Saint Valentine, Chocolate and Sex
Before becoming a saint, Valentin was a Roman doctor who officiated the marriage of entire legions against the emperor’s express orders. Emperor Claudio II considered soldiering and matrimony incompatible, and insubordination cost Dr. Valentin his head. The good doctor lost his head but conquered posterity as a martyr of love, securing for himself February 14 in the Catholic Calendar. Curiously, his day coincides with pagan fertility bacchanals.
Delicious Currency
Michael Coe, professor emeritus at Yale University and author of The True History of Chocolate, affirms cocoa was domesticated at least one thousand years before Saint Valentine, becoming a fundamental element in pre-Hispanic diet, pharmacy and rituals. Mayans and Aztecs considered chocolate a divine gift, specially its aphrodisiacal properties. Emperor Moctezuma would drink, chroniclers assure, two large cups of the sour drink before engaging his harem.
Chocolate derives from the Mayan word chocol, to which Aztecs added the Nahutl atl, ‘water,’ turning it to xocoltl, ‘sour water’.
Cristopher Columbus brought chocolate back to Spain. Spaniards found the drink so foul tasting, wrote a priest, it was better suited for feeding pigs. But the reverence natives afford it, as to pass cocoa beans for currency, did fascinate Spaniards. Chroniclers point out: One bean bought a tomato, ten a pumpkin, one hundred a turkey and one thousand a slave. And how many beans for a lover’s heart? Poets say love has no price, but just in case, Aztec priests advised boys, fill your bags with cocoa beans. What about girls? Witches recommended washing their genitals with water, and mixing that water with chocolate to provide their men generous servings with lots of froth.
Chocolate Conquered Europe
Sweetened with cane sugar and honey, chocolate took Europe by storm. At the beginning, though, it was a delicacy reserved for aristocrats and legendary lovers. Casanova ingested row eggs with liters of chocolate, and famed Madame de Pompondiur boasted that chocolate kept the flames of desire burning when she visited Louis VX of France.
In Spain, commissars of the Inquisition kept close tabs on libertine and disobedient monks — mostly noblemen. The Catholic Church mandated fasting on certain days, and fasting meant water. Monks found in chocolate a loophole: drinking chocolate was not eating, yet so spiritually fulfilling. They drank massive quantities. To these sixteenth and seventeenth century monks we owe great mystic poetry. Some historians suggest that the famous mystic Saint Teresa de Avila downed large portions of chocolate, propitiating her ecstasies to transmute.
Old fasting guides advise getting one’s mind off food by engaging in captivating activity, which might explain the mysterious impregnations in villages surrounding monasteries. A popular 16th century tale recounts how a devious monk allured girls to his cell with these words: “Come, my angel, come taste chocolate.”
British authorities prohibited the masses from consuming chocolate. It induced to lethargic contemplation. Tea, on the other hand, kept laborers alert and productive. In Britain, ironically, the industrial revolution propelled mass production of chocolate powder. In 1861, Richard Cadbury created the first heart-shaped box with a Cupid aiming its arrow to the masses and chocolate became Saint Valentine’s best ally.
The Science of Persuasion
Has science proven chocolate’s aphrodisiacal properties? Chocolate contains the neurotransmitters serotonin and anandamide which contribute to feelings of happiness and excitement during sex. Chocolate contains both, but science has not proven a direct effect on the libido. “What is real is our propensity for auto-suggestion,” notes psychotherapist Nubia Santos. “Chocolate is delicious, sweet and we live bombarded by marketers heralding the link between chocolate and sex. It follows that experiencing the slow melting of such sumptuousness in your tongue can make you feel sexy.”
Or, to paraphrase the monks, come, my angel, come taste me.
And poetry did its part. Wrote the Nicaraguan author Giaconda Belli: When I eat chocolate / I think of you in the language of biting, / I think of your legs, / your foot…
