourable in your eyes!
May we prepare ourselves for the new year that is to come!
Salve Luperce!
Salve, sancta parens!

 

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The Lupercalia are dedicated to Lupercus whom we may take as another indigitation of the chthonian Mars. The day is concerned in particular with both purification and fecundity. Lupercus or Faunus has wolf, dog and goat associations. In ancient Rome, two youths ran around the Palatine Hill on this day and struck women who put themselves forward to them with goat skin straps to augment their fertility. The circumnavigation of the hill itself would have represented a lustration rite of the earliest community. As the ‘twin’ of the terrestrial-supernal Mars, Lupercus-Faunus-Februus-Inuus is a patron of the quickening fertility of the earth. He is the dual-counterpart of Mars himself, that is, his twin.