Janus - by Gillian Polack

Yesterday I thought a lot of Janus. Christianity’s early rise as a major religion was strongly linked to the Roman Empire, so in the Julian and Gregorian calendars we have a month named after a god. More than one month, in fact, but today I shall focus on just that one. I love this. It reminds me, always, that the relationship between religions and the places they grow up help shape the way they shape us. I don’t want to talk about that today, however. I was thinking of Janus. 

In the Middle Ages (which is definitely the period of western European history I know most about) representations of Janus showed him as two-faced or three-faced. On a bad day, I would make Batman jokes about Two-Face, but today is a good day, and what interests me is what Janus means for the way people saw time in the Middle Ages.

Janus was two-faced on calendars because he looked back into the old year and forward into the new. This reflected something so important culturally that we still check our futures on horoscopes and we make resolutions for the New Year and we write “This is what 2018 was like.” Not everyone does all of this, but enough of us do these things that I have to suspect that this response to the change of years is a deep artefact.

It may date back to far earlier than the Middle Ages, and it may not. My evidence is Medieval. In the Middle Ages one gave nice gifts (gloves, for instance) to celebrate the new year. That was part of the looking forward, too. These presents were, I suspect, more important than anything given for Christmas itself, for we have a lot more listings of presents given for the new year than for any other part of Christmastide.

In the Jewish Middle Ages in the same western European countries, Janus does not appear. Jews used both the Christian calendar (for their everyday interactions with the majority part of the community) and their own, and the change of year was governed by the Jewish calendar and was, as it is now, in September/October. White was the colour of the New Year, so white food was popular. New food was popular and new clothes. 

The celebration of the calendar change focussed more on the forward and the cleansing of the slate than on looking back. I suspect this is because there is a formal ‘looking back’ during the ten days after the new year itself in the Jewish calendar. This means there isn’t as much of a call for it during the actual new year celebrations. 

Interestingly, Judaism and Christianity lived alongside each other in ancient Rome. 

Cultural remnants are not always an indication of worship. Christianity was the minor religion of the two nearly 2000 years ago but it adopted facets of Roman religion quite early. Judaism did not. The gods that label Jewish months are earlier deities from a different region. Just as Christians didn’t worship Janus just because Janus illustrated calendars and prompted people to look at both past and future on New Year, Jews didn’t worship the gods that appear on the Jewish calendar. 

If gods don’t indicate worship or even belief, what do they indicate? Why weren’t they dropped?

They are cultural remnants that act as reminders of the paths our cultures have travelled. I mostly like to think of it as a form of respect for our ancestors. Our world is very different to theirs. Some years, though, certain similarities strike. I look at Janus today and see something old that’s nevertheless very new and very important.

So many people assume that I am an ethnohistorian because the food history side of it is amazing. Well, the food history side of it is totally amazing. I’m not going to give it up in a hurry. My friends will suffer my experiments with old recipes for a long time yet. 

Cooking, however, is part of a vastly complex everyday and that everyday is our Janus-looking-backwards. I’m not actually a culinary historian. I’m an ethnohistorian. I need to understand people and their societies, not simply one element of them, but as much as I can.

Janus is important as an indicator of the strength of culture over time and of the legacy that culture gives us. Cultural artefacts can hang on or leave powerful echoes. Culture is not some neutral aspect of the universe: it’s our lives. Janus reminds us, every year, that we have a past as well as a future. If we’re wise and clever and remember to look back and think about that past, we’re more likely to walk into that future without as many burdens. If we stride forward blindly, then we’re carrying all kinds of burdens with us. 

Right now, with all the hate in our current world, it helps me to be able to look at the witch trials and back further at how the Inquisition targeted people who were Christian but with Jewish ancestors, and back further at the invention of the blood libel. All three of these vile parts of the past have carried forward into the present and are with us right now in a variety of forms. Imagine a Janus looking at mass murder in the past and then imagine him turning his head and looking at us, with a grim face. He’s seeing the same sights in both directions.

That’s the way I see Janus this year. We had a difficult 2018 and 2019 is going to be a challenge for many of us. The wonderful thing about looking at history through Janus’ eyes is that we know it. It doesn’t just change theoretically. We change it. We can choose to carry all those wonderful foodways forward and we can also say, “But we don’t need to carry this other thing.” 

Instead of a resolution, we can make a choice as to which aspects of culture we want to keep from those that Janus saw in the last year.

This isn’t where I meant to go with this month’s post. I was going to talk about the formal change to calendars. I wanted to talk about the libraries that keep the ephemera, including those cheap Jewish calendars from the seventeenth and eighteenth century that married the Christian year with the Jewish so that people could live in both, happily. Then I read the news and I thought that the only part of the calendar I wanted to talk about was Janus.

The news in Australia today was that our government in 1996-7 began a lot of the policies we so hate in 2018-9. 

Looking back colours what we see when we look forward. It also helps us to say “I don’t want this” and pushes us to action. This year, I can see precisely why Janus was so important when the year was depicted in the Christian Middle Ages. It was nothing to do with his ancestry as a god and everything to do with the help he gave in understanding what the year meant and how to handle its more impossible aspects.

To Resolve or Not, that is the New Year's Question by Julie Summers

A few years ago a husband of a friend of mine announced at midnight on 31 December that his New Year's Resolution was to make love to his wife three times a week. We all stood around feeling suitably impressed, depressed, optimistic - take your pick - and somewhat inferior. After all, we were none of us less than 50 years old. He kept his promise and did make love three times a week but more often than not to someone else's wife. Was that a good resolution? I leave you to judge for yourselves.

I, personally, find New Year's resolutions more of a burden than anything else, something to beat myself up about in the dark, cold days of February but quickly forgotten when the spring flowers come of life and my garden is alive with proliferating flora and fauna. However, so many people make resolutions that I thought I would look up their ancestry.

New Year's resolutions seem to have begun with the ancient Babylonians who made promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. That tradition developed and evolved under the Romans into a series of promises to Janus, the god of beginnings after whom the month January is named. He is also the god of gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages and endings. Usually depicted with two faces, he also presided over the beginning and ending of conflict: the doors of his temple were open in time of war and closed to mark peace.

Over the next millenia various ages adopted variations on the theme of reaffirmation of promises, while the world religions used it to urge us to reflect upon our wrongdoings in order to seek and offer forgiveness. That seems to me to have moved on a little from the original simple message and introduced a level of guilt which, to me at least, seems unhelpful.

Liverpool Central Library - one of my favourite places to work

Being a book person the message I take from the Babylonians is that I must check I have returned all the books I borrowed in 2016 whether from libraries or friends. But, flippancy aside, I'm beginning to like the idea of returning borrowed objects and paying debts. It seems to me so much more positive and interactive than promising myself I will go to the gym once a week or always wash socks in pairs or, heaven forbid, promise to make love to my husband three times a week. No, I think I shall take away the positive message and return affection that I have been given over the last year and pay my respect to friendships that have held me up in difficult times as well as celebrating good things. So my New Year's Resolution is made.

I wish you all a very happy 2017.

Looking backwards and forwards by Mary Hoffman

Since I have the first-of-the-month position in which to write History Girls posts, I can take the opportunity to wish all our Followers a very happy and fulfilling 2016.

And I can, Janus-like, look back over 2015 and forwards to the coming year, in which the History Girls will turn five! Watch out for a special birthday party on 1st July.

Statue of Janus in the Vatican Museum

First, we have lost some of our regular History Girls and gained some new ones. We say goodbye to  Laurie Graham, Christina Koning, Eleanor Updale and Clare Mulley and au revoir to Louisa Young, who leaves us a monthly poster but will be back as a Reserve and also a guest in 2016. Eleanor and Louisa have been with us since the beginning and we wish them all well..

In their place we welcome Vanora Bennett, Katherine Clements, Katherine Webb, Miranda Miller and Julie Summers. You can read about the new HGs on the About Us page. People only ever leave us because of pressure of work and sometimes they come back; the door is always open.

Looking back over last year shows we had a slew of anniversaries, from VE Day (70 years) on 8th May

VE Day celebrations in London (Imperial War Museum)

to the sealing of Magna Carta (800 years) on 15th June.

Magna Carta 12 97 version

 And there was the Evacuation of Dunkirk (75 years) at the end of May/beginning of June;

The Little Ships, Chatham (Colin Smith Creative Commons)

the Battle of Waterloo (200 years) on 18th June

Artist: Thomas James Barker

 and the Battle of Agincourt (600 years) on 15th October.

15th century miniature

It's a bit heavily biased towards the military and the political, perhaps because History being "about chaps" tends to show up in commemorations. What do we take from the celebration of these dates in the calendar? The Battle of Britain Memorial Service (also 75 years autumn 2015) created more column inches over Jeremy Corbyn's non-singing of the National Anthem than anything about what was actually being remembered and honoured.

Photo credit: Beata May

But there's a world of difference between a battle victory for the British at Waterloo and that at Agincourt. In both cases the French were on the losing side (though Wellington said it was a close-run thing) but the more recent conflict led to eighty years of peace in Europe. Whereas Henry V's victory in France against a force far superior in numbers came bang in the middle of what we loosely call the Hundred Years War and marked the high point of English possessions in France.

After Henry died young his infant son, Henry Vl was crowned king of England and France but it was downhill all the way after Agincourt in terms of England claiming territory across the Channel. That was an ambition that seemed obvious and right to English kings for reasons the woman in the street now (and possibly then)would find incomprehensible.

Borders are artificial politically-imposed boundaries but they do at least make some sense when marked by a large geographical feature like a stretch of water. In our era, when Superpowers from countries thousands of miles away from a conflict feel they have a right (or to put it more charitably, a duty) to intervene with bombs and drones and soldiers, the whole notion of sovereign states is differently undermined.

"Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it"

says the Norwegian Captain to Hamlet in explanation of his massed forces marching on Poland.

Hamlet Why, then the Polack never will defend it.

Captain Yes, it is already garrison'd.

Which brings me to next year's major anniversary, at least for me. Not a battle or a treaty or a natural disaster but the 400th anniversary of  the death of Shakespeare on 23rd April. The History Girls really must do something special for that. My own personal celebration of the life of my favourite writer will include publishing on that date my YA novel Shakespeare's Ghost. The cover came yesterday and you will be seeing more about it here.

BBC 2 will continue its very successful The Hollow Crown series with the first tetralogy (to be written, though later historically) of the three Henry Vl plays and Richard lll. The previous cycle had a very memorable Ben Whishaw as Richard ll, Jeremy Irons as Henry lV and Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal/ Henry V. The ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch will play Richard lll and Geoffrey Streatfeild his older brother Edward lV. I can't wait!

By coincidence I have just finished reading Dan Jones' The Hollow Crown, the sequel to his The Plantagenets. it is very readable indeed and it's such a complicated period of battles, treachery, familial in-fighting and summary executions that one needs a clear guide.

But back to 2016. There are a host of anniversaries coming up from the Battle of Hastings (950 years) on 14th October

to the Great Fire of London (350 years) in September.

Artist Rita Greer 2008

And from January to December there are bound to be mentions of the 80th anniversary of the succession and abdication of Edward Vlll.

Here on The History Girls we have a stellar list of guests lined up, including Tracy Chevalier and Alison Weir.

It only remains for me to wish you all the very best that 2016 can bring and preferably no battles!

Two-faced b**t**d

There is an irresistible subject for any History Girl whose blog-posting date is 1st January: Janus. He was a Roman god but not one of the Olympians borrowed from the Greeks and re-named. No, Janus was more of down-and-dirty street god, with no high-falutin' powers or exciting sexual history.

He was the embodiment of a single idea and an idea that is so much a part of our everyday life that we rarely think of it as in any way needing a divine presence. Janus is the god of beginnings.

But he is also the god of gateways and therefore one who looks backwards as well as forwards: hence the two faces. So a god of endings too.

The annual desire to "ring out the Old Year and ring in the New" with parties, more or less alcohol, traditions involving lumps of coal or whatever, are just up Janus's street. Particularly since they are followed by possible hangovers and that other custom of New Year's resolutions. We are looking forwards in the light of what has gone before. "This year I shall lose weight/drink less/be nicer to X, get a two-book deal" or whatever it is can be the triumph of hope over experience.

Every year the image of the old year as a skeleton with a scythe is replaced by a fat gurgling baby. But 2011 was a baby on January 1st last year and rapidly turned into a more skeletally terrifying year than many of us can remember before.

But I bet that's what people felt in Europe as 1348 turned into 1349. And they didn't get much comfort from their new year either.

Still,  I am resolutely a glass half full kind of History Girl so am not going to have any truck with that gloomy view. Even without the Black Death, the people of mid-14th century Europe had so much shorter a life expectancy than we do and so much more brutal a life while they were on this earth that it really does make our own financial and climatic disasters more bearable to contemplate.

"In my end is my beginning," was the motto Mary Queen of Scots embroidered on a cloth while she was in prison awaiting her execution. "In my beginning is my end," echoed T.S.Eliot more pessimistically in East Coker (though he turned it back into the more positive version in the last line).

"The way up and the way down are the same" was one of Heracleitus' apercus, along with the one about not stepping into the same river twice. I think he would have been quite keen on Janus if he had known about him.

I found these interesting facts about Janus on a site called: Livius, which tells me that he was very ancient indeed and the "gods' god."

"Janus also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Marc Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time; then war broke out again at once, and it was opened."

[Plutarch, Life of king Numa 20.1-2
tr.Bernadotte Perrin]

Even Vergil had a view about these gates:

"The terrible iron-constricted Gates of War shall shut; and safe within them shall stay the godless and ghastly Lust of Blood, propped on his pitiless piled armory, and still roaring from gory mouth, but held fast by a hundred chains of bronze knotted behind his back."

[Virgil, Aeneid, 1.293-296]

Tr. W.F. Jackson Knight

This is the arch of Janus Quadrifrons in Rome, which means four-faced. His usual two aspects are "bifrons", which means two-faced and signifies virility, according to the Livius site. I shall NOT comment on the connection between masculine behaviour and two-facedness. But the four-faced version is for death and destruction. Probably. Or it just refers to the architectural construction of the arch, with four lots of vaulting. Whatever, Janus is certainly the god of doorways, gates and possibly bridges too, which are all two-way entities.

I always see the year as a circle, with December/January down at the bottom - probably a leftover from Infant School iconography. But that encourages the view of the cyclical nature of seasons, life, the universe and everything. And it brings me to Fortune's Wheel. Fortuna, the Roman goddess, originally held a cornucopia, I discovered last week; the Wheel so familiar to us from Tarot packs and the cover of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, was a 16th century invention.

So, the imagery comes and goes, like the year. Happy 1st of Janus's month and a very good New Year to all our History Girls followers.

We have a strong Viking theme coming up with Guest posters including Kevin Crossley-Holland. And watch out for May when we will have the amazing Hilary Mantel.

Meanwhile I hope the temple gates stay firmly shut and peace is given a chance in 2012.