The symbolism of the two solstices, from two-faced Janus to the two Johns

The ancient solstitial cult, centered on the figure of two-faced Janus, was "Christianized" around 850 and included in the liturgy with the names of the two Johns: St. John the Evangelist on December 27, at the winter solstice and St. John the Baptist on June 24, at the summer solstice. On the other hand, the initiatory doctrine had recognized in the symbolism attributed to the Saints a coincidence of images with the pagan divinity, which went beyond the merely occasional datum.


di Simone Salandra

When the Catholic Church gradually began to replace the ancient pagan religion, built churches in place of the old temples and gradually replaced saints and martyrs in the days of polytheistic holidays. It was, in fact, a shrewd strategy to keep the habit of periodic ritual festivities in the same places of worship to keep the participation of the people continuous. The first churches arose at first as a remodeling of the pre-existing sacred places, later, when the presences had secured and loyal to the new religion, the original buildings were demolished and new sanctuaries were built on their ruins. We have news of it from St. Augustine and from the letters to the bishops of Pope Gregory I.
The mother goddess, to which numerous temples were dedicated, was hastily Christianized, so to speak baptized, and forced to a forced conversion. Most of the current denominated churches "Notre Dame" they were originally consecrated to it, to the mother goddess that is, or in any case to a female divinity that the Church quickly removed and then dedicated them to its own mother goddess, the Virgin Mary, often merged and confused with the Magdalene.
Similarly, many pagan deities were redeemed and adapted to the new doctrine always in order to keep the assembly of the faithful united. For this reason, many holidays and anniversaries of the ancient religion were exploited for the certainty of the consensus they kept. Examples are i solstice rites which were soon remodeled: so much so that their deity, Giano Bifronte, was immediately split into two saints. But this time the replacement was not easy: in fact, despite the new patrons, the festivals of the sun, deeply rooted in peasant and popular culture, continued to be dedicated to Janus and constituted a management problem for the Catholic Church which at the end of the first century it still came to preserve a mixture of Christian and pagan liturgies.
Les_feux_de_la_Saint-Jean_en_Bretagne_ (Le_Petit_Journal_1-07-1893)
Therefore the protectors of the solstice were replaced several times but always without success. Initially this transformation had seemed trivial, but over time, towards 605, the impossibility of reconciling other saints with the adoration of the Sun, put the Congregations of Bishops in the need to deepen their cult in order to seek out among the martyrs or blessed someone the whose work was compatible with the movements of the star. The need to recover the feast forced the Church to try to penetrate its most ancient and profound meaning.
So if before there was a god with two faces, it was now necessary to look for two saints with only one face, with only one datum in common, that is, but with the opposite analogical meaning. Not a small undertaking. It was necessary to penetrate the profound and arcane concept of bifrontism, which was already present in the ancient hermetic doctrine and which perhaps Pythagoras first theorized. He had recognized ten pairs of fundamental opposites in nature and therefore assumed that they were reconciled by a principle of unitary harmony: that is, each pair was governed by unity.
This conception has permeated various aspects of the culture of the past. For example, we find it in art where, as a concept of pairing, it is related to the image of symmetry or in poetry with some rhetorical figures such as the palindromium. This is the possibility of reading the same sentence equally in both senses. As in the magical painting of Pompeii "Sator arepo tenet opera rotas”(The sower with his plow wisely holds the universe) which could be read in both directions both vertically and horizontally from right to left and vice versa. For this suggestive opportunity to the painting were attributed magical powers.
Illustration of a Roman God Janus
Janus
To contain oneself within the idea of ​​bifrontism it was therefore necessary to know Giano and its meanings in depth. Janus he identified himself with the light of the sun, with the divinity that illuminating makes things live and for this image he could remember the beginning of the Gospel of John: the other John came as a consequence since he had the same name but an opposite symbolic meaning in reason for the necessary bifrontism to be preserved. It was in this way that after many attempts and after a difficult study, around 850 the names of the two Johns, to replace liturgically the solstice festivities: St. John the Evangelist on December 27, at the winter solstice and St. John the Baptist on June 24, at the summer solstice. The position of the two Johns in the new calendar was therefore in perfect agreement with the function of Christianizing a pagan cult by virtue of their allegorical symbolism.
The Catholic Church, accepting the meaning of Janus, had attributed a metaphorical value of Light to the two saints. It recognized in the Baptist the emblem of the redemptive water, that is to say of the Light of Christ reflected in the baptismal water, like the moonlight, since of him it had been said: "He is the Elijah who is to come"; while in the Evangelist he recognized the image of the light of the Sun as opposed to darkness, of reassurance as opposed to fear, because this is the meaning of the Apocalypse (literally, "Revelation"), and again of the Resurrection as opposed to Death, given that the episode of Lazarus is reported precisely in the Gospel of John.
The new state of things now satisfied everyone a little: both those who had a popular and peasant background and had been more and more compliant and willing to change and those who had not been at all like the ancient guilds and the brotherhoods of builders. These, in fact, had inherited from the initiatory institutions and from the ancient Colleges, especially Greeks and Romans, the custom of honoring the Solstices, to pay homage to the greatest force of nature, namely the Sun.
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"Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist with a Donor"
The solar cult, which formed the foundation of all the old theogonies, as a progressive replacement of the lunar cult, had until then been handed down in secret. But in that dark period, in which every secret was feared because it was considered diabolical and was severely punished by the Church, the Corporations that guarded it, faithful to their tradition, in order to abandon the dangerous hiding place agreed to hide behind the new Janus, that is, behind the two Giovanni, who elected their patrons in the face of a finally pleased and reassured clergy. On the other hand the initiatory doctrine had recognized in the symbolism attributed to the Saints a coincidence of images with the pagan divinity, which went beyond the merely occasional datum.
The phonemic matrix of John and Janus is always the same "J", besides the Hebrew root Joni, which means day, reaffirms their symbol of light. The name Giovanni was linked to the Hebrew word in the Middle Ages hanan, with the double meaning of "mercy" and "praise", whereby its two meanings of "mercy of God" and "praise to God" would correspond to the descending and ascending directions of the two halves of the annual cycle of the sun. In fact, Mercy descends from God on men, while Praise rises up towards the Divinity. An analogous sense of movement, of passage, lies in the name Janus for the Anatolian root GaΓ² like the Sanskrit word YanΓ² ("Door") and the Latin verb Eo ("to go").
Giano was already for the Etruscans the patron of the gods Collegia opificum atque fabrorum, established by King Numa and in his honor the guilds of Roman artisans celebrated the solstice festivals. In pagan theogony, Janus had therefore the task of assisting the movements of the solar chariot, of presiding over its exit at dawn and its return at sunset. The movement of the Sun, the divinity that gives life, was therefore identified in him. As in the daily cycle so in the annual cycle Janus started and ended the passage of the star and therefore of the seasons and consequently held control over time and destiny. The first day of each month was dedicated to him, the first hours of each day, that is, the beginning of every activity. He was therefore the protector of every beginning and therefore the initiator of civilization.
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Anton Raphael Mengs, "St John the Baptist in the Desert"
From Janus derives Januarius, January, the month that is at the beginning of the annual cycle and in which it is possible to make an evaluation of the past and a project for the future. This is why the divinity had a double face: because it symbolized the gift of awareness of what had happened and foresight of the future, one face looked back and the other forward, one was young and the other old. The young and joyful face of the god symbolizes the divine aspect of the soul, facing upwards towards the divinity, the elderly and sad face symbolizes the material aspect of the body facing the things of the world. But at times the young face was represented as feminine as if to contain the male / female dualism, Janus / Jana that is Janus and Diana, Sun and Moon.
Over time, the solstitial celebrations have thus had the function of reminding man that the continuous repetition of death and the rebirth of the Sun is by analogy the alternation of death and rebirth in the cycle of life, including human. The solstice moments therefore represent an opening, a passage after which the movement of the sun takes a new course: it is as if at the solstice the sun passes through a door, beyond which things change.
For the ancient cosmology the Door of Capricorn, namely the winter solstice, had a positive meaning as it opened the phase of the year in which the sun rose, while the Gate of Cancer, the summer solstice, had a negative meaning since it preceded the dark period. The Door of Capricorn or winter was also called "Gate of the godsΒ»(Or door to the gods) because by crossing it the energies ascended to the divinities and then descended upon men. Thus the Gate of Cancer or summer was also called "Door of menOr of the Avi because through it the souls of the ancestors descended on earth to be incarnated again.
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Carlo Dolci, "Saint John the Evangelist"
According to the esoteric tradition, St. John the Evangelist would have received a secret teaching from Jesus himself and this teaching John would later have transmitted to an invisible Church. In this way, official or exoteric Christianity would be nothing more than a vulgarization of that primitive teaching. Therefore, for the esoteric tradition, next to one Peter's Church, an invisible and underground one exists Church of Giovanni.
They are represented in Rome by two basilicas: that of San Pietro and that of San Giovanni in Laterano. The first reserved for worldly and spectacular events, the other, consecrated to St. John, is the true cathedral of Christianity. The Church of Peter is therefore exoteric because it addresses the crowd. The Church of John, on the other hand, is esoteric because its teachings are reserved for only a few: for example, the shepherds who march at the head of the flock. It was a curious indication, in the Mass celebrated in Latin, that the priest, after having dismissed the faithful, with theite missa is, for him alone he recited the prologue of the Gospel of John, as if he alone could know how much the rest of the faithful did not know.
The Church of Peter is the Judeo-Christian one, that of John the Hellenic-Christian one. There Judeo-Christian Church it represents the authoritarian, dogmatic principle, the Law which in history relied on the strength of the Rome of the Caesars. There Hellenic-Christian church it blends mysticism, which thinks of God as Love, with the philosophy of Plato, Plotinus and Clement of Alexandria which considers God as Spirit and therefore a freer and more speculative religious conception results. The ideas of violence do not exist in it and a Saint Francis of Assisi, with a Johanite vocation, represents it better than a Saint Dominic or a Saint Thomas.
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Nicolas Poussin, "Landscape with Saint John on Patmos"
The Church of John is therefore that of the Spirit who is knowledge and love. In this Church, the religious experience can be identified as pure spirituality and does not imply believing or having faith but consists of what the person who is living it understands in the form of direct knowledge. In the XNUMXst and XNUMXnd centuries this knowledge was defined gnosis; today it could be called mysticism and the moment of cognitive perception could be defined as an altered state of consciousness; that is, a natural and authentic experience unrelated to any subsequent rational interpretation. This solitary and intimate experience does not involve priestly intermediaries.
On the contrary, the Church of Peter is founded on one theology, that is, on the rational interpretation which is subsequently linked to direct cognitive perception. He tries to explain the religious experience and where he fails he makes up dogmas, articles of faith, prohibitions and sanctions and the more complex and elaborate these become, the more they separate and diverge from the original experience that inspired them. Thus theology loses all contact with the initial datum and becomes an independent bureaucratic and intellectual construction.
This Church which is founded on theology no longer has anything to do with spirituality, it is reduced only to a control, management and conditioning tool, with the responsibility of dictating laws and even challenging the natural order of things. This Church is hierarchically organized to supervise and punish those who do not conform to it. By its structure it sees gnosis, or at least everything that is different from itself, as a threat to be fought in order to maintain one's authority. Therefore judging John's disciples as heretics, the Church of Peter persecuted them, imprisoned them and condemned them to death at the stake. Such were the fate of the Arians, Nestorians, Templars, Cathars and to the Albigensians.
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A page from Jacopo da Varagine's β€œLegenda Aurea”
For this reason St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is oriented in the opposite direction to tradition, it looks towards the west and not towards the east in this way it offers its back to the Light. The hagiographer Jacobus of Varagine, in Golden legend, composed in 1264, mentions the privileges that God granted to St. John the Evangelist. The first was to be particularly loved by Christ, the second to be in charge of taking care of the Mother of God, the third to obtain the revelation of the Mysteries and finally to be the Word of the Flesh that is to have virginal purity. Being the beloved disciple of Jesus, Light of the world, confers on John an almost identifying role with the rising sun. In fact Dante says of him:
Β«This is the one who lay upon the breast
of our Pelican, and this was it
from up the cross to the great chosen fire. "
In the triplet the symbolism of the pelican, which the Christian tradition associates with Christ, because this bird was believed to tear its breast to feed its young, making it the symbol of altruism pushed to the point of sacrifice and confirms the solar destiny that was reserved for the Evangelist. And since the dying Christ entrusts to him the Mother, symbol of the Prima Materia and of the feminine principle, receptacle and reflection of sunlight, in the sacred iconography the figures of the Virgin and Saint John at the foot of the Cross can be identified with the Sun and the Moon. . All this leads back to the dual aspect of Janus.
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The saint's virginity alludes to the purity of his spirit and suggests an upward direction linked to the rejection of sexual differentiation. Therefore in the images the saint is indicated with the beardless face, almost feminine in resemblance to the young face of Janus, symbol of the ascending tendency of the soul. The second face of Janus, elderly and bearded, on the other hand leads back to the old age of the saint and to his role as a popularizer and therefore to the descended aspect of the Word who becomes flesh and spreads throughout the world. In both cases, the symbolism of St. John the Evangelist suggests the Winter solstice, the "Gate of the Gods" that is, which was dedicated both to the ascent of souls and to the voluntary descent of the Spirit.
Also the privilege relating to the revelation of the Mysteries it reconnects to the Winter solstice as through the Door of Capricorn the Spiritual Principle can choose to descend into the manifest world, or revealing itself, that is, covering itself with new veils, or on the contrary in a perceptible but still mysterious form. The Apocalypse, which in Greek means "Revelation", is the text of the Christian tradition which in a symbolic and cryptic form communicates the mysteries relating to the world and its destiny.
The relationship with the revelation of the Mysteries makes St. John the symbol of the esoteric aspect of the Christian tradition and in this sense his link with the Confraternities appears to be based on the ancient assimilation of the concept of Mystery to the practice of the Craft and therefore to the transmission of its operational secrets. The Gospel of John refers to the principle of cosmic creation and clearly refers to the birth of the Light, at the beginning of the new year and to the figure of Janus as God of the Beginnings. All this explains how many secret societies have chosen St. John as their patron, from the Templars to the Rosicrucians, from the Carbonari to operative Freemasonry first and then speculative.
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Hieronymus Bosch, "Saint John on Patmos"
After all, the first three Masonic degrees are also defined Loggias of San Giovanni and still today some German lodges associated to the summit with the United Grand Lodge of Germany, are indicated by the initials JL, Joannes Loge, in place of Β«Respectable LoggiaΒ». Moreover even today in almost all the workshops of the world, albeit of different Masonic confession, it is customary to start the ritual works with the opening of the Holy Book at the beginning of the Gospel of John where it is said: "In the beginning was the verb ". In Italy in Rite Emulation for example it is the Venerable Master who reads the text, while in the Symbolic Rite he is the First Warden.
Always in the Golden legend, from the description of St. John the Baptist we can recognize his symbol of Reflected Light in the verse: "I need to decrease for him to grow". The light that wanes after the solstice would be represented by John, while the sun that grows in the following months is represented by Christ. The reverberating attitude of the Light in the dualistic opposition can only be lunar. And again Jacopo da Voragine tells that the Baptist was called for the qualities that were recognized by Christ: Burning Light for holiness, Angel for purity and Voice for humility. All these names exclude the solar character and confirm its lunar aspect.
Sacred iconography describes him as an adult with a long beard and unkempt hair, dressed in a lambskin: similar to Janus. St. John holds a stick with a cross banner and often points his finger upwards to allude to the forthcoming coming of the Lord or points to the lamb, symbol of Christ. Janus was also represented with a wand in hand, a crosier, a sign of power, to order what is confused, almost a shepherd's rod or royal scepter.
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Caravaggio, "St. John the Baptist"
The story of the Baptist, reported by Josephus, describes him as a pure man who preached to the Jews only precepts of virtue and exhorted those who practiced them to leave the city and symbolically wash the body of sin with water baptism. But his fervor and the number of his followers worried the Tetrarch Herod Antipas who suspected such attitudes as possible provocations aimed at ousting him. For this reason he imprisoned him and did not hesitate to give him death.
The ancient initiatory wisdom captures from the words with which the Prophet Isaiah prophesied the mission of the Baptist: "let every valley, every mountain or hill be lowered"; the image of the horizontal line that is the Level. It is also assimilated to the horizontal plane the water, the water in which he baptizes, which corresponds to the passive, that is, to the Moon. John the Baptist is therefore by analogy compared to the Moon, while John the Evangelist to the Sun. The same name with two opposite meanings: pagan two-facedism is renewed in Christian symbolism.
The Evangelist in his song takes us back to the Vertical. He is on the Mount of Transfiguration, on the Mount of Olives and on Calvary and does not walk the flat desert of Judea. Apostle of Light and Fire, he is symbolized by the Eagle; the Eagle that with acute eyesight sees every detail from above and descends rapidly and precisely vertically like lightning to seize its prey. This image of verticality alludes to Lead wire and the luminous character confirms its sunny aspect. In the hermetic language the Eagle indicates Mercury after the sublimation phase; this juxtaposition arises from the observation that it is very volatile, but also from the consideration that, as the Eagle devours every other bird, so the Mercury of the Sages devours and destroys everything, bringing matter back to the primitive stage.
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Domenico Veneziano, "St. John the Baptist in the desert"
John the Baptist since he says he is "the voice of him crying in the desert" has suggested an analogical interpretation with the rooster crowing at dawn, in the desert of the night, to announce the coming of the Light. In Freemasonry the rooster alludes to the awakening of forces and incites action, and is also a symbol of rebirth, and therefore of the initiation ritual. It is in fact present in the cabinet of reflection which is in turn assimilated to the center of the earth: therefore the rooster is related to the idea of descent into hell, of operates in black, of mortification. This brings us back to the Baptist's penitential side and his mission in the spiritual process. The rooster also symbolizes the end of the Opera or opera in red and so Giovanni is found at the beginning and at the end of the Art; to initiation and completion.
The two St. Johns are therefore two points of reference: the Baptist announces the Christian Revolution, the Evangelist closes the Book of the World with the Apocalypse. One is at the beginning and the other at the end. One is the alpha and the other the omega. This is why Christ says of the Baptist: "... the prophets and the law prophesied up to John" and he says of the Evangelist: "I want him to remain until he returns". They are therefore two witnesses, two limit points along the path of man that in Freemasonry we identify with VITRIOL. And like every initiatory journey, so too every journey described in the Bible, with its exquisitely symbolic value, begins with the descent into hell. In the hermetic texts this journey is called denudation, a word that recalls the habit of the Baptist and that of the postulant Freemason.
Suggestive are the similarities between the masonry initiation and the Baptist: the isolation in the cabinet of reflection is associated with the representation of the desert in which the saint preached. The meditation that leads to the reflection of the neophyte alludes to the reflected light of the Moon which symbolically represents him. Furthermore, the preparation for the journey, with the stripping and the fixing of the blindfold that immerse the knocker in the blackest black of the black, recalls the attitude of the Baptist of anxious waiting for the rebirth to a new life. But on the other hand, the description of the death and resurrection of Lazarus, made by the Evangelist, also refers to the Masonic work. It is certainly coincidental, but not without charm that the initials of Joannes "J" and Baptista "B" recall the two columns of the temple: just as there are two saints, so there are two feasts, two faces of Janus: everything it falls under the dualism of the principle of polarity.
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Anthonis van Dyck, "St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist"

In conclusion, the two Johns, opposed to each other, complement each other. Both from the Christian and the initiatory point of view there is an interpenetration and complementarity of values ​​and meanings such as to make them indivisible and irreplaceable. They represent an analog connecting link on one side with the cult of the Sun, consisting of Janus and Christian worship, represented by the Word of Christ, and on the other with the symbolic and esoteric value attributed to them by Masonic thought. For what has been said, the two Johns are in the history of masonry the memory of the moment of transition from the ancient to the medieval era; moment that for the incisiveness and the actuality of the image is valid and still lasts today. In fact, the similarity with the Light that was given to them and which was therefore related to the cycle of the Sun is still preserved today.

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