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The odds an adult plans to celebrate Valentine's Day this year are 1 in 1.68.

Valentine’s Day didn’t begin with hearts and flowers. It began with sex and nudity.

The first known occasion for a mid-February celebration of sexual connection—and the resulting progeny—was the festival of Lupercalia, named for Lupercus, the Roman god of shepherds. The College of Luperci—the priests who directed the ceremonies—are thought to have begun the festival in the 4th century B. C., but it took a distinctively saucy turn in 276 B.C., after an epidemic caused massive miscarriages and stillbirths among both the human and animal populations of ancient Rome.

The priests consulted with Juno, the goddess of fertility, who decreed that “the sacred he-goat must enter the women of Rome.” Rather than require each member of the College to actually penetrate Rome's women, the priests hit upon a happy compromise. On February 15th, two goats and a dog were sacrificed, their blood smeared onto lashes. According to one account, “naked young men, their bodies oiled and smeared with blood, ran about striking anyone who got in their way.” Young married women, also often naked, were encouraged to submit to the lash in order to prevent barrenness and ease childbirth. “One can see why it was such a popular spectacle,” a classical scholar noted.

The Roman Catholic Church outlawed this pagan festival around the 5th century, offering a tame substitute in its place: the Church encouraged young men and women to enter a lottery in which each received the name of a saint to emulate throughout the year. The patron saint of the lottery was St. Valentine.

There have been numerous saints named Valentine—and even more legends about them—but the one most closely associated with Valentine’s Day was a Christian priest known to take a tender attitude toward young lovers. It is primarily this St. Valentine, 150 years after his martyrdom, who helped to turn a randy fertility romp into an homage to romantic love. During Valentine’s lifetime, Emperor Claudius II had forbidden men of fighting age to marry, believing that married men made poor warriors. Valentine defied the edict, secretly performing marriages between young lovers. For his disobedience he was sentenced to death.

Another legend around a St. Valentine also awaiting execution is that this saint miraculously restored the sight of his jailor’s blind daughter, leaving her a farewell note signed “from your Valentine”—before he was put to death on the 14th of February.

Saints Valentine may have come and gone, but the practice of name-drawing on Valentine’s Day continued for over a thousand years. In 18th century England, many villages had a ceremony on February 13th in which young people drew the name of a member of the opposite sex. This person was to be their “Valentine” the following day, and considered a good prospect for marriage. In some places, the name of your Valentine was pinned to your sleeve for a whole week—the origin of the expression “wearing your heart on your sleeve.”

In 1415, Duke Charles of Orleans penned the earliest surviving valentine to his wife while imprisoned in the Tower of London. By the end of the 18th century, valentine cards had become so popular among the hearts-on-sleeves set that a guide for would-be suitors, The Young Man’s Valentine Writer, came out in Britain suggesting phrases for successful wooing. Around the same time, sexual suggestiveness also crept back into the holiday, as a reduction in postal rates encouraged the sending of anonymous—and often risqué—valentines.

Esther Howland, dubbed the mother of the American valentine, endowed the cards with their familiar frills and finery. After receiving a valentine from England in 1847, Howland began to create her own, with ribbons, flowers, lace, and crafty techniques like accordion pleating and collage. Turning one floor of her home in Worcester, Massachusetts into a factory with an all-female assembly line, she was soon grossing more than $100,000 a year.

Following the Civil War, affordable, pre-made cards helped to fuel an explosion in the number of people sending valentines. But American lovers had to contend with the prudery of the US Post Office. In Chicago alone, authorities deemed 25,000 cards in the 1880s as too racy to be carried by mail.

Today, Valentine’s Day is second only to Christmas in profitability for greeting card companies. There will be 152 million Valentine’s cards sent this year (1 in 1.82 American adults celebrating Valentine’s Day plan to give a card), not including those calamitous cards that can make February the cruelest month for schoolchildren: classroom valentines.