Ja=nu=ti=ca \,ja-‘nu-ti-ke\ n [fr. L Janus] (ca. 2006)                

Janus is the name of the Roman God of the past and the future, doorways and gateways, beginnings and endings. Our month name January is derived from Janus, being the first month of the modern Gregorian calendar. The Latin word janitor is also deriving from Janus as the gate keeper and key holder. Janus is presented to us from antiquity as a man with two faces or heads looking in opposite directions. This is symbolic of looking into both the past and future at once, as well as inside and out. As a result, images of Janus were hung over doorways and gateways to offer blessings, while the deity was worshipped during the start of important events or times. 
The process of Janutica is the stepping through of a doorway in the mind. The seeker is encouraged to undergo a process of self initiation for which there is never any end. Every life choice is a stepping through, and each step is as if the first, always a new beginning, and the end of something before it. You are your own gate keeper. 

 
Every choice must be a conscious step through the doors in your mind to your higher self. We live stepping through. Only at death do we finally pass, and then who knows how many more steps await? Because of this, we choose Janus as a figure of reference for our process. The image of Janus helps us remember what we are undertaking.

 
There is another, more sinister aspect to the word Janus which has crept into modern English. In common usage, the phrase Janus-faced depicts a dishonest or deceitful character. It should however be seen simply as a term of contrast, or at worst, contradiction. Contrast describes a completeness, a fully realized whole being as the Alchemist’s hermaphrodite, or more abstractly as in the yin-yang of the East, a perfect unity. A contradiction can be called also a paradox, which some ideas can not be understood without, though this concept is incomprehensible to vulgar minds.

 
Janutica works to assist individuals find this balance of contrasting principles within themselves and to become the complete and full idea of themselves. Attention should also be given however to the areas where one half of certain opposites are not desirable, and should be eclipsed and consumed completely by their superior counter parts. Occasionally, there is no true valid opposite for a thing, though the modern mind may think so. These invalid opposites must be expunged. This is the removal of false reflections. This is the paradox of balance. 

 
Janutica should not be confused with the cult of Janus, or as a Greco-Roman Pantheistic religion. Janus to us is simply a convenient symbolic literary tool that describes so perfectly this system of thought, a system of thought that is not new, but descended from antiquity and has worn many faces and taken on many names along the way.                                                       
 


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