Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| For What Reason the Worshippers of Janus Have Made His Image with Two Faces, When They Would Sometimes Have It Be Seen with Four.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 8.—For What Reason the
Worshippers of Janus Have Made His Image with Two Faces, When They
Would Sometimes Have It Be Seen with Four.
But now let the interpretation of
the two-faced image be produced. For they say that it has two
faces, one before and one behind, because our gaping mouths seem to
resemble the world: whence the Greeks call the palate
οὐρανός,
and some Latin poets,266
| 266 Ennius, in Cicero, De Nat.
Deor. ii. 18. | he says, have called the heavens
palatum [the palate]; and from the gaping mouth, they say,
there is a way out in the direction of the teeth, and a way in in
the direction of the gullet. See what the world has been brought
to on account of a Greek or a poetical word for our palate! Let
this god be worshipped only on account of saliva, which has two
open doorways under the heavens of the palate,—one through which
part of it may be spitten out, the other through which part of it
may be swallowed down. Besides, what is more absurd than not to
find in the world itself two doorways opposite to each other,
through which it may either receive anything into itself, or cast
it out from itself; and to seek of our throat and gullet, to which
the world has no resemblance, to make up an image of the world in
Janus, because the world is said to resemble the palate, to
which Janus bears no likeness? But when they make him four-faced,
and call him double Janus, they interpret this as having reference
to the four quarters of the world, as though the world looked out
on anything, like Janus through his four faces. Again, if Janus
is the world, and the world consists of four quarters, then the
image of the two-faced Janus is false. Or if it is true, because
the whole world is sometimes understood by the expression east and
west, will any one call the world double when north and south also
are mentioned, as they call Janus double when he has four faces?
They have no way at all of interpreting, in relation to the world,
four doorways by which to go in and to come out as they did in the
case of the two-faced Janus, where they found, at any rate in the
human mouth, something which answered to what they said about him;
unless perhaps Neptune come to their aid, and hand them a fish,
which, besides the mouth and gullet, has also the openings of the
gills, one on each side. Nevertheless, with all the doors, no
soul escapes this vanity but that one which hears the truth saying,
“I am the door.”267
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
