January: A time to look both back and forward like a god with two faces… or why January is the first month of the year

I have had this little blog for nearly a year, and while I am not producing as much content as I would like, I am immensely proud of what I have written. January is a time to look back at the previous year and forward to the year ahead.

2014 has been quite a year for me and I am excited for 2015.

What many do not realize is that January was not originally part of our calendar. As many things in western civilization we have the Romans to thank for this. In antiquity, many different calendars were used.

Calendars were generally either 10 or 12 months. The reason for both makes complete sense. There is a human instinct to try and categorize things in base ten, simply stemming from the fact that we have ten fingers.  On the other hand, the ancients observed that in a single year the moon went through 12 cycles of waxing and waning over the course of the four seasons.

The Romans were smart enough to know the lunar year cycle was not exactly a solar year (in fact most every ancient civilization knew this). The Romans originally had a ten month calendar. This legacy is very easy to see in the names of the later months that kept their numerical etymology. September was the seventh month, not the ninth. If anyone has read Game of Thrones, the “Sept” is the church of the seven gods of that world.  October was the eighth month, just as an octagon has eight sides. November also has its analog; a nine sided polygon is a nonagon. December…well a decade has ten years, and a decagon has ten sides.

So what are the two extra months?  Some might point to July and August, named for Julius and Augustus Caesar. But those months were merely renamed in honor of the great Roman leaders, they were not added. July was originally Quintillis (or fifth month) and August was Sextillis (or sixth month).

In fact, thinking logically, when would it make sense to start a new year?  Of course, it would be at the beginning of spring! March was originally the first month of the year! March was also named for the god of war, Mars, as it was when the fighting season also resumed.

In order to link the lunar and solar calendar, the dark time of winter was made its own part of the year (but it was not called a month and this bridging time did not have a month’s name allocated with it).

Circa 700 BC it was decided that this was not satisfactory. This period was divided into two and it is here that January and February were added to the calendar, at the END of the year.  February was named for the word “Februum,” which means “Purification.” It was a time to get ready for the New Year, think of it like Lent for Catholics. February then, as now, was the shortest month and was tinkered with many times by the Romans to get enough days to get to a solar year.

January was named for the god Janus. Janus was the god of gates, doors, beginnings and transitions and to that end Janus has two faces one always looking forward and one always looking back.

Over the course of a few hundred years, the last two months added to the calendar became the first two, and while I do not know why, I believe it is because of Janus.  The end of the year and the start of a new year is a time to look back and to look forward. Janus would have been the image of this.

It was at this point the calendar was codified. Julius Caesar, in 48 BC, reformed the calendar into roughly how we know it today with the Julian calendar. Caesar kept the 12 months, that by his time were tradition, (with January as month one) and he officially standardized the lengths of the months at this time. This took out the propensity of some politicians to play with the calendar for political reasons in order to make their political year longer or shorter.   It was in 44 BC that the month known as Quintillis, the month he was born in, was renamed for Julius Caesar. Others would later try to name months after themselves but only July and August (changed in 8 BC for Augustus Caesar) stuck.

At the time of the calendar’s codification, the Romans were putting their empire into place, which would be the great connector between antiquity and the western world. In fact, the Julian calendar has only been successfully adjusted once, and that was with the Gregorian calendar in 1582. This was done because the Julian calendar had gone out of cycle by a couple of weeks after 1500 years of use.  Some nations were still using the Julian calendar as late as the early 20th century!

The history of our calendar is as messy as human history. Our calendar makes logical sense to a point and while a wonderful system on the whole; it is wholly a human creation, which I think we often forget!

On this, the first day of the first month of the 2015th year after the birth of Christ (which itself is not calculated quite correctly), I look forward and look back thankful for the inspiration of the image of Janus, and what that tells us about where we came from and even possibly were we are going.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Finally just so I don’t leave them out:

April is named for the word “Aperire” which means “open,” as this is when the buds would begin to bloom. May is named for the goddess “Maia,” the goddess of growth, which also makes sense. Lastly, June was named for Jupiter’s wife Juno.