Janus

Janus is one of the few major Roman gods with no Greek equivalent — the two-faced god of doorways, gates, transitions, beginnings, and endings. With one face looking forward and one back, he gazes upon past and future at once, presiding over every threshold and every passage from one state to another. The month of January, the opening of the year, bears his name.

He was invoked first in any list of gods, even before Jupiter, for he is the god of first things and of openings; the doors of his shrine in the Roman Forum stood open in time of war and were closed, rarely, in time of peace. As the keeper of beginnings and the god who faces both ways, Janus came to be seen as a fitting emblem of the threshold between worlds — and of the mind that looks at once toward its source and its end.

Epithets

• Bifrons Lat. — the two-faced
• Patulcius Lat. — the opener of the gate
• Clusius Lat. — the closer
• Geminus Lat. — the twin-faced, whose temple doors marked war and peace
• Pater Lat. — father, invoked first in every prayer