Janus was older than Rome. He was older than the gods that Rome adopted from Greece and gave Latin names to and built temples for in the new city that was organizing itself on the hills above the Tiber. He was older than the mythological system that the Romans constructed to make sense of the world and their place in it — older, in the Roman theological tradition, than Jupiter and Mars and Neptune and all the Olympians combined, because what Janus governed was not a domain within the world but the mechanism by which any movement through the world became possible. He was the god of thresholds: of doorways, of gates, of the moment of passage from one state to another, from one space to another, from one condition of being to the different condition that begins on the other side of the door. Without Janus, there were no beginnings, because every beginning is a threshold crossed, and every threshold crossed requires a god present at both sides of it simultaneously to make the crossing real. The Romans gave him January — Ianuarius — the month that stands at the threshold of the year, looking back at what the previous twelve months had been and forward at what the next twelve would become. His face looked in both directions because the threshold exists in both directions at once, and a god of thresholds who could only see one side of the door he was governing was a god who only half understood his own domain.
The connection between Janus and the sea was not incidental to his nature but fundamental to it, because the ocean is the oldest and largest threshold that exists in the human experience of the world. Every coast is a threshold — the place where the known stops and the unknown begins, where the land that can be mapped and named and walked across gives way to water that has no roads and no markers and no guaranteed passage from one side to the other. The Roman sailors who stood at the edge of the Mediterranean and prepared to cross it understood that they were standing at a Janus threshold: the door was behind them, the land they were leaving was the world they knew, and what was ahead of them was the other side of the door that Janus held open or closed depending on what the crossing deserved. They invoked him before every departure — not Neptune, whose power was in the water itself, but Janus, whose power was in the act of entering the water, in the moment of commitment when the ship left the harbor and the threshold was crossed and the journey became real in the specific way that journeys become real only after the point of return has been left behind.
The priestesses of Janus in the coastal cities of Roman Italy built their altars from the materials of the threshold itself — two great oyster shells placed facing each other like the two faces of the god, one oriented toward the sea and one toward the land, the land-face and the sea-face held together by an arch of golden coral that unified the two directions into a single structure without eliminating the distinction between them. Between the shells they wove branches of coral as Janus wove the relationship between departure and return, between what is left behind and what is found on the other side, between the grief of leaving and the possibility that the leaving makes available. Black pearls were placed in the interior of each shell as offerings for the souls of sailors whose crossing Janus had permitted but whose return he had not — not as an acknowledgment that Janus had been unkind, but as a recognition that every threshold has two sides and that some crossings, once made, are made in only one direction, and that the god who governs thresholds governs those ones too, with the same attention and the same authority that he brings to the crossings that end in homecoming.
The blue crystals suspended at the center of the coral arch were called the eyes of Janus — the specific form that the god's two-directional vision takes when it is expressed in the material of the ocean rather than the material of stone doorways and city gates. A crystal is transparent: it can be seen through as well as seen, it holds light rather than blocking it, it makes visible what passes through it from either direction simultaneously. A sailor who touched the crystals before boarding and closed his eyes was touching the point where Janus's two fields of vision met — the exact center of the threshold, the place where the face that looked backward and the face that looked forward occupied the same position, where departure and return were the same moment seen from both sides at once. The prayer was not for safe passage in only one direction. It was for the threshold to be honored in both of its dimensions — for the departure to be real and the return to be possible and for the god who stood at the door to hold it open long enough for both to occur.
Janus remains the only Roman god who has no Greek equivalent — no Olympian counterpart, no myth of origin that connects him to the stories that Greece told about its own divine figures. He is entirely Roman, which means he is entirely about the act of beginning: about the courage that it takes to stand at a threshold and cross it without knowing what is on the other side, and about the faith that what the other side contains will be worth what the crossing costs. The portal in this piece stands in the shallow water where the sea meets the shore — in the exact location of the threshold, neither fully in the ocean nor fully on the land, in the place that belongs to Janus because it belongs to neither of the worlds it connects. The two great shells are his two faces. The coral arch is the gate. The blue crystals are his eyes, seeing in both directions at once. The green resin base is the seafloor of the threshold — the ground that exists beneath every crossing, that holds the portal in place while the world on both sides of it changes and the god at the center holds still and watches everything come and go.
"Janus, guardian of all gates, open before us the way of the sea, and close it gently behind when we return."
— Adapted from Roman hymns to Janus, Carmina Romana, c. 2nd century B.C.
Artist's Note
I saw the portal before I understood what I was seeing — the two great oyster shells facing each other across the coral arch, each one a door, both of them part of a single structure that required both to be complete. The symmetry was not something I arranged. It was already there in the way the shells wanted to face each other, in the way the coral arch rose between them with the specific geometry of something that has been built to hold a threshold open rather than to decorate a surface. The black pearls in the interior of each shell are the souls that have crossed. The blue crystals at the center are the eyes that watch every crossing from both sides simultaneously. I built the base in the green resin of shallow water because that is where Janus lives — not in the deep ocean and not on the dry land but in the place where both exist at once, where the threshold between them is at its most visible and its most real.
At CuepoxyGift, the most sacred pieces are the ones that stand at the boundary between what is known and what is not — that make visible the threshold that every great journey requires the traveler to cross. "The Portal of Marine Janus" is for those who understand that every beginning is a door, and that the bravest thing a person can do is stand at the threshold, honor both sides of it, and step through.
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A Private Collection Artwork
If this story has moved you and the beauty of this piece has stirred something deep within, you should know that "The Portal of Marine Janus" is part of the artist's private collection and is not currently available for sale.
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— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift