On Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings
Or: how January got its name & why you shouldn’t give up on your New Year’s resolutions just yet
Now that we’re more than halfway through January, how are your New Year’s resolutions coming along?
If you’re anything like most of us, your resolve may be getting shaky. According to this Forbes Health/One Poll survey, the average resolution lasts a mere 3.74 months, and only 6% of people stick with their goals long term.
But you know what? Even if you’ve failed to live up to your resolutions less than a month into 2024, that’s fine. Don’t give up on yourself just yet.
Here’s an unlikely source of hope and motivation to get back up again and keep at it in the guise of one lesser-known (undeservedly!) Roman deity.
Roman gods are boring
Yep, I said it. Sure, the Romans were pioneers in law, engineering, military strategy and empire-building but remained little more than students of the arts, philosophy and mythology, in which the Greeks excelled.
The Romans famously copy-pasted Greek deities onto their own pantheon, and did a rather mediocre job of that. Just think about it: How often are you reminded of Jupiter, Juno or Minerva? Do these names even ring a bell?
In contrast, Zeus, Hera and Athena are household names to this day — a good millennium and a half after Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, making Christianity the official religion of the empire and ushering in the twilight of the old gods.
Venus and Mars are the only names I can think of that are more popular than their Greek counterparts. But then again, those two are greatly helped by having a couple of planets, venereal diseases, a disposable razor, a freaking chocolate bar and countless artworks named after them. I’d chalk it up to the fact that “Venus” rolls off the tongue a bit easier than “Aphrodite”, and Mars sort of comes as her plus one.
That said, not all Roman gods were of Hellenic origin. Some, such as Mithras, were imported from the East, and others were remnants of archaic Etruscan or Italic deities. One of those local ancient gods was Janus — and this guy is anything but boring.
Enter Janus
If you were to meet Janus face-to-face, well, you’d be meeting not one but two faces. Janus, like his Etruscan prototype Culśanś, was depicted as a two-faced man.
Janus is an ancient god even by Roman standards, so his exact function and status in the archaic Roman pantheon are still up for debate and will likely forever remain shrouded in the mists of deep time.
The current scholarly consensus is that his fundamental nature had to do with all beginnings, transitions and endings — figurative or concrete, hallowed or profane.
A farmer stepping through the door of his house to go about his daily activities. A merchant embarking on a long sea voyage. Youths maturing into adults. The start of a new year. The beginning and ending of wars. The birth of new historical eras.
Wherever time or movement flowed, whenever one thing or state transitioned into another, wherever there were liminal spaces — there went Janus, one face turned towards the past and the other gazing into the future.
Doors, gates and passages
The etymology of Janus’s name suggests his original function was presiding over the stepping in and out of doors.
Janus (Iānus) means “doorway” or “arched passage” in Latin, from Proto-Italic *iānu (“door”), which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *ieh₂nu (“passage”). From Iānus derived ianua (“door”), and then, much later, the English “janitor” (ianitor in Latin).
One theory posits that in remote antiquity, the earliest Latins believed all objects to be animated by numina or vague, non-personified spirits — the spirit of the doorway, the spirit of the hearth and so on. As religious thought became more sophisticated over time, some numina gained names and personalities and attained the rank of deities with increasingly complex and abstract functions.
Janus is an ancient Italic god, much older than later Greek transplants, so he may well have started his career as a house-bound spirit of the doorway. His mandate eventually expanded beyond the private sphere of the home to other transitional spaces such as covered passages, bridges, boundaries, roads and, most importantly, city gates.
As Janus’s stature grew, numerous liminal places and entire communities were named after him. At least one stands to this day. Legend has it that the city of Genoa was named after Janus because its position at the centre of the Gulf of Genoa enables it to act as a door (ianua) to the mainland. Or — more poetically — because Genoa, like Janus, has two faces: one overlooking the blue waters of the Ligurian Sea and another gazing up at the steep slopes of the Apennines.
Movement, transitions and journeys
The ideas of stepping through doorways and onward movement are closely connected, so it’s only natural that Janus would eventually gain functions pertaining to journeys, travelling and shipping.
Iānus is cognate with many words related to movement, to the act of going or passing from one place to another: Sanskrit yāti (“to go, travel”), Lithuanian jóti (“to go, ride”), Bulgarian yaham and Serbo-Croatian jàhati (“to ride”).
From there we have another conceptual leap — from spatial transitions to transitions of ownership — and so Janus assumed power over trading, exchange and financial enterprises (according to Roman myth he was the first to mint coins).
Over time, Janus crystallised into a god of all change and transition: the progress from one condition or vision to another, from youth to adulthood, from barbarism to civilisation, from past to future.
Time
And so, Janus came to be identified with time itself. What once was a simple door spirit evolved into a powerful uranic deity and a cosmological principle.
In at least one of his temples, the hands of Janus’s statue were placed so as to signify the number 355 (the number of days in a lunar year) and later 365 (the number of days in a solar year) — an expression of his dominion over time.
But Janus wasn’t merely associated with time. The Romans pictured him as sitting at the very origin of time; he was the first of the gods and therefore their father. He presided over the beginnings of time, religion, the world and the gods themselves.
Even mighty Jupiter could only move back and forth thanks to Janus, who was the guardian of the gates of heaven (See? Here goes the door connection again) and thus controlled access to the other gods.
That was why the Romans would invoke Janus first, regardless of which deity they wanted to pray to. By the same token, it was customary to make a preliminary offering to Janus when making sacrifices to other gods.
Beginnings and endings, war and peace
As master of both motion and time, Janus presided over all beginnings and endings. He caused actions and phenomena to start and end; he was the initiator of all enterprises, of human life itself and of historical ages.
Crucially, Janus’s mandate included the beginning and ending of armed conflict, and hence war and peace.
One of the most important buildings in ancient Rome — sadly long destroyed now — was a structure in the Forum called Janus Geminus (also known as Janus Bifrons, Janus Quirinus, Porta Ianualis or Portae Belli), a walled open enclosure with gates at each end.
The gates of the Janus Geminus would be ritually flung open in times of war to allow the safe return of soldiers and closed shut during peacetime to keep peace inside: a brick-and-mortar manifestation of the fusion of the concepts of the doorway, beginnings and endings and war and peace.
You don’t have to be an expert on Roman military history to guess that the gates of the Janus Geminus were almost always open.
The building was said to have been erected by King Numa Pompilius and was always shut during his reign (715-672 BC). After that, it was closed only a handful of times: most notably after the end of the first Punic War, three or four times under Augustus and once under Nero and Vespasian.
The ceremony of the gates of Janus was so deeply rooted in the Roman psyche that it held out as one of the last vestiges of paganism.
In the early stages of the Gothic War in 536 AD — some two centuries after Christianity became the state religion and Theodosius I banned pagan cults in 391 AD — someone sneaked in under cover of darkness and opened the doors of Janus one last time, perhaps feeling that no war could begin properly without this ancient ritual.
So, in an extraordinary twist of fate, a blurring of the boundaries between reality and religion, history and myth, Janus stayed true to his liminal role as beginner and ender with this final act of worship of the old gods.
The importance of a good beginning
All the evidence suggests that Janus was one of the most important deities, if not the foremost deity, in the archaic Roman pantheon.
Unlike other gods, he had no flamen or dedicated priests assigned to him; none other than the rex sacrorum — the king of the sacred things — performed Janus’s rites.
Ceremonies related to Janus were ubiquitous throughout the year, and not just on New Year’s Day or throughout January (Ianuarius), which — you guessed it — was named after him and eventually became the first month of the ancient Roman calendar (initially it was March).
Janus was worshipped at rites marking the beginning of the new year and every month, as well as the opening and closing of the military season in March and October, at the start of the planting and harvest times, at marriages and deaths.
Beyond these dedicated festivals, virtually any religious rite or ceremony required the invocation of Janus first, regardless of the main deity honoured on the particular occasion.
And no wonder. Having dominion over beginnings, Janus bore an organic association with omens and auspices, and oh boy did the Romans love a good omen. An auspicious beginning was of fundamental importance to the success of any venture, as the beginning of anything was an omen for the rest of it.
The first words of an oracle held more sway than any which followed. Stumbling upon the threshold of a house was unfortunate even on regular days, and to stumble when carrying a bride over the threshold of her new home (yep, that’s how old the custom is) — you might as well get divorced there and then.
And so, because Janus presided over all beginnings and everything is the beginning of something, the Romans would invoke Janus all the freaking time.
Okay, but what does Janus have to do with you?
And with your New Year’s resolutions, of all things?
Here’s the thing. We could write off the concept of Janus as a remnant of primitive religious beliefs, ancient superstitions, magical thinking and the inevitable fatalism of a people who had little to no control over the powers of nature and their lives. And to some extent, that’s probably true.
However, as tempting as it might be to toot our own horn, the Romans on the whole weren’t stupid and most definitely weren’t any more stupid than us, smartphones and all.
It only takes a slightly deeper level of analysis to reveal that Janus, like other ancient gods and mythological characters, is also a complex symbol, a handy heuristic, a cognitive shorthand, if you will.
The two-headed deity is a visual representation of meaning and revelation collected over millennia, then refined and distilled down to a single image pointing to a conceptual chain of connected ideas — from the doorway of the home to the beginning and end of the world itself to the realisation that all beginnings flow into their endings that in turn flow into new beginnings and so on into eternity — and that every moment is in fact a new beginning, a chance to start afresh and take courage by invoking the help of Janus.
Or, in modern times, by mouthing a positive affirmation, or creating a vision board, or doing some other silly-but-allegedly-research-backed trick peddled by self-help gurus as a way to hack your unconscious mind (don’t get me started on the replication crisis in psychology research).
Truth be told, our modern rituals don’t necessarily strike me as more sober minded and certainly lack the theatrical flair of flinging open the gates of Janus Geminus.
But that’s beside the point. The point is: It might do us well to borrow a page from the Romans’ book and do whatever works for us to mark our new beginnings, no matter how small or trivial, take heart and start anew whenever we waver from the straight and narrow path. For every end is a beginning in disguise.