Janus

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Janus sees both the past and the future at once through his two faces and presides over every doorway, threshold, and beginning.
Role in Mythos: He is the Roman god of gates, transitions, and time, invoked before all other gods at the opening of any undertaking.
Relation to Humans: Every Roman crossed his domain daily, since he ruled the doorway of the house and the arch over the street, and his name opened every prayer no matter which god it was meant for. In war his shrine stood open as a sign that the city’s soldiers had gone out through his gate, and its rare closing meant peace had come to the whole Roman world.

There is a small bronze shrine in the Roman Forum that is really just a doorway with nothing behind it, two arches facing opposite ways joined by a short passage, and for centuries the whole business of Rome turned on whether its doors stood open or shut. Open, and the legions were in the field. Shut, and there was peace across every land Rome touched, which in practice meant the doors were almost never shut. Inside stood an old bronze figure with two bearded faces, one gazing out each end, watching the road come and the road go. This was the house of Janus, and he was the god of the space between one thing and the next.

He looks strange even among gods. The face doubled back on itself, four eyes, two mouths, no back of the head at all, so that nothing could approach him unseen and no moment, arriving or departing, escaped him. In his fuller form, the Ianus Quadrifrons, he wore four faces and took in every direction at once. The key belonged to him because a key opens and shuts, and the staff because a porter guards a door and turns travelers through it. Both objects say the same plain thing about him. He is the one who lets you pass, or does not.

The Romans made him first in everything, and they meant it literally. His name was spoken at the head of every liturgy, before Jupiter, before the god the prayer was actually addressed to, on the reasoning that no rite could begin until the god of beginnings had opened it. The first hour, the first day, the first month all fell to him, and the month at the head of the year still carries his name. Farmers called on him when they broke ground. A man starting anything at all gave Janus the opening words.

His origins run back past the city itself, into a time Rome only half remembered. One strand of the tradition makes him a mortal king, the first ruler of Latium, who kept his palace on the Janiculum hill above the western bank of the Tiber and reigned in a golden age, sometimes beside a shadowy consort named Camese. Another strand reaches further still, to the Etruscans, whose two-faced Culsans guarded their gateways long before Rome poured its own bronze, and further east yet, where Near Eastern art had set two faces on a single head for millennia. Janus came from somewhere very old. The Romans themselves could not agree exactly where, and did not seem troubled by the gap.

The best of his stories turns on a favor. When Saturn was thrown down out of the heavens by Jupiter and came wandering into Latium as an exile, it was Janus who took him in and sheltered him, and shared his rule with him. In return Saturn gave the king a gift suited to a doorkeeper: the sight of what had already passed and what was still to come, the double vision that split his face in two. Everything he became afterward grew out of that one act of hospitality at a threshold.

He could also act, when a door needed defending. After Romulus and his men carried off the Sabine women, the Sabine king Titus Tatius came for the city, and the citadel had already been betrayed to him from within. As the enemy pressed toward the gate, Janus opened the ground itself. A scalding jet of water burst up from the earth beneath the attackers, the spring later called the Lautolae, and the boiling flood and steam broke the assault and drove the Sabines back. It is the one moment in his myth where the god of the passage slams the passage shut in an enemy’s face.

Numa Pompilius, the second king and Rome’s great lawgiver, is the one who fixed Janus at the center of the state. He dedicated the twin shrine and made its doors the city’s barometer of war and peace, a piece of religious theater so effective that emperors centuries later still boasted on their coins when they managed to close it. The whole apparatus rested on a simple idea Numa understood better than most. A door is never neutral. Something is always about to change through it.

What Janus holds is real power, but it is power of a particular and narrow kind. He commands transitions absolutely, the seam between war and peace, past and future, inside and out, the god without whom nothing can start and nothing can be crossed. He has no Greek twin, no imported double, which the Romans took as proof he was theirs from the root. Yet he governs only the threshold, never the country on the far side of it. He opens the year but does not rule it; he opens the war but does not fight it; he stands in the doorway and turns you through, and then his part is done. His sign of peace hung on the shutting of two bronze doors that a restless, expanding city almost never allowed to close, so that the god of endings spent most of Roman history looking out at a road with no end in sight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Janus in Roman mythology?

Janus is the Roman god of beginnings, doorways, transitions, and time, depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. He presided over every gate, arch, and threshold, and was invoked first in every Roman prayer, before even Jupiter, because no undertaking could begin without the god of beginnings opening it.

Why does Janus have two faces?

Janus has two faces because he sees both the past and the future at the same time, watching what comes and what goes without turning around. Roman myth says he received this double sight from Saturn as thanks for sheltering him when Jupiter cast him out of heaven, and the two faces also suit his role as a doorkeeper who watches both sides of every threshold.

What is the Temple of Janus and why did its doors matter?

The Temple of Janus, or Ianus Geminus, was a small bronze shrine in the Roman Forum built as two facing archways with doors at each end. By tradition set up by King Numa Pompilius, its doors were left open in times of war and closed only in times of complete peace. Because Rome was almost always at war, the closing of the gates of Janus was a rare and celebrated event.

Why is the month of January named after Janus?

January is named after Janus because he was the god of beginnings, and the month stands at the start of the year, looking back on the old year and forward to the new. As the god who opened all first things, the first day and first month of the calendar were sacred to him.

Does Janus have a Greek equivalent?

No. Janus is one of the very few major Roman gods with no Greek counterpart, which the Romans regarded as evidence that he was originally and distinctly their own. His likely ancestors instead lie with the two-faced Etruscan gateway god Culsans and older two-faced figures in Near Eastern art.