Happy New Year!! Hope 2024 is a great year for you all. Did you know the human race has celebrated the start of the new year for thousands of years? In this sense, it predates the Christmas celebration.
The modern celebration of New Years Day kicked off first with the Romans, although their first calendar simply didn’t have enough days in it to keep up with the Sun’s cycle, having only 304 days spread out over 10 months. It was this geezer called Julius Caesar who fixed the problem with his Gregorian calendar. To do this he consulted with the best astronomers and mathematicians who hadn’t yet been thrown to the lions and came up with the quite stunningly clever concept of January.
Even better, January 1st became the start of the New Year, a day devoted to the hangover and cleaning up vomit in the bathroom. January itself was named after the Roman’s top God, Janus, the God of Gods. This dude was literally two sides of the same Roman coin. On one side he had a bearded face and on the other a clean shaven face. How you played ‘heads or tails’ with it, I really don’t know. Maybe this Janus coin was the scammer’s first double-headed coin? Let me know if you have more info on Janus.
It seems to me he could be mythology’s first schizophrenic. And it’s started me thinking of an actual human character literally with two faces: one facing forward, the other back. Do you know of anyone who’s written a body horror novel with that kind of crazy character? Again, the email button is below.