It was while searching for an appropriate symbol or image for the cover of a new book on ethnographies of archaeological practice that I encountered Janus - the Roman god of doors and gates. I was specifically looking for something in ancient material symbolism that encapsulated the idea of looking both inwards and outwards at the same time, a recurring and important theme of the various papers in the book. I didn’t really expect to find anything, and was surprised when I did. As a door-god, Janus has two faces. One face looks inwards (perhaps to the interior of a house, temple or city): the other looks outwards to the exterior world.
Roman Republican coin depicting Janus
(photo reproduced by permission from Livius.Org – see http://www.livius.org/ja-jn/janus/janus.html )
This seemed to me an image that could be usefully appropriated from the ancient world. Originating in a more symmetrical age, it can yet be taken to represent the contemporary ideal – so difficult to attain - of counter-balancing our outward looking objectivising gaze (on the material culture and practices of the distant Other) with a reflexive inward looking glance (at our own material culture and practices).
Janus is symmetrical in many different ways. He is both a subject (a supernatural being or divinity) and an object (a door). He is at once a person and a thing, with attributes of both. He looks both back and forth, to and fro, in and out, ahead and behind. His two faces are sometimes depicted as respectively male and female, bearded and non-bearded, old and young. He stands on the threshold – the present moment - between the future and the past. Hence his association with the winter solstice, the first month of the year, turning points and new beginnings. In looking forward to the future he also looks backward to the past.
This is more than just a superficial symmetry of mirror reflections: rather it is a deep symmetry which counterbalances opposites or polarities. And these aren’t just abstract symmetries to be theorised about. Most depictions of Janus are based, as well as on the vertical symmetry of the human body itself, on an actual axis of vertical symmetry out there in the material world that can be perceived through vision or touch - or indeed by the embodied action of going through a door. The door is ultimately a very practical item of material culture.
The symbolism of a threshold god is complex and remarkably relevant to any discussion about breaking down oppositions and dichotomies. A door facilitates communications and interchanges between opposed worlds that are separated by the door. The paradox here is that the very thing that unites is also that which divides. That which dissolves dichotomies and oppositions is that which sets them up in the first place. The door which is open, affording passage, can also be the door which is closed, obstructing movement. Indeed these are themselves really just two aspects of the same thing – yet another fundamental dichotomy that Janus simultaneously brings together and keeps apart.
Maybe ‘simultaneous’ is the wrong word. There’s something of the gestalt switch about Janus. A door is either open or closed, never both at once. You’re either on the inside or the outside. A similar alternating pattern of ‘either one thing or the other’ is easily identified in archaeological theory - e.g. the objective and subjective approaches towards the meaning of things that characterise much theoretical discussion today.
Thus in the emerging field of embodied archaeology, for example, there are alternative formulations of 1. the body as a universal or natural feature of human existence (serving as the basis for cross-cultural or cross-temporal comparisons and inferences) or 2. the body as a socially and historically constituted entity (implying that all archaeological or other cultural interpretation is contingent and relative). In reality, of course, the body is at once both a natural and a cultural entity. Yet it is quite difficult, it seems, for us to apprehend both aspects at the same time.
Ethnographies of archaeology raise another form of this conundrum. As archaeologists we are used to being the subjects behind the objectivizing outward-looking gaze. We are the observers, the interpretors, the explainers. What happens when that outward-looking gaze is turned back on ourselves - our own practices and our own material culture - transforming us into the objects of study? Can one be the object and subject of study simultaneously?
In this sense Janus hints at the very assymetry that symmetrical archaeology seeks to overcome – the tendency in all of us to look at one side of a question or thing and not the other, or to switch between alternative viewpoints without ever holding both views at once.
A god of symmetry or assymetry? Or both?
As it happens, on consideration I did not choose Janus for the book cover after all. For me, many classical depictions of Janus, like the one on the coin, are somehow too neat, too flat, too detached – literally disembodied . They are representations of representations of representations. As such they have lost something of the force of the embodied experiences that originally gave rise to them – the shock of materiality that is part and parcel of actual encounters with the world.
There are other Janus-like images, however, from outside of the Roman cultural universe. These are wilder, rougher, coarser, less abstract, more tactile. Take for example this two-faced stone carving - of Celtic, possibly pre-Christian workmanship - that stands on the Isle of Boa in Lough Erne, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
Photo taken by Jon Sullivan of http://pdphoto.org/ who kindly placed it in the public domain
Its original symbolism is uncertain. It may have nothing to do with doors and gates, though it has acquired associations with Janus in modern times. Today it is the ‘January God’ of Seamus Heaney’s poem of that name, which captures something of the sheer power of its material presence:
“In the wet gap of the year,
Daubed with fresh lake mud,
I faltered near his power -
January God.”
(Seamus Heaney)
Like Janus, the Boa figure has one face looking forward, the other looking backward (though only one face is fully visible in the photo). One face is male, the other – arguably - female. Between the two faces on the top of the figure is a hole for holding water or other liquid – or possibly, as Heaney and others would have it, for affixing antlers. The faces, moreover, are not disembodied; they are part of a full figure sculpture which itself has two aspects or orientations. Because nobody knows what meaning the carving had for its makers, there is also the crucial dimension of mystery – the mystery of the not-entirely-explainable past - bound up with the special atmosphere of the site on the Isle of Boa where it stands.
For me it is both subject and object, person and material, cultural and natural. As subject, it can indeed be taken to be a material reflection of the observer – looking both inwards and outwards, ahead and behind – while retaining its distinctive personality as cultural Other. As object, it refuses to be entirely sublimated to the observer’s point of view. In receiving our gaze, it has something of the sheer stubborness that all archaeological evidence has - a certain resistance to interpretation. In returning our gaze, it can momentarily transform the viewer from subject to object, and challenge the assumed relation between the viewer and the viewed.
For all these reasons it was chosen as the image to appear on the cover of the book.
Matt Edgeworth
