1890, hail!
“Annum novum faustum felicemque tibi!” [May the New Year bring you happiness and prosperity!]
Such was the sacramental phrase in the mouth of every gentile, great or small, rich or poor, on the day of the 1st of January, centuries before the Christian era; and we still hear it today, especially in Paris. This mutual wish was exchanged on the aforesaid day throughout the whole extent of the Roman Empire. It awakened the echoes of the palace of the Caesars, cheered the poor hovel of the slave, and rose to the clouds in the vast open galleries of the Colosseum, in the Capitol and in the Forum, everywhere beneath the blue sky of Rome. On that day, everyone decked himself out, in honour of the double-faced Janus, the more or less prominent false nose of goodness, frank cordiality, and sincerity.
“May the new year bring you happiness and prosperity!” we say to each of our readers. “May it be light upon you,” we say to our enemies and detractors. Brothers—we say to all Theosophists in every part of the world—Brothers, let us rid ourselves, for this day at least, of all our respective false noses, in order to wish one another health and success, and above all, a little more cordial understanding than during the year 1889, now happily deceased.
However, whether we repeat the old Latin formula in one fashion or another, in French or in English, it will still be nothing but a variation of the ancient pagan phrase. For the New Year, like every other festival, is but a legacy bequeathed to Christian peoples by the worshippers of the gods of Olympus. Let us therefore exchange wishes and gifts, but let us not be ungrateful, Theosophists. Let us not forget that we owe these customs to paganism, and that congratulations and New Year’s gifts come to us from the same source.
Indeed, New Year’s gifts are nothing but the strenae, the presents exchanged by the Latins on the 1st of January, the day which opened the new year.1 As everyone knows—or does not know, which is all the same to me—this day was consecrated to Janus, who gave his name to the month of Januarius, or January, and even to the saint of that name, patron of Naples and its lazzaroni [poor beggars]. But this amiable saint is, after all, only one of the false noses of the god Bifrons. The old pagan, in his first youth, was called Dians, from his Vedic name [Dyaus], the beautiful god of day and light. After having emigrated to Thessaly, and from there to Italy, where he settled on the Tiber, in his little hamlet on the Janiculum, he had his name Latinized and became Dianus, god of light (whence Diana). His false noses were numerous, and history no longer knows their number. But he has allowed himself to be converted since then; and now, for more than eighteen centuries, having replaced his last and modest false nose with a mask more respectable, if not more impenetrable—he is called Saint Peter.
Let the reader kindly not protest, and above all let him abstain from applying ill-sounding epithets to us, which would do us no harm, but might do him injury—in our eyes. I am but the humble interpreter of truths and symbols, more or less veiled, but well known to all who have studied their Virgil and their Horace, as well as their Ovid. Neither false nose nor mask could prevent an old pagan from recognizing, in the apostle who denied his Master, his double-faced Janus. The two are identical, and everyone has the right to take what belongs to him wherever he finds it. Saint Peter is the coeli Janitor [gatekeeper of heaven] only because Janus was so before him. The old porter of heaven, who pulled the cord at the gate of the palace of the Sun at each new day, as at each new year, and shut it again behind them as he escorted them out, is only too recognizable in his new role. It was written in the stars that govern the destiny of gods as well as mortals that Janus—who held the key of heaven in one hand and a halberd in the other, just as Saint Peter has done since he succeeded him—would yield his place as gatekeeper of the Sun to him who would become the guardian of the gates of Paradise, the dwelling of the Christ-Sun. The new coeli Janitor has succeeded to all the functions and privileges of the old one, and we see no harm in it. Solomon said it: “There is nothing new under the sun;” and he spoke truly. One would be rather foolish to invent new functions or new gods—whom we create in our own image—when our fathers from beyond the Deluge had already taken that trouble so well for us. It is for this reason that everything has remained as in the past, and that nothing is changed in this world—except the names. In all religious ceremonies the name of Janus was always invoked first, for only through his immediate intercession could the prayers of the faithful idolaters reach the ears of the immortal gods. Now it is the same. He who thought he could communicate with one of the persons of the Trinity over the head of Saint Peter would be sorely mistaken. His prayer would suffer the fate of a petition one tried to leave at the concierge’s lodge after having quarrelled with him and called him an “old porter”: it would never reach the upper floors.
The fact is that the great army of “Pipelets” and “Anastasias” ought to have Janus Bifrons as their recognized patron, the god in whose image it was created. Only then would it have a legal right to New Year’s gifts on New Year’s Day, while its great patron would receive his penny from the beginning until the end of the year. Everything is relative in this illusory universe; nevertheless, it is necessary that between a celestial porter and an earthly porter there should exist a difference of degree. As for New Year’s gifts, they have existed in all times for the great as well as for the small. Caligula, Emperor though he was, did not disdain to stand all day long on New Year’s Day in the vestibule of his palace, to receive the strenae of his trembling subjects—sometimes with their heads as well, for variety’s sake. The Virgin Queen, “Queen Bess” of England, died leaving 3,000 ceremonial gowns, which represented her last New Year’s gifts. And thus still act the great and the small, in the year of Our Lord 1890, on our deranged globe which we name Terra—the “footstool” of God.
Did this same God of Abraham and Jacob not allow himself to be softened by promises and presents, just as did the gods of the nations? Did this God and these gods not receive, just like mortals, New Year’s gifts for services rendered or to be rendered? Did not Jacob himself bargain with his God, promising Him as New Year’s gifts “the tithe of all that thou, God, shalt give me”? And he added, this good patriarch, at Luz before “Bethel”: “If God will be with me . . . if he will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on . . . then shall the Eternal be my God.” In saying this, he did not forget, either, in a simple but beautiful phallic ceremony, to inaugurate the stone “Bethel” which he had set up, by pouring oil upon its summit. (Genesis 28)
This touching ceremony came to the Israelites directly from India, where the stone of Śiva, the lingam, still undergoes today the same exoteric rite with oil and flowers at every festival of the worshippers of the god of Destruction (that is, of gross matter) and of the Yogis.
Everything, then, has remained as of old. In Christian countries—especially in France—the New Year makes its triumphal entrance just as it did two thousand years ago, when the Pagans celebrated it by giving themselves an indigestion of figs and gilded plums. These latter have since migrated onto Christmas trees, which does not alter the fact that they came to us from the temples of Janus. It is true that priests no longer sacrifice a young white bull upon his altar—it has been replaced by the lamb of the same colour—but hecatombs of quadrupeds and fowls are slaughtered annually in his honour on that day. It is certain that more innocent blood is shed today, to satisfy the voracious appetite of a single street in Paris on New Year’s Day, than was needed to feed an entire Roman city in the time of the Caesars. The gentle Julian, the pagan, who found again at Lutetia his beloved gods—after the Gallic gods had been, by order of Caesar, decked out with the false noses of Roman divinities—spent his leisure hours taming doves in honour of Venus. The ferocious potentates who came after him—the eldest sons of the Church—tamed only Venuses, who made pigeons of them. Servile history nicknamed the first, to please the Church, the Apostate, and caused the names of the others to be followed by sonorous epithets: the “Great,” the “Saint,” the “Fair.” But if Julian became an “Apostate,” it was perhaps because he held false noses in horror; whereas his Christian successors would probably not be presentable in good society without this artificial appendage. A false nose becomes, when needed, a guardian angel, even at times—a god. This is history. The metamorphosis of the divinities of barbarous Gaul into gods of Olympus and Parnassus did not stop there. In their turn these Olympians had to undergo an operation by order of the successors of Janus-Saint Peter—that of forced baptism. With the help of tinsel and finery, of glue and Roman cement, we find again the gods beloved by Julian, appearing since their violent death under the titles of blessed Saints, male and female, in the Golden Legend and the calendar of good Pope Gregory.
The world is like the sea: it often changes appearance, but at the bottom remains the same. The false noses of civilization and of the bigots have hardly embellished it, however. Quite the contrary, since with every new year it becomes uglier and more dangerous. We reflect and compare, and modern New Year’s Day gains nothing from this comparison with its predecessors of antiquity, in the eyes of a philosopher. The billions in the strongboxes and banks of governments do not make the poor people happier, nor the rich either. Ten bronze coins bearing the effigy of Janus, given as New Year’s gifts, were worth more in those days than ten gold pieces bearing the effigy of the Republic or that of the Queen are worth now; the baskets of gilded plums, costing only a few pennies, contained fewer germs of indigestion than the boxes of sweets exchanged on modern New Year’s Day—sweets representing, in Paris alone, a sum of more than half a million francs. Five hundred thousand francs’ worth of sweets, before the face of the same number of men and women dying of hunger and privation! Let us transport ourselves in spirit, dear reader, fifteen centuries back, and try to draw a comparison between a New Year’s dinner in the years 355 to 360 and an analogous dinner in 1890. Let us go in search of that same good and gentle Julian, when he inhabited the Palace of the Thermes, which is now called the Hotel de Cluny—or what remains of it. Do you see him, this great general, at his own dinner, surrounded by his soldiers, whom, after his gods, he loves more than anything in the world, and who idolize him in return? It is the 1st day of the month of January and they are celebrating the day of Janus. In two days, on January 3rd, they will pay like honour to Isis, patroness of the good city of Lutetia Parisiorum. Since then, the Virgin-Mother of ancient Egypt has allowed herself to be baptized Geneviève, and this Saint and Martyr (of Typhon?) has remained patroness of the good city of Paris—a true symbol of a false nose furnished by Rome to the Christian world. We see neither knives nor forks, neither silverware nor Sèvres porcelain, at this imperial table—not even a tablecloth; but the meats and provisions which the guests make disappear with such appetite have no need to pass under the microscopes of the chemists of the sanitary police. No artificial or poisonous product forms part of their bread or wine. Arsenic does not colour their herbs and vegetables with a false nose of deceptive freshness; verdigris does not lodge in the corners of their tins of preserves; and their pepper is not represented by red brick pounded in a mortar. Their sugar (or whatever stood in its place) was not extracted from the tar on the wheels of their war-chariots; in swallowing their liqueurs and cognac, they do not swallow a solution of old gendarme boots taken from the basket of a ragpicker; they did not devour, with an unconscious smile on their lips, a condensed broth of the fat of corpses (human as well as animal) and of rags and lint used in all the hospitals of Paris—in place of butter. For all this is the product of modern culture, the fruit of civilization and the progress of the sciences, while Gaul, in Julian’s time, was only a wild and barbarous country. But what they ate at their New Year could be eaten with safety and benefit (except to the physicians) at our dinners on the first day of the year 1890.
“They had neither forks nor silverware,” I am told; “and, the barbarians! they ate with their fingers!”
It is true; they did without forks, and perhaps without pocket handkerchiefs; but in return, they did not swallow, as we do every day, their ancestors in cooking grease, and the bones of their dogs in their white bread.
Given the choice, we would decidedly choose, not the gala dinner of New Year’s Day in the year of grace 1890, in Paris, but that of a thousand years ago, at Lutetia. A matter of barbarous taste, you see; a bizarre and ridiculous preference, in the opinion of the majority—a preference for the naturalness of the fourth century, which charms us infinitely more than the false noses and all-pervading artificiality of the nineteenth century.
1. From Janus—“door” or any entrance; the door that opens the year.