I beseech you, O compassionate readers and devout followers of the arcane rites of the ancient cult, that you have, with reverent spirit, imbibed my solemn exhortation to the venerable majesty of Saturnus Pater, whose austere and generous visage is anchored in the hearts of those who, refusing forgetfulness, yet sustain with fidelity the living remembrance of the immortal gods. It is therefore my privilege to reiterate that his august presence — whose authority extends over both the fields of time and the cycles of fertility — must always be invoked with the dignity befitting his memory and the ancestral weight of his name.

However, in the just observance of the celestial rhythm, which regulates with inviolate order the succession of days and nights, moons and solstices, it now behooves me to highlight that, having passed the Dies Saturni — which in modern Portuguese we call "sábado," and which in the tongues of the Germanic tradition is consecrated as Saturday, "the day of Saturn" — we presently enter the Dies Solis, the solar day, the first of the seven days of the consecrated week. This very day, which in our modern vernacular is named "domingo," still retains, in the English language, the echo of the ancient cult to the Sun: Sunday.

Yet, with the advent of the spiritual and institutional transformations within the Roman Empire during the fourth century of the Common Era, and more particularly under the auspices of Emperor Constantine, this day was transfigured and absorbed into the sanctity of the new official state religion, which named it, under the Latin liturgical formula, Dies Dominica, or, in the later and less canonical Late Latin variant, Dies Dominis — both expressions meaning "the Day of the Lord," in reference to the celestial dominus of triumphant Christianity.

Indeed, this transformation of liturgical and symbolic order did not occur by mere chance, but was instituted by imperial and legal force, through the famous Edict of Constantine, whose promulgation determined, with unquestionable authority and binding character, the sanctification of the Sunday rest and contemplation, to the detriment of the traditional Saturday, which had once been observed according to the Mosaic precepts. Thus, the Dies Saturni was eclipsed in the order of official worship, and the Dies Solis was elevated, under its new designation, to the status of the sacred axis of the Christian week — not without, however, retaining in the heart of the calendar the solar reminiscence of its pagan origin, as an enduring witness to the persistences of the old beneath the veils of the new.

"Ut omnes iudices, urbanaeque plebes et cunctarum artium officia in veneratione diei Solis quiescant. Agricolis tamen liberum sit in diebus istis fruges seminare vineasque plantare, quando saepius alio tempore non aptius terrae natura respondet: ne occasione tempestatis caelitus concessae pereat commoditas."

Or, in the vernacular:

"Let all judges, the inhabitants of cities, and the craftsmen of all arts cease their labors on the venerable day of the Sun. However, let it be lawful for the farmers, without hindrance, to cultivate the fields, since there is often no other day more suitable for sowing the grains or planting the vines; therefore, one should not waste the favorable opportunity granted from above."

That being said, it is fitting for us to inquire, with our spirit turned to the contemplation of the sacred, which, among the innumerable hypostases of the divine, would be the one that rightfully presides over the spiritual influences of this solar day, the Dies Solis, consecrated in the firmament of the calendar and in the symbolic order of time as the first of the seven — the threshold of the weekly cycle, the dawn of all renovatio.

Would it, perhaps, be presumptuous or even unfounded to consider that this day — an ancient heir to the cult of the solar star — would belong, in its essence, to the venerable god Solis, or simply Sol, the purest expression of immortal light, celestial constancy, and the eternity that pours forth upon the sublunary orb? Not at all. Such an association is not without merit, nor lacking in theological or philosophical foundation, for Sol is, by right, one of the most exalted manifestations of the visible order and the luminous harmony that governs the days and destinies. His cult, originating both from the Latin and Hellenic traditions and later reconfigured in the syncretism of Sol Invictus, remains a radiant testimony of Roman spirituality.

Nevertheless, in this present address, I wish to raise my gaze not to the manifested light, but to the source prior to the light itself — to the numen (god) who not only bears within himself solar aspects, but who ontologically precedes the Sun itself and all subsequent manifestations of divinity. I refer, therefore, with the appropriate solemnity and reverence, to the most ancient, mysterious, and august of Roman gods: Janus, the bifront lord of beginnings, the supreme mediator between the worlds, the archetype of all duality reconciled within the womb of primordial unity.

Janus is not merely a solar god — he is luni-solar, transcending the celestial dichotomy by uniting within himself both principles: that of irradiated light and that of reflected light, day and night, the visible and the hidden, the solar masculine and the lunar feminine. This is no mere metaphor: in the most ancient traditions, Janus is depicted in androgynous form, with one face turned to the East — birth — and the other to the West — dissolution, symbolizing the eternal and indivisible cycle of all things that begin and end in time.

In venerable testimonies dating back to Cicero, Cato, Varro, and especially the obscure and ceremonial verses of the Carmen Saliare, it is ritually proclaimed the doctrine that Janus is the first of the gods, the one whom no other precedes, neither in substance, nor in time, nor in majesty. He is the primus deus, the lord of thresholds, the custodian of cosmic doors, the king above all kings, before whom even Jupiter himself bows in deference, for Janus does not reign within the world — he reigns over the world and beyond it.

Thus, on this first day of the week, which inaugurates the cycle and consecrates time to spiritual regeneration, it is fitting not only to recall, but to solemnly celebrate the most ancient and exalted of the Roman gods: Janus, the architect of the cosmos, the ordainer of existence, the god prior to all creation, whose presence existed before time itself, when no universe had yet manifested, when neither gods, nor men, nor stars had been called into the light of being. Only he existed: the primordial One, the silent and active intelligence that shaped, with his dual gaze, the visible and invisible realities.

Janus is, therefore, the pater deorum, the god of gods, the unmoving principle that precedes all moving things. In him, all history finds its origin; through him, every rite begins and ends; in his honor, every threshold is crossed with words of reverence and sacred fear.

In this regard, Ovid, in his great work Fasti, of which, as clarified in my biography, I had the honor of translating into Portuguese, expresses with sublime poetic art the absolute precedence of this god in the following terms:

"Observe, O ye who follow me with devout attention, how Janus, the two-faced augur, presents himself at the forefront of my solemn chant, invoked therein as the first fruits of the time that is renewed, in praise of the noble Germanicus, to whom is directed the blessing of a prosperous year. You, Janus, of dual countenance, who gently unfolds the threshold of the annual cycle, and who, among all the supreme gods, are unique in simultaneously contemplating both what lies ahead and what rests behind, be favorable to us!

To you are directed the vows of the princes, whose work and care ensure the rest of the fertile lands and the peaceful silence of the vast seas. Come, O beneficial guardian of the thresholds, to the senators and the populus Quirinalis, and with a light wave of your hand, which breaks the seal of the sacred temples, inaugurate with joy this radiant morning, worthy of auspicious words and the promise of good fortune.

Let the discordant cries be banished, let the senseless quarrels cease, let the tongues inflamed with hatred fall silent, for this day is consecrated to harmony! Behold how the sky gleams with aromatic flames, and how the saffron of Cilicia crackles on the fiery altars; the flame, in its fiery splendor, reverberates over the golden pediments of the sacred temples.

In immaculate garments, the procession ascends the Tarpeian heights, the citizens dress in the color of grandeur, while new emblems and standards pave the way — new glories of purple and the unprecedented gravity that falls upon the ivory throne. Heifers, which once grazed in the truthful fields of the Falisci, still untouched by the plow’s yoke, now offer their necks to the sacred axe.

From the apex of his celestial dwelling, Jupiter contemplates the world, and sees Rome — for Rome is the world — pass before his eternal eyes. Hail, then, this festive day! And may it always return with doubled joy, a day that deserves to be solemnized by a people who hold dominion over the orb!

But who am I, that I dare name your nature, Janus, in its duplicity? For not even Greece, mother of the Muses, possesses among her gods one like you. Reason, too, reveals to us why, among all the numina, you alone simultaneously observe both the past and the future. Thus I meditated, with the tablets resting between my fingers, when the dwelling in which I was seemed to shine with an unexpected brilliance.

And behold, suddenly, the sacred Janus, in his two-faced form, appeared before my astonished eyes, presenting me with both his countenances at once. A chill ran through my chest, my hair stood on end, and a sacred terror seized my entire being. With the staff in his right hand and the key in his left, from the face that gazed upon me, he spoke these words:

— Dissipate your fear, O laborious singer of the ages! All that you ask will be answered. Do not fail to inscribe in your memory what you shall hear, for the ancients called me Chaos — yes, Chaos! — for I am prior to the very order of the cosmos. Hear the centuries and millennia that my voice shall reveal!

Behold, poet, that once the luminous air, the ethereal fire, the liquid expanse, and the solid earth were all amalgamated into one matter. There was a time before time, an indistinct and formless reality, to which I called Mist — neither hot, nor cold, neither dry, nor wet. Only I existed, with my clear mind hovering over the orb I had engendered.

It was by my will that the real parted from the illusory. I shaped this matter, a formless mass, which dissolved due to elemental discord, seeking new abodes: the fire ascended, the air filled the nearest spaces, the earth and the sea sank to the depths.

And then, I, who until that moment was merely an unshaped principle, assumed the form and members of a god. And even now, as a symbol of my primeval nature, my face appears as twofold, like a reflection of the state before the distinction of forms.

Now listen to the other reason for my duplicity, that you may understand not only my appearance, but also my sacred duty. All that you see — sky, sea, clouds, earth — is opened and closed by my hand. The guard of this vast universe rests only under my command. No one but me can govern the orb.

When I desire to grant peace, it emerges free from my serene halls and travels, without hindrance, through all regions. But the entire world would submerge in carnage, were it not for the rigid locks that restrain war. I am the key of time, the watcher of the thresholds, the first among the gods.

I sit at the celestial threshold, where, interwoven with the harmony of the firmament, I share the august seat with the gentle Hours and the radiant Graces, whose beauty modulates the cadence of times and seasons. It is in this hall of the sky that I perform my duty: to govern with a firm hand and silent gesture the comings and goings of the divine powers, including Jupiter himself, whom, though king of the shining ether, I serve as the guardian of time and thresholds.

It is for this reason that Janus is the name by which men invoke me — Janus, he who opens and closes, who contemplates the past and the future, he who, with his golden key, marks the beginning of all actions. Yet, when the priest approaches the altar, with purified hands and a forehead bound in white wool, and offers me the primeval bread — the most sacred cake of barley and spelt, sprinkled with consecrated salt — then, another designation is given to me.

The mouth of the sacrifice, tinged with the ritual chant, now calls me Patulcius, he who opens the ways, he who flings open the portals of the world and of the soul; now it names me Clusius, he who shuts, he who seals the sacred, he who guards the thresholds from the profane. You, perhaps, would smile to hear such ancient names in the liturgy, but know this: in every epiclesis lies a key to the world, and many are the masks of he who holds all beginnings."

Indeed, as already outlined in previous propositions, Janus is presented as a theonymic entity of ancient origin, linked to the deepest layers of primitive Italic religious consciousness, particularly within the tradition of Latium Vetus. His nature transcends the typical contours of mythological anthropomorphization, participating in an ontology that brings him closer to the immaterial and archetypal cosmogonic powers—those that not only inaugurate being but are installed within the very primordial interval between being and non-being, between latent form and chaotic formlessness, between virtual time and the time manifested in history and ritual.

However, he radically diverges from such metaphysical abstractions by a trait that is both singular and revealing: this principium, this absolute and unconditioned point of ontological emanation—which modern reason might conceive as a symbolic concept or speculative archetype—has assumed, within the heart of the Roman religio, a corporeal and active form, clothing itself in divine members and attributes, and manifesting as a living and operative entity in the realm of the world. Thus, from the primordial matrix of Chaos, Janus rises as the primigenius God, the inaugural numen of Rome, anterior to all other divine forms, and as such, preceding in both theological and liturgical order any other power in the pantheon.

Yet, his singularity does not reside solely in his chronotheological priority but also in his iconographic and symbolic aspect, which exhibits extraordinarily distinct traits within the Italic polytheistic universe. While the other Roman gods appear under idealized, anthropomorphic, and regular forms, following recognizable models of sacred statuary, Janus breaks such conventions, embodying in his figure the tensions of the threshold and of duplicity, of before and after, of the totality that encompasses opposites.

Therefore, he is frequently represented as Bifrons—that is, as bearing two symmetrically opposite faces—one directed towards the past, the other towards the future—in a clear and eloquent manifestation of his sovereignty over the totality of time. This bifront form, the most consecrated among the iconographic variants, symbolically translates his function as the lord of beginnings and ends, of openings and closings, of material and spiritual portals through which men and gods pass.

However, in certain more elaborate traditions, especially in cultic expressions of a more mystical or augural character, Janus is depicted as Trifrons—with three faces turned to the triple time—or even as Quadrifrons, with four faces directed towards the four cardinal points. In this symbolic expansion, he transcends the limits of time to assume dominion over space—becoming not only the arche of becoming but also the watcher of directions, the one who contemplates all openings in the world and governs, with omnipresent eyes, the four winds, the four seasons, and the four paths of human destiny.

Thus, although deeply rooted in the ethos and religiosity of the Latin people, Janus ascends to the condition of a meta-cosmic entity, in whose being the visible and the invisible, space and time, movement and rest, the beginning and consummation of all things, are reconciled. His figure exceeds the plane of the conventional pantheon and draws closer to what, in the language of the mysteries, would be called the hidden god, the originating principle and also the consummator of all manifest realities.

From the perspective of the mos maiorum, which constitutes the normative foundation of the Roman worldview, no reality—whether sensible or intelligible—can subsist without an ordering principle and a final delimitation. The ordo rerum thus requires an inaugural term and a sacred conclusion, both inscribed in the theological horizon of tradition. Now, this inaugural and terminal function is precisely that which belongs exclusively to Janus, whose presence is always required at the beginning of rites, vows, oaths, contracts, alliances, and both public and private celebrations.

Therefore, in all religious ceremonies of archaic and classical Rome, Janus is the first to be invoked in the sacred formulas (sacra Romana), and also the last to be honored, for only he holds, in his exclusive power, the keys to the sacred doors—both those of Earth and those of Heaven. He is the costos liminum, the universal guardian of the boundaries of the world and of the spirit. Hence, no one enters the divine realm except by his favor; no one returns to the profane world without his permission for reentry.

Moreover, Janus fulfills the role of the archetypal pontiff, the supreme mediator between man and the numinous, the pontifex archetypus, by whose gaze and key the portals of the celestial dimension are opened. This liminal function, both sacerdotal and oracular, is widely attested in classical literature, notably in the refined work of Ovid, who, in organizing the sacred calendar in his Fasti, ritually reaffirms with veneration Janus' absolute precedence among all gods:

"After a brief and reverent pause, I dared to inquire of the augural god: 'Tell me, Janus, why is it that, when I bend in supplication to the other deities, I am compelled to offer to you, before all others, fragrant incense and libations of pure wine?' And then he, with a solemn and firm voice, thus answered me: 'O prophet worthy of praise, your question is just and well-formed. For I am the first of all divine beings — primus ego sum. All that you perceive, touch, sing, or think has come into being through my mediation. I am the guardian of thresholds, the lord of openings and beginnings. To no other god can you approach without first passing through me, for it is by my grant that the sacred paths are opened."

By virtue of this most sacred arrangement, no deity — whether of masculine or feminine nature, celestial or infernal, benevolent or terrifying — may be legitimately invoked, venerated, or welcomed into the human realm without, first and foremost, evoking with the utmost reverence the august and firstborn figure of Janus. For it is this god, unique in his liminal function and archetypal position, who, armed with the claves sacrae, holds the exclusive power to open the portals that separate the profane world from the sacred domain, raising the bridge that connects the two planes of reality.

Thus, Janus not only precedes ontologically and liturgically the other members of the Roman pantheon in the invocatory formulas, but he also acts, with inviolable authority, as the absolute mediator, interpres divinorum, the one by whose consent communication with the transcendent is initiated, and by whose favor the ritual gains legitimacy and efficacy. His presence is not optional, but necessary and constitutive of the very ritual act, for without his approval, the sacred remains veiled, and the human appeal lacks direction and response.

For this perennial reason, both in the realm of solemn public celebrations (sacra publica) — those civic ceremonies that brought the entire community together under the auspices of fas and collective ancestry, such as the Lupercalia, Saturnalia, Parentalia, and other festivals of the sacred calendar — as well as in the observances of a domestic and familial nature (sacra privata), concerning the worship of the Lares, Penates, and the tutelary deities of the gens, Janus always manifests as the limen ineluctabile, the obligatory passage that conditions all human entry into the divine sphere. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be initiated without his favor; no supplication, even if uttered with purity and zeal, can pass through the veils of heaven unless he, with his keys of silver and gold, opens the celestial channels and authorizes the crossing of human words into the divine ear.

Regarding the venerable etymology of his name, known in modern languages under various variants — Janus in English, Jano in Portuguese, Giano in Italian — the form consecrated in the Roman tongue is Ianus, a term whose origin has sparked numerous hypotheses and philological discussions. One of the oldest and most respected explanations, already recorded by Cicero, especially in his treatise De Natura Deorum, traces the name Ianus to the Latin verb ire, meaning "to go," "to move," or "to pass through." According to this interpretation, Janus would be the animating principle of all movement, the supreme patron of transitions, the ruler of paths, and the governor of crossings, both physical and metaphysical, visible and invisible.

From this perspective, the primacy granted to him in the rites precisely derives from his presidency over all thresholds, whether the thresholds of the house or the portals of the temple, the passages of time or the arches of the spirit. In his honor, the ancient tongue uses the terms ianuae (doors) and limina (thresholds), words that indicate not merely architectural spaces, but ontological boundaries, points of passage where the profane opens to the sacred, and the human is admitted, for brief moments, into the company of the gods.

[...] And as all these divine powers were distributed across the various parts of the cosmos and human affairs, Janus was consecrated, whose name derives from the verb ire — to pass, to go forward — as having primacy in the sacred ceremonies, for he presides over all passages, with the doors of buildings and the thresholds of profane things being named in his honor.

Furthermore, it is important to mention the proposition put forth by the distinguished philologist and historian of comparative religions, Herbert Jennings Rose, who, driven by rigorous linguistic and pragmatic analysis, advocated the hypothesis that the theonym Janus directly and immediately derives from the Latin word ianua, whose strict and literal meaning is "door." This etymology, in addition to aligning with the symbolic function of the god as costos liminum, the sacred guardian of all transitions—whether spatial, temporal, or metaphysical—would help elucidate the genesis of other lexical units in the corpus of the Latin language, such as the term fenestra (window), by way of visual and architectural metonymy, and, above all, the month Ianuarius, dedicated to Janus as the inaugurator of the solar year and bearer of the keys of renewed time, the one who, by opening the portals of the calendar, authorizes the ritual crossing from one cycle to another.

However, in contrast to this more concrete and lexical reading, inspired by phenomenology and post-history, stands the theory of a deeper, more structural nature proposed by the eminent comparatist Georges Dumézil, whose methodology is grounded in diachronic linguistics and the archetypal analysis of Indo-European mythical structures. In his magisterial work La Religion Romaine Archaïque, the author argues that the name Ianus should be traced back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root ei-, originally associated with the concept of movement, passage, and transition—an essential dynamic that precedes and sustains the very possibility of being in motion.

From this elemental root, Dumézil asserts, an expanded morphological form developed, yā- or yā-a-, whose phonological duplication aimed to intensify the semantic content of the transitive action, culminating in the nominal form yā-tu- or yātus, which would denote the act or state of crossing. This configuration would have evolved in the early Italic languages into the hypothetical form Ienus, which in turn would give rise to both the noun ianua and the proper name Ianus (and, consequently, its feminine version, Iana), irrevocably establishing this god’s association with the domains of crossing, liminality, and opening, both in the spaces of the world and in the hidden arcs of time and the making of fate.

Thus, while Rose follows a descending path, starting from the manifest linguistic phenomena of the Latin language to infer the meaning of the theonym, Dumézil operates in an ascending and metaphysical sense, questioning the primordial structures of mythical thought and the first language. For the latter, Janus is not merely the watcher of tangible doors, but the very archetypal hypostasis of "passing," "initiating," and "making a path"—an entity whose being resides in coming-to-be, and whose nature is rooted in the original crossing that establishes the cosmos as a discernible order.

Indeed, although Janus is frequently classified among the solar deities—due to his manifest connection to the beginning, the rising light, the cosmic east, and the openings of the dawn—he is not exhausted by this singular archetype. On the contrary, a more careful examination of the archaic texture of his identity reveals a deity of a bifront and polar nature, whose attributes exceed the Manichean opposition between the solar and the lunar, inscribing him instead in a luni-solar structure, or in other words, in a symbolic paradigm that positions him simultaneously as a synthesizing actor and mediator of the fundamental polarities of reality: light and darkness, action and receptivity, beginning and return, masculine and feminine.

It is not without significant value that certain remaining traditions—of an esoteric, residual, or sapiential nature—have represented him in an androgynous form, endowed with two complementary faces, not only in the directional sense (anterior/posterior, east/west), but also as an expression of primordial sexual ambivalence: one male, solar, extroverted, and active; the other female, lunar, introverted, and fecundating. This iconography, whose matrix traces back to pre-classical conceptions of hermaphroditic or bifront deities—common to Italic, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian cultures—witnesses a profound conception of the divine as a generative and ordering force, whose fullness resides not in exclusion but in the harmonic conjunction of opposites.

In the view of the archaic Italic world—where the sacred is not isolated in singular figures but pulses in the interweaving of complementary forces—there is no generation without a diadic confluence: the masculine principle, by itself, remains sterile; the feminine, on the other hand, is the matrix of multiplicity, shadow, and memory. Understood thus, Janus is simultaneously the one who initiates and the one who allows the unfolding of what was initiated—principle and mediation, origin and unfolding—therefore being the most encompassing, radical, and original deity in the entire Roman pantheon.

From this deeper ontological reading, the error of those who, influenced by later Hellenizing reception, attributed the supremacy of Roman worship to Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, in an attempt to establish a formal parallel with the Greek Zeus, becomes evident. Such assimilation, though functional for syncretic interpretative purposes, does not correspond to the ritual, cosmogonic, and metaphysical hierarchy of the religio Romana in its archaic form. For while Jupiter reigns in the heavens and exercises, with his thunderbolt, the visible domain of celestial power, Janus is the one who precedes his very manifestation, the one who opens the paths to the gods, the one who presides over the liminal aspects of being and the cycles of creation, and thus holds the absolute primacy over time, space, and ritual. He is, in short, the alpha of the sacred order, the first among the numina, the one without whom even the gods have no access to the world of men—nor men to the world of gods.

Janus, therefore, is the Principium et Finis, the origin and the end of all things, the one who inaugurates and the one who closes the cycle of being. He is the keeper of the keys to eternity, the sovereign who determines the course of the cosmos, drawing it from primordial chaos and shaping it into order. Nothing moves without his consent; no supplication ascends to the heavens without first passing through his scrutiny; no sacrifice is accepted unless, first, it is invoked by him. He is not merely the praefectus sacrorum, but the innate archetype of the creator and ordering deity—the Deus Summus of the oldest Roman tradition, whose sovereignty does not rest on visible thunderbolts or thrones, but on the impervious sovereignty over time, existence, and the flow between the worlds.

In the testimonies left by ancient wisdom, whether they be the archaic verses of Ennius, the erudite philosophical-theological dissertations of Macrobius, or even the prolix yet illuminating works of Lactantius—this latter, though of Christian faith and apologetic in nature, did not fail to admirably reflect on the imposing and transcendent figure of Janus. His image transcends the ages with a dignity that remains incorruptible, unfading. In the sources of the ancients, Janus is not merely one deity among others but the primordial god, the creator and orderer of the cosmos, the sacred king of the visible and invisible world, who dominates the heavens above the heavens and sovereignly transits through the earth, where, in ancient times, he ruled as a revered and just monarch over the most ancient soil of Latium.

It was Janus, as tradition teaches us, who welcomed Saturn in his exile—this one, once overthrown by the Titan—offering him royal hospitality and granting him the southern regions of the Italian peninsula, consecrated in his honor under the name of Saturnia Tellus. From the symbolic union between the two oldest celestial lords, the Golden Age originated, one that poets and philosophers celebrated as the true aetas aurea of the Roman world: a mythical era in which peace, abundance, and justice presided over human life, under the triple reign of Janus, Saturn, and Ops, whose auspices formed the foundations of Latin civilization.

It was Janus—so it is taught—who transmitted to humanity the foundations of all that defines the human and social condition: articulate language, the science of navigation, the use of coinage and their minting, the art of equitable trade, the principles of writing, legal precepts, norms of civic coexistence, and even the principles of sacred art and architecture. The mount that served as the seat of his earthly rule was named Ianiculum, a topographical honor that reflects the reverence of the ancients for the god of many faces. The southern region, entrusted to Saturn, became known as Saturninus Ager, in recognition of the sacred alliance between these two divine patriarchs.

After the decline of that primordial era, the times of the so-called Aetas Argentea followed, under the dominion of deities such as Jupiter, Lupercus, Trivia, and Picus. However, their power never nullified the unquestionable primacy of Janus over all other entities.

For, as the ancients affirm, there is no deity who precedes Janus, whether in the public domain of the city, or in the private cults of the home and blood. To him pay tribute not only magistrates and priests, but also heads of households and initiates into the arcana of the cosmos. Sacred lover of Juno, of Trivia (the ancient name of Hecate), and of Carna, Janus is the Lord of Time, the guardian of what was, what is, and what is to be, an invisible and eternal presence at the dawn of all things.