LUPERCI AND LUPERCALIA. - Festival of 15 February in the ancient Roman religion. The performance of its rites was entrusted to the luperci (proposed etymologies: 1. from lupus, like noverca from nova; 2. from lupus and hircus; 3. from lupus and arceo), grouped into two priestly sodalities: the Luperci Fabiani and Quintiliani or Quinctiliani (to which, through a short-lived reform under Julius Caesar, the Luperci Iulii were added).
On the day of the festival the luperci gathered in the cave called the Lupercal on the slope of the Palatine, in which, according to legend, the she-wolf had found and suckled Romulus and Remus. In the ritual of the festival three moments can be distinguished: 1. The sacrifice, in the cave, of a goat (or a he-goat?) and of a dog, in the presence, it seems, of the Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter, who nevertheless, on other occasions, was not allowed to see dogs and goats. 2) The foreheads of two young men, presumably luperci, were touched with the bloodstained knife used in the sacrifice. The trace of blood was then wiped away with a woolen cloth soaked in milk, at which the young men had to burst out laughing. 3) The luperci, completely naked apart from a goatskin apron, then set off running all around the Palatine. With a goatskin thong, called the amiculum Iunonis, they struck anyone they met or, according to other versions, only the women, who thereby assured their own fertility. As the deities of the festival, the ancient authors mention — in apparent disagreement — Faunus, Lupercus and Inuus (but the last two are probably merely other names of the first), while according to an isolated but not negligible testimony the festival would have belonged to Juno. For Faunus one can adduce the festival of this god on 13 February, his specific cult in the gens Fabia, his connections with the wolf; for Juno the amiculum Iunonis, the sacred character of the month of February (cf. Iuno Februata and the festivals of 1 February and 1 March), the goat as her sacred animal, and the legend that traces the rite of flogging the women back to an oracle of Juno Lucina. The festival may have been dedicated to these two divinities simultaneously, which would find correspondence in the double priestly sodality, in the double sacrificial victim, in the two young men of the rite with the knife, and in the two animals connected with the luperci, the wolf whose name they bear and the goat whose skin they wear.
The ancients explained the festival etiologically, as a commemoration of events in the lives of Romulus and Remus. The moderns mostly interpret it within the framework of a general theory, emphasizing or regarding as the only original features of the rite those that best correspond to that theory; someone (Mannhardt) will therefore find in it rites of agrarian fertility, others (Deubner, Rose) magical rites of prophecy, others again (in part W. Fowler, Carcopino) totemic facts. The festival is evidently complex, as complex as the polytheistic system of the archaic calendar that contains it. The circuit described by the luperci around the seat of the most ancient Roman community, the complex of cult legends connected with the origins of Rome, the close parallelism of Latin and Sabine elements, etc., also underline a "political" aspect of the festival.