Fortuna

“…Fortuna has not only been conjectured to be a deity of the dawn; she has been made out to be both a moon-goddess and a sun-goddess. For her origin in the moon there 169is really nothing of any weight to be urged; the advocate of this view is one of the least judicious of German specialists, and his arguments need not detain us^[691]. But for her connexion with the sun there is something more to be said.

“The dedication day of the temple of Fors Fortuna was exactly at the summer solstice. It is now St. John the Baptist’s day, and one on which a great variety of curious local customs, some of which still survive, regularly occur; and especially the midsummer fires which were until recently so common in our own islands. Attention has often been drawn to the fondness for parallelism which prompted the early Christians to place the birth of Christ at the winter solstice, when the days begin to grow longer, and that of the Baptist—for June 24 is his reputed birthday as well as festival—at the summer solstice when they begin to shorten; following the text, ‘He must increase and I must decrease^[692].’Certainly the sun is an object of special regard at all midsummer festivals, and is supposed to be often symbolized in them by a wheel, which is set on fire and in many cases rolled down a hill^[693]. Now the wheel is of course a symbol in the cult of Fortuna, and is sometimes found in Italian representations of her, though not so regularly as the cornucopia and the ship’s rudder which almost invariably accompany her^[694]. Putting this in conjunction with the date of the festival of Fors Fortuna, the Celtic scholar Gaidoz has concluded that Fortuna was ultimately a solar deity^[695]. The solar origin of the symbol was, he thinks, quite forgotten; but the wheel, or the globe which sometimes replaces it, was certainly at one time solar, and perhaps came from Assyria. If so (he concludes), the earliest form of Fortuna must have been a female double of the sun.” W. Warde Fowler. The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic: An Introduction to the Study of the Religion of the Romans.

The Wheel of Fire  can be relate to the Circle of Time–The Calendar, in terms of a Circle — the Seasons of Life, and the Circle of Life.

Ancient Astrologers, Zodiacs & Calendars

Seasons of the Year as Symbols and Themes in Literature

Circles as Symbols and Themes in Literature

Dark versus Light – Night versus Day – Themes in Literature

The Moon & the Stars — Things That Light the Night

Janus

Janus is also considered to be representational of a Circle of Time

“He was a sun-god^[1256], and his name is the masculine form of Diana (= moon); he was the mundus, i. e. the heaven, or the atmosphere^[1257]. These were, of course, mere guesses characteristic of a pedantic age which knew nothing of the old Roman religious mind. If Janus ever had been a nature-deity, his attributes as such were completely worn away in historical times, or had lost their essential character in the process of constant application to practical matters by a prosaic people. How far the Roman of the Augustan age understood his great deorum deus may be gathered from Ovid’s treatment of the subject, itself no doubt a poetical version of the learned speculation of Varro and others. The poet ‘interviews’ the deity with the object of finding out the lost and hidden meaning of his most obvious peculiarities, and the old god condescends to answer with a promptness and good temper that would do credit to the victims of the modern journalist. The curious thing is that the real origin, humble, simple, and truly Latin, 284escaped the observation both of the interviewer and the deity.

“Before I state more definitely the grounds on which this simple explanation of Janus is based, it will be as well to deal shortly with the more ambitious ones.

1. The theory that Janus was a sun-god has the support of Roman antiquarians^[1258], and was probably suggested by them to the moderns. Nigidius Figulus, the Pythagorean mystic, seems to have been the first to broach the idea: we have no evidence that Varro gave his sanction to it. It was Nigidius who first suggested the idea of the relation of Janus to Diana (Dianus, Diana = Janus, Jana), which found much favour with Preller and Schwegler^[1259] at a time when neither comparative philology nor comparative mythology were as well understood as now. But the common argument, both in ancient and modern times, has been that which Macrobius quotes from certain speculators whom he does not name: ‘Ianum quidam solem demonstrari volunt, et ideo geminum quasi utriusque ianuae coelestis potentem, qui exoriens aperiat diem, occidens claudat,’ &c. It is obvious that this is pure speculation by a Roman of the cosmopolitan age: it is an attempt to explain the Janus geminus as the representation of one of the great forces of nature. But it has nothing to do with the ideas of the early Italian farmer.

“2. The theory that Janus was a god of the ‘vault of heaven’ was also started by the ancients, as may be seen from the chapter of Macrobius quoted above. Recently it has been adopted by Professor Deecke in his Etruscan researches^[1260]. He seems to hold that Janus in Etruria, as a god of the arch of 285heaven, was represented on arches and gates in that country, and came to Rome when the Romans learnt the secret of the arch from the Etruscans. That the Romans were the pupils of the Etruscans in this particular seems to be true; but if Janus only came to Rome with the arch (Deecke says in Numa’s time) it is hard to see how he could have so quickly gained his peculiar place in Roman worship and legend. I cannot think that Deecke has here improved on the conclusions of his predecessor.

“Speculations about Janus as a heaven-god have been pushed still further. Here is a passage from a book which is almost a work of genius^[1261], yet embodies many theories of which its author may by this time have repented: ‘He who prayed (in ancient Italy) began his prayer looking to the East, but ended it looking to the West. Herein we find expressed the conception of the unity and indivisibility of Nature; whose symbol is the most characteristic figure of the Italian religion, the double-headed Janus, the highest god, and the god of all things, all times, and all gods. He unites the dualistic opposites which complete the world—beginning and end, morning and evening, outgoing and ingoing. He is the god of the year, which finds its completion in its own orbit, and as he is the god of time, so he is the god of the Kosmos, which like a circle displays both beginning and end at once.’ He then quotes a passage from Messalla, which Macrobius has preserved, in support of this astonishing product of the rude mind of the primitive Roman^[1262]. Of this Messalla we only know that he was consul in 53 B.C., and that (as Macrobius tells us) he was augur for fifty-five years, in the course of which period, after the fashion of his day, he wrote works of which the object was to find a philosophic basis for the quaint phenomena of the Roman religion. His speculations on the double head of Janus cannot help us to discover the primitive nature of our deity; Janus may have been the ancient heaven-god of the Latins, but these guesses are the product of a spurious and eclectic Greek philosophy.

3. There is another possible explanation of Janus, which is not mentioned in Roscher’s article, but is perhaps worth as much consideration as the two last. Professor Rhys, in 286his Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Mythology^[1263], somewhat casually identified Janus with the Celtic god Cernunnos, whom he considers to be the Gallic deity called by Caesar Dis Pater. The one striking fact in favour of this equation is that Cernunnos was represented as having three faces, and like Janus, as a head without a body—the lower portion of the block being utilized for other purposes^[1264]. He seems to have been a chthonic deity, and is compared to and even identified by Rhys with Heimdal of the Norsemen and Teutons, who was the warder or porter of the gods, and of the underworld^[1265], who sits as the ‘wind-listening’ god, whose ears are of miraculous sharpness, who is the father of man, and the sire of kings. Both Cernunnos and Heimdal are thought further to have been like Janus, the fons et origo of all things. According to Caesar the Gauls believed themselves to be descended from their deity; and both the Celtic and Scandinavian gods seem to have had, like the Roman, some connexion with the divisions of time.“W. Warde Fowler. The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic: An Introduction to the Study of the Religion of the Romans.