Whose forehead is adorned with the bright half-moon;
Whose fingers are interlaced to typify a deer;
.... ...”
For the explanation of the Roman myths of Dianus and Diana (varying forms as the dictionary tells of Janus and Jana) we may naturally seek for the same astronomic origin, as for those concerning the Grecian archer divinities.
Janus indeed has not, so far as I know, ever been represented as an archer or a Centaur. The attribute for which he is especially renowned is that of “opener of the year,” and this attribute, on the astronomic theory here proposed, would furnish the connecting link between the varying forms of the Italian deities above mentioned.
The many and still imperfectly understood changes that were made in the Roman year by successive rulers, have effaced the connexion of that year with the stars which must have originally presided over its opening. But Roman tradition embodied in Virgil’s lines speaks of “the bright Bull” who “with his gilded horns opens the year.”[87] The golden star-tipped horns of the Bull are as we know exactly opposed to the westernmost degrees of Sagittarius; and that constellation, in opposition to the sun, would therefore have marked the opening of just such a vernal year as that alluded to by Virgil. Whether this vernal year before the Julian reformation was still the calendrical year in Rome is, however, very doubtful.
[87] Virgil, Georg., Lib. I., 217, 218.
Janus is represented with two heads, sometimes even with four, “to typify the seasons of the year.” The full moon in Sagittarius 4,000 B.C. marked the season of the spring equinox—the sun then being in conjunction with the stars marking the horn tips of the Bull. The new moon in Sagittarius at the same date marked the autumn equinox. The half waning moon in Sagittarius marked the season of the winter solstice: and the half moon of the crescent or waxing moon marked the season of the summer solstice. The four heads of Janus may thus have referred to the four seasons marked by the moon in Sagittarius.
The fact that the Indian archer Rudra (= Siva) and the Grecian archer Artemis, were represented as crowned by the half, not the full moon, would refer these myths to an Indo-Iranian, not to a somewhat later Iranian source. It was not to the reformed Iranian equinoctial year that they pointed, but to the sun’s triumph at the solstitial season. In the Roman Janus myth we may rather detect the later Median influence, and suppose that it referred to a year beginning with the full moon in Sagittarius, a year opening in the spring, when the sun was in conjunction with the “gilded horns” of “the bright Bull.”
All these mythological indications, derived from Median, Assyrian, Indian, and classical sources, though each of them looked at separately may not speak with much insistence, yet considered together seem to point us more and more clearly as we study them, to the fact that about 4,000 B.C. a very important and authoritative observation of the colures (amongst the Zodiacal constellations) was made, and that upon this observation much of the mythology of ancient nations was founded.