Two-Faced Theology

In another article on this site, we introduced the idea of a ‘Two-Faced God’ as seen in disparate mythologies and theologies across multiple cultures. We made reference to YHWH (Hebrew), Janus (Roman), Duir (‘Thor’, Nordic), Hercules (Greek), and Llyr/Lear (Welsh/Anglo-Saxon). 

These two faced gods all function as time-binders. They look back on the Past and forward to the Future. Take Llyr (above) for example. Yes, this is the ‘Lear’ of Shakespearean fame, the father of Cordelia, a goddess in her own right (Cardea). 

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cordelia buried Llyr at Leicester, a site sacred to the Roman god Janus (above), after she had obtained “the government of the Kingdom”. (Geoffrey writes happier endings than William.) 

Janus and the other two-faced gods of mythology are often associated with celebrations of the New Year. At the turn of each year, God looks back on the Past and forward to the Future, all at the same time, i.e. in the Present. At the stroke of midnight, for one brief moment, as the ball nears the end of its descent in Time Square, the Past and the Future are co-incident. 

But this is merely a convention to make reality compatible with orientable spacetime. In reality, every point in time is simultaneously its own beginning and its own end, the culmination of a unique past and the launch of a unique future. The present is a point, but any point, on a non-orientable Mobius Strip. 

If we wish, we can define the unique point we call ‘present’ as any intersection of any past with any future. We know that this is true because wherever and whenever we are, it is always the Present, right there and right then. “In my end is my beginning.” (Queen Mary)

‘God’ bridges the gap between Past and Future and enables a single timeless, motionless moment ‘where & when’ the entire Universe, past and future, can just be present. God is Presence; presence per se is God’s gift to the World. Christ, God’s Incarnation, is ‘God being present’, Emmanuel, ‘God with us!’ 

Again according to Geoffrey of Monmouth (above), the wizard Merlin prophesied to King Vortigern, “After this, (two-faced) Janus shall never again have priests. His door will be shut and remain concealed in Ariadne’s crannies.” 

According to Robert Graves (The White Goddess), ‘after this’ refers to the coming of Christianity and ‘Ariadne’s crannies’ refers to the Corona Borealis, aka the ‘Castle of Arianrhod’, a small constellation in the northern sky. 

Presciently, Merlin saw Christianity as a threat to pagan traditions; but had he read more closely the Nicene Creed and the Gospel of John, Merlin might have understood that Christianity was really a restatement of his own core beliefs, albeit at a deeper level. 

Imagine how different the course of history might have been, had Merlin been at the docks to welcome St. Augustine upon his arrival in England! We might be talking today about ‘Bishop Merlin of Cornwall’, or who knows, maybe even ‘St. Merlin’; but that is not how this cookie crumbled. 

In our map of the Universe, Earth and the firmament that surrounds it remain separated by a vast topological gulf. Our moon shots and deep space probes are attempts, yet feeble, to bridge the gap between terra firma and the stars. 

In this respect at least, earlier civilizations were way ahead of us. In Nordic mythology, for example, there is no essential discontinuity between ‘heaven and earth’. W. B. Yeats references a similar tradition in his Celtic Twilight. Sky begins where Earth leaves off. The cosmos is radically continuous, so no special feat is required for Janus to play hide and seek among the celestial bodies. All the kids do it! 

Ancients intuitively understood the Universe as ‘non-orientable’. Earth and sky are simply complementary orientations on a single continuous surface; they are mirror images of one another. This explains why celestial forms (e.g. constellations) are thought to mirror terrestrial forms and why celestial events are believed to influence terrestrial counterparts. Ezra Pound explored this theme repeatedly in his Cantos. 

According to orientable post-Copernican cosmology, I can walk along the surface of the Earth and, completing a 360° loop, I will find myself back where I began. According to many non-orientable ancient cosmologies, that same journey will take me across the sky as well as around the earth. I must complete a 720° loop if I want to get back to Boston, now appropriately, if somewhat pompously, nicknamed ‘The Hub’, as in ‘Hub of the Universe’. 

Where earth ends, sky begins. Therefore, when the cult of Janus is banished from Earth, it naturally reappears as a celestial phenomenon. Hiding in the stars is better than wandering through Hades…though perhaps a bit chillier. 

Speaking of Aranrot, in the ‘Castle of Arianrhod’ there is a silver wheel, the mill around whose pivot the entire universe was thought to turn. Through that pivot runs Yggdrasil, the cosmic Tree of Life, the ‘pole’ whose wobble determines the precession of the equinoxes, an astronomical cycle, approximately 26,000 years long, which forms the basis for the so-called ‘ages’ of the Zodiac. 

Today we are in the Age of Pisces, the fish, Jesus; ‘tomorrow’ we will find ourselves in the Age of Aquarius, water, the Holy Spirit. Liturgically, we are living in the Church’s ‘Easter Season’, but we are approaching the cosmic Pentecost. 

According to the Standard Model of Cosmology, time is a vector that is infinitely, or ‘almost infinitely’ (down to units of 10^-44 seconds), divisible. Therefore, any past is separated from any future by a point which we mistakenly call ‘the present’. This model is sufficient to account for almost all physical phenomena, but it cannot account at all for the phenomenon of experience. 

Fortunately, each of us is also two-faced. (If that comes as news to you, get out more!) Like Janus, we bind past and future in a real present, but unlike Janus, we also look outward at the World and inward at our experience of that World. 

We are Janus on steroids. We are not well represented by mechanical models (e.g. door and hinge). Our experience requires something more organic. We are better modeled as membrane, permeable to the flow of time but also resistant to it; that resistance is presence, the narrow neck in the temporal hourglass. 

Are we not forever trying to hold on to the present? Memory, language, and the arts (including architecture, sculpture, and photography) are all efforts to project our Past-Present into the Future. We have evolved, physiologically and culturally, to conserve and savor what is passing away.  

Along the universal timeline, the present looks back on the past and forward to the future. Within the present, time does not exist. The present is an immobile pivot around which time itself revolves. Itself immobile, it enables all motion; timeless, it is the origin of time (time = motion, the mill, above). 

All cosmic history hinges on this hinge (see what I did there?) and this two faced but ever constant Presence is what human beings have called God. 

Without God, nothing exists; nothing can exist. The past does not exist; it is past. The future does not exist; it is future. All that exists is the present and according to physics, the present is an infinitesimal point with zero informational content. Therefore, nothing can exist; but something does… Ergo, God. 

Two-faced, God incorporates both the Past and the Future in the Present. God provides the continuity that connects what once was with what is not yet. God makes the Present possible, lifting what is out of the rushing river of perpetual perishing, aka time (lie quiet Heraclitus), thereby making it eternal. 

Temporality is possible only in the context of eternity. 

Either the Holy Grail of the ancients, to enjoy eternal life with the gods, is realized every single day in every single event or God is just auditioning for the role of “Two Face” in the next Dick Tracy movie.

Image: The Emperor Augustus Closes the Doors of the Temple of Janus (c. 1655-1657) by Carlo Maratta