Hail Janus!
Hail to the fleeing king!
May you take refuge during this time beyond time!
May you be safe while we celebrate the epagomenal inversion!
And may you return when time is regained and is safe!
Salve Iane!

* * * * *

The circle comprises 360 degrees and, likewise, the ideal year contains 360 days. Because, however, there is a discrepancy between the ideal and the real, many ancient cultures appear to have designated the extra full five days of the natural year as a kind of ‘time out’. This ‘non-time’ or ‘time-between-time’ is the epagomenae – the five ‘extra’ days that are beyond the norm and which are in some way inauspicious. We can suspect that with the flight of the king or rex sacrorum, the ‘king of the sacred rites’ on the previous day of the Regifugium, the sacred fire of Vesta was also extinguished. With the absence of the norm, the loss of the titular head as well as the community’s symbolic hearth, the resultant time inversion became the original moment of carnival.

For the Mayan and Nahuan peoples of Central American, the five ‘extra’ or interpolated days were ‘nameless’ or ‘hollow’: the nemontemi. The Mesopotamian calendar also considered there to be an extra week of five days between the old year and the beginning of the new. For the Egyptians and their Sothic year, the five epagomenal days were those in which Nut, circumventing a curse from the sun-god Ra, gave birth successively to Osiris, the elder Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys. For the Indians of Central America, the nemotemi were feared as times of ill-omen. The Roman interregnum, if not elsewhere as well, was a critical period of possible misfortune. Therefore, it was celebrated by the people as a reversal of normal activity. In a word, this was a prototype of carnival: the suspension of normal institutions and patterns of behaviour and their replacement with merry-making and general license.

One of the most prominent features of the Mardi Gras-type celebrations is the carnival mask. While the interregnum ends with the ‘burial of Carnival’, the carnival itself is a time in which the normal and ordinary are themselves buried or hidden. This feature is so intrinsically a part of epagomenal practice, that the Roman prototype carnival has itself become in time ‘buried’ or ‘hidden’ or even ‘lost’ and survives more overtly in the feriae that surround it from the Lupercalia, Quirinalia and Feralia to the Matronalia, Mamuralia, Ides and Liberalia. Consequently, the Regifugium is nefastus rather than a full dies festi, and the only genuine ‘festival’ within the Roman proto-carnival is the Equirria on the 27th (or 28th in leap years): itself perhaps a pale pre-reflection of the Equirria of March. In other words, while the festive merry-making has been largely shifted to nearby occasions – including today’s Mardi Gras celebrations, the original carnival may be approached more as a moment for contemplative reflection between one year and the new one which follows.

We are not informed by our surviving sources who the deity of the Regifugium is. Because of the connection of Janus with the original king of Rome and his post-monarchial substitute, the rex sacrorum, we have assumed that the ferial figure is Janus himself. This two-faced deity is himself however a composite of the divine twins – whether Jupiter and Mars or Mars and Quirinus. The Regia in the Forum that is connected to the rex contained a sacrarium Martis or shrine to Mars who appears in either his primary or secondary role to be a key figure throughout the months of February and Mars, and if the rex has a particular connection to this deity, Janus as the composite of both Jupiter and Mars and/or of Mars and Quirinus is a suitable ritual focus personage for the ‘flight of the king’ on the Regifugium. The priest of Janus has as a presumable functional duty the extinguishing of the fire in the temple of Vesta before making his retreat. And with the exit of the ‘king’, the mock-king begins his temporary reign. With his ascension, carnival begins.