Two-Faced

As far as gods go, Janus is one of my favorites.

In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past. The concepts of January and janitor are both based on aspects of Janus.

You never hear Janus stories. A few are related in the link above (one, unfortunately, is a rape story for which he made amends of sorts by making his victim the goddess of hinges and I'm not certain which was the greater offense).

Janus is, above all, the personification of a concept. He lives as we do, in the eternal now, spanning the distance between what was and what will be. He reminds us of our complexity. We count it a bad thing to be two-faced, but Janus tells us that we are all, in fact, multi-faced. Contradiction could be another word for human.

That he is the symbol of January, of the new year, has long been known to me. That his name is also linked with janitors is a delightful discovery. The hands of that backward-looking face hold a broom, sweeping up the detritus of the past as the forward face presses onward into the future.

I was in Rome and at the Vatican about four years ago, but I did not see this portrait. Thank you, Wiki. And Happy New Year to all. Time for a new broom.