Janus

Associated with: Roman mythology
Also known as: Bifrons
Earliest recorded mention: Depends on how far back you want to identify a two-faced god with Janus. Some scholars trace the worship of Janus all the way back to ancient Sumer, c. 4500 BCE.
Major texts: Cicero, De Natura Deorum; Publius Nigidius Figulus, De Diis

Janus is one of the oldest and most important of the Roman gods, with authority over thresholds — gates and doorways, entrances and exits, transitions both literal and metaphorical. "January" comes from Janus, as does the word "janitor," in the sense of a doorkeeper.

One story says that Janus was originally human, a king of Latium, the region of Italy that later became the site of Rome. According to this legend, Janus offered sanctuary to Saturn after his defeat at the hands of Jupiter. He also introduced agriculture, money, and laws. He became a god after his death, and in that capacity, served as protector of Rome. His temple gates were open when Rome was at war, so that Janus could offer his protection to the city.

Years ago a therapist offered me the observation that change is always loss. In my mid-20s, I had never formulated this into words, but it comforted and reassured me in a way that was almost physical. Because if change is always loss, loss is also simply change. We trade people, things and experiences for other people, things and experiences, or maybe for their absences. Janus is often described as the god of beginnings, but his two-headed nature reminds us that every beginning is also an end — and vice versa.

I feel cautiously optimistic as 2012 begins, with no real resolutions other than to be more present in my own life, and keep closer track of myself, for myself. It is a little startling to find myself deep in mid-life, since it feels — when I look backward — that I was a kid just a couple of days ago. 

Happy new year, everybody.

Krampus

Associated with: Germanic mythology
Also known as: Klaubauf, Bartl, Niglobartl, Wubartl, Pelzebock, Pelznickel, Gumphinckel, Krampusz
Earliest recorded mention: unknown, but BCE
Major texts: None, really, as Krampus is an oral tradition, but Austrian governments have been trying to discourage belief in the Krampus since at least the 1930s.

While naughty American children might feel mildly anxious about coal in their stockings at Christmas, Austrian and Hungarian children have spent centuries worrying about the Krampus, a forest demon whose stories predate Christ. Krampus doesn't bother with coal in stockings. He whips children with birch switches or drags them off to hell in a tub that he carries on his back.

The world's a dangerous place for children. In the days before electricity and central heating, it was even more dangerous. A child who wandered away from her parents or stayed out too late at night could be lost for good, frozen to death, snatched by evil strangers or mauled to death by wild animals. It only takes three or four days to die of thirst, and not much longer to starve to death in winter. Before floodlights, helicopters, fingerprints or photographs on the back of milk cartons, parents could keep children safe only by emphasizing the dangers of disobedience. These dangers form the basis of many folktales, from Little Red Riding Hood (keep to the path, don't talk to strangers) to Snow White (don't take food from scary old ladies) to Hansel & Gretel (seriously, don't take food from scary old ladies).

Krampus was the parents' tactical nuclear weapon, and too valuable to abandon even once the southern Alps embraced Christianity. Krampus survived as traveling companion to St. Nicholas, dealing with the naughty children as St. Nick hands out candy, nuts and presents to the good ones.

I'm glad I didn't know about Krampus until fairly recently. I was anxious enough as a child, and almost always worked myself into nervous hysteria at some point before every Christmas. Santa Claus, like God, knew all my meanest thoughts and impulses, and kept score of every pinched brother and undone homework assignment. If I'd had Krampus to deal with on top of that, I'd never have made it to adulthood.

Here's wishing you all a Krampus-free holiday, and all the blessings of the season. Merry Christmas, and God bless us, every one.

Saturn

Associated with: Greek and Roman mythology
Also known as: Cronos
Earliest recorded mention: c. 700 BCE
Major texts: Hesiod's Theogony, Macrobius' Saturnalia

For the past several years, the one consistent social event of my week has been Tuesday night pub trivia at The Liberal Cup in Hallowell. I was lucky enough to join a team that usually does pretty well, though more and more often lately they seem to do best on nights I'm not there. It's not a coincidence, I'm afraid; all too often, I'm absolutely sure about things I'm absolutely wrong about.

Last night it was the question of why Christmas falls on December 25, which has only been the formal practice of the Catholic church (and its successor Christian religions) since the fourth century. Quizmaster/Brewmaster Geoff asked what Roman celebration this was specifically meant to supplant. The answer he was looking for was "the winter solstice." The answer our team gave — which I'm sticking by, even though it got us no points — was Saturnalia.

Saturnalia was, in fact, a solstice celebration, in honor of the great and ancient god Saturn, patron of agriculture, justice and time. Saturn was a Titan, one of the children of Earth and Sky, and the father of most of the gods of Olympus. Told that one of his sons would overthrow him, Saturn devoured his children as they were born. His wife, Ops (Rhea in Greek mythology) finally managed to deceive him after the birth of her sixth child, Jupiter (Zeus). She gave Saturn a stone wrapped in a blanket, which he ate; Jupiter/Zeus grew up to lead a rebellion against the Titans, installing himself and his siblings as rulers on Olympus.

What I'm less clear on, and would like to know more about, is what was supposed to have happened to Saturn and the Titans once they were defeated. Gods are immortal. Saturn was conquered, not killed, and cast into Tartarus, the lowest point in the universe. He was imprisoned for all time with his fellow Titans — but he was never quite forgotten, and in the later years of Roman Empire he became a symbol of a mythical Golden Age, when humans lived in harmony with each other and nature, and feasted off the bounty of the land without having to do any real work. The Romans even built a temple to Saturn, right on the Forum — so his defeat was not exactly permanent, and I'd like to know whether Saturn's followers honored him in Tartarus, or believed that he had somehow escaped.

Saturnalia, which began as a single day (Dec. 17) and became a week-long celebration, commemorated this Golden Age with feasting and revelry, and particularly the suspension of regular order for the duration of the festival. During Saturnalia, masters served their slaves, and slaves became masters; people partied, gambled, wore outlandish clothing, and took various other social liberties. The festival began with a ritual sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, and concluded with a day of gift-giving on December 23. It was celebrated well into the fourth century, and its practices influenced similar holiday celebrations in Zoroastrianism and Mithraism as well as Christianity.

It feels appropriate to me that a year-end celebration would honor both justice and time, as we tally up the year's gains and losses, evaluate successes and failures, make amends where necessary and plan for the year ahead. Happy Solstice to everyone.

Mary

Associated with: Christianity, especially Catholicism
Also known as: Miriam, Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin, the Immaculate Conception, many others
Earliest recorded mention: c. 70
Major texts: The Gospel of Luke

I'm courting trouble here, because the whole point of the Church's reverence for Mary is that she is not divine. She is human, and her humanity is what makes her so special and precious. She is like us but better than us, and what makes her better than us is the mystery of her Immaculate Conception, which the Catholic Church celebrates today.

The Immaculate Conception is one of the great stumbling blocks of Catholicism for non-Catholics, and also one of the hardest doctrines to explain to outsiders. It's reckless of me as a layperson even to try, but that's never stopped me before.

The Immaculate Conception is too often confused with "virgin birth," the Catholic belief that Mary conceived and bore Jesus without having sexual intercourse with a man. But the two doctrines come together in the story that introduces us to Mary: her visit from the angel Gabriel, as reported in the gospel of Luke.

Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear a son to be called Jesus, who will rule over the House of Jacob forever. Mary asks how this could be, since she is a virgin. Gabriel explains that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and that the child will be the Son of God. He also tells her that her elderly cousin Elizabeth, long thought barren, would bear a child as well, "for nothing is impossible to God."

Think about what this would have meant to Mary. She was young, probably only in her mid-teens. She was engaged to be married to Joseph, a carpenter, and looking forward to a happy, normal life. What would any ordinary person have done in this situation? You or I would have done what Sarah did when the angel told her she would have a son in her old age. We would have laughed. Or we would have said, "No," because that was not part of our own plans, and would have interfered — maybe even have subjected us to humiliation, pain, terror and grief, as indeed it did to Mary.

Instead, Mary said, "I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me." This, right here, is the essential mystery of the Immaculate Conception. Unlike the rest of us, Mary was born without the original sin that drives human beings to choose our will over God's. That is what Immaculate Conception means: conceived without sin, born without the fundamental weakness that keeps us separate from God. Mary did not have to work at her faith. She never held herself separate from God. She never preferred her own choices.

That is not a life the rest of us can really imagine. Our own selves are always too present, too loud, too demanding. I am not entirely sure it's something the rest of us should even aspire to. In real life it would look too much like madness, and isn't presuming to know God's will the sin of pride? Mary had a uniquely mysterious relationship with God even before the conception of Jesus. She serves as a role model and as a bridge between us lesser humans and the Almighty, and it is this we celebrate on the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.

The Holly King

Associated with: Celtic religions, Neopaganism
Also known as: Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Lugh, Gwyn ap Nudd, Lord of the Greenwood
Earliest recorded mention: Depends on whether you buy the theory
Major texts: The White Goddess by Robert Graves

The one thing this year's blog theme has shown me is how little I know about this subject, despite a lifelong interest in myths and comparative religions. I have not, for instance, read all of The White Goddess by the poet Robert Graves. If anyone wants to give me a copy for Christmas (or of Graves' memoir, Goodbye to All That, or of his collected poems) I'd be grateful.

Robert Graves is best known for the historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, although his poetry deserves to be better read. He was a complicated man — to put it mildly — who did a good bit of damage to the people who loved him. He was a Romantic in the most complete and classic sense of that word, meaning that he considered emotions rather than reason the most powerful life forces. Carl Jung's theories of archetypes buried in a collective subconscious made sense to him, and The White Goddess is "a historical grammar of poetic myth" that traces all Western mythology to a single belief system involving a triple goddess of love, birth, and death (maiden, mother, crone) and her adjunct deities.

Among the mythic archetypes Graves identified were the Holly King and the Oak King, gods who battle for the world twice a year but rely on each other for life and identity. The Holly King presides over the waning of the year, from the Summer Solstice to the Winter Solstice; at the Winter Solstice, the Oak King triumphs, and life returns to the world.

Up here in Maine, we feel this waning acutely, and it does carry a feeling of portent and doom. The sun will set at 4:00 this afternoon; we are losing more than a minute of light a day. We battle it by decorating for Christmas: lights and greenery, things that sparkle, food full of butter and sugar to carry us through the months ahead. It was smart of early Christianity to co-opt this festival for its own purposes. The historical Jesus was probably born in early autumn; almost all of our western Christmas customs come from the old feast of Yule. The official stories might correlate Santa Claus to St. Nicholas or St. Basil, but the image of the bearded man in red is all Holly King.

My sisters gave me a light box for my birthday. It does help, though I feel irritable rather than sad, which probably doesn't make me any easier to be around.

Persephone

Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Associated with: Greek & Roman mythology
Also known as: Proserpina, Kore, Nestis, Despoina
Earliest recorded mention: c. 1400 BCE
Major texts: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Pindar's odes, Hesiod's Theogony

I'm going to stop apologizing for the long absences from this blog, and I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up with it any better going forward. It's pressures of work, partly, but it's also a general malaise that has me feeling strangely detached from anything I could call "mine." This is an issue for a therapist, not a blog, but in the absence of decent health insurance I may check in here periodically to wrestle with some of this.

The goddess Persephone is one of the oldest of what we call Western civilization, predating the Olympian gods as part of the Eleusinian mysteries celebrated in Mycenaean Greece. Persephone's name has many variants in Greek, possibly because it came from a language other than Greek and was hard for the Greeks to say or spell. She is the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and in her own right the Queen of the Underworld.

Persephone is also known as Kore, a name that means only "the Maiden." Her beauty and innocence captured the attention of Hades, King of the Underworld, who came up from below and kidnapped her (with the explicit or implicit permission of her father, Zeus). Demeter, anguished at the loss of her daughter, walked the earth in search of her. While she did, nothing grew or bloomed or bore fruit, and the world starved. Persephone, pining for her mother, refused to eat or drink in the Underworld, and would not let Hades woo her.

Finally Demeter learned what had happened to her daughter. Zeus ordered Hades to release her — and Hades agreed, except that he had managed to cajole Persephone to eat just a few pomegranate seeds. And anyone who ate any food in the Underworld would have to live there forever . . .

Persephone was returned to her mother, but as penalty for the six seeds, would have to return to the Underworld for six months of the year. During those months, the earth dies, and is renewed again when Persephone comes back to her mother.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Pomegranate Seeds" was my introduction to this myth. It's a children's story, so it softens the edges of what must originally have been terrifying. The adult Persephone, in her role as Queen of the Underworld, is a terrible figure in later Greek mythology. In Hawthorne's version, the child Proserpina comes to love her captor (Stockholm syndrome was well known before we had a name for it), and doesn't really mind returning to the Underworld for part of the year. Hawthorne's ending feels benign.

But up here in Maine, at this time of year, nothing feels benign about Persephone's return to the Underworld. We've already had one snowstorm, and frost is heavy on the ground right now. I need to replace my winter coat. I need to buy new ice spikes for my shoes. This may be the year I buy one of those lights to treat seasonal affective disorder. In the meantime I reread Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine," and am grateful for the extra hour we got last night.

Eris

Associated with: Greek & Roman mythology
Also known as: Discordia, Enyo
Earliest recorded mention: c. 700 BCE
Major texts: Works and Days, Theogony, the Iliad

The name "Eris" is also the Greek word for strife, and Eris is the goddess of chaos. She's a troublemaker who never gets invited anywhere; she is either a daughter of Nyx, goddess of the night, or a true daughter of Zeus and Hera, and thus one of the highest-ranking immortals.

Hesiod distinguishes between two different goddesses named Eris, one of whom is destructive and one of whom's just restless. Even the restless one, however, is "unwholesome for men." The Greek ideal was placid and peaceful; nothing good could come of discontent.

If I were a serious historian or sociologist, I might study this question: why is the Greek ideal (and many of the Eastern ideals) peace and tranquility, when it is obvious that human progress comes only from discontent and conflict? People who are happy and have all their needs met might create beautiful works of art just for the joy of it, but they don't invent technology. Technology comes from need and want, and it's the simple truth that many of mankind's greatest technological and medical advances emerged from war.

Anyway, Eris is another object lesson in the dangers of leaving people off your guest list. According to Homer, the gods of Olympus gathered to celebrate the marriage of the human Peleus to the sea-nymph Thetis (over Thetis' initial objections, but that's another story). No one invited Eris, because she was a known troublemaker — but she showed up anyway, throwing an apple with a tag reading "For the fairest" into a group that included Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked Paris, prince of Troy, to be the judge, and bribed him with the best they could offer: power (Hera), military might (Athena), or the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, already married to Menelaus of Sparta (Aphrodite). Paris, poor fool, chose Helen, and the Trojan War began.

The children of Eris were as dangerous as she was, including (among others) the previously-mentioned Ponos, god of labor; Lethe, forgetfulness; Limos, famine; Algos, pain; Hysminai, combat; Makhai, battles; Pseudologoi, lies; Ate, folly; and Horkos, god of false promises.

In the present day, Eris is hailed as the patroness of Discordianism, "a sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners" which its adherents say "should on no account be taken seriously but is far more serious than most jokes." For more information, check out Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's novel Illuminatus!