JANUARY & THE NEW YEAR: IT ALL STARTS OVER AGAIN!

After Yuletide and the Midwinter Solstice in December, we quickly enter the start of another contemporary year with the frozen month of January.

I underline the word ‘contemporary’ because synthetic calendars (those not based on natural cycles) have repeatedly altered over the passing centuries.

The rural, pre-Christian, Celtic land dwellers regarded the time we now call Halloween, in October, as the end of summer and beginning of winter. It marked the start of their New Year. When we overlook the synthetic almanac and take a long hard look at nature’s changing moods, this elderly system of time calculation begins to make a great deal of sense. At the beginning of the modern New Year celebrations, many trees have now started to produce swelling buds and migratory fish like salmon and sea trout have long since spawned in upland streams.

Mother Nature celebrates her own New Year just like the Celts did, several months before today’s more random occasion. Some birds are also now starting their courtship displays and thinking about nesting, if the weather permits.

Many parts of our modern culture are thinly based on the enormous wisdom of our primordial Pagan ancestors. Alternatively, confrontational religious fundamentalists, enthusiastic to expand a podium for their narrow-minded, sectarian worldview often try to refute this fact. Their re-hashed adaptation (Jesus) of the ancient sun god myth fits gracelessly into the natural, agricultural, Pagan calendar that the ancients translated so well via mythological thesis.

Our Pagan ancestors lived close to and in great synchronization with the planet; whilst today’s self-satisfied religious church missionaries have sought to transform all rural aspects of the natural calendar into false occasions to venerate their latest and clearly most bogus sun god adaptation.

ANCIENT GOD OF THE NEW YEAR

January in fact receives its name from the grand old Roman god of doorways/new ventures, ‘Janus.’

Janus was habitually portrayed in classical art with two heads, or faces; one looking to the past, whilst the second viewed the future.

Some ancient scholars have supposed that this god presided over the investiture and terminate of the sun’s travel though the daily sky. As the sun opens each day so does it close it and it was the same with Janus. Some writers described him as the son of Apollo and so great was his magnitude that his name was habitually invoked before all others. In ceremonies all prayers went by him first, due to his revered status and link with the opening of doorways. Janus therefore lends his name to the New Year’s beginning and like us he looks poignantly back at the past, then onto the invigorating future to come.

Stay true to a noble path, stand strongly against all pretenders and your dreams and aspirations may indeed come true in the year ahead.