Hail to Janus!
Hail to the portal god who ushers us to new beginnings!
Hail to your implicit duality,
And hail to your affinity to the lord of light!
Hail mysterious god of many departments and functions!
May we pass from the solar year to the sacral year –
With your guidance, protection and comfort!
Grant us the vision to learn from the past and grow in the future!
Salve Iane!

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The Agonium of January is sacred to Janus, the god of beginnings and passageways. For the solar year that begins with the Kalends of January or the first sighting of the new moon following the winter solstice, this is the first feriae. Implicit through the name of this festival is the hypothetical deity Agonus of whom Janus, the Colline Mars, i.e., Quirinus, Vediovis and the indigenous sun of December are all interrelated instances.

Janus’ own duality is twofold. On the one hand, he is a composite of Jupiter and Mars, the supreme understanding of the divine twins among the Romans. Janus’ name, in fact, is most likely a cognate of that of Jupiter’s – probably descending from an earlier form as Dianus and hence also related to Diana, Juno and Juturna. Through the pairing of Janus’ January festival with the first Carmentalia and Jupiter’s festival on the Ides with the second Carmentalia, Janus and Jupiter’s twinship is again implied. On the other hand, Janus embodies the more strictly terrestrial duality that is comprehended in the divine twins as Mars and Quirinus. Among all the Roman gods, Janus-Agonus is the most esoteric and complex. He is a solar figure, a god of light, a deity of the waters, and the patron of doorways, gates, passages, tunnels and beginnings. His affinities extend as well to those of Neptunus, Volturnus and Fontus.

In Roman ritual, Janus is the first deity to be invoked. He shares with Juno the patronage of the Kalends of each month. His vehicle is the ram, and his priest is the rex sacrorum. All in all, while his epithets range from Bifrons and Geminus to Consivius, Janus encapsulates the basic formula of Roman religious understanding, namely, the identity of Mars and Quirinus and the identity of the two united both with and vis-à-vis Jupiter. Deific twinship or duality for the Romans almost invariably conceives of one of the twins being a pair of twins in himself. What this suggests is something we find more widely with Indo-European ancestral spiritual understanding: a divine duality in at least three persons.