Polenta for Janus: Memory, Tradition, and the Path Ahead
Somewhere I had read that on the New Year, it is a tradition to leave an offering of strewn polenta to Janus, god of doorways, gateways, and new beginnings. The polenta would feed the birds, and I assume the presence and song of the birds would mark that the polenta was offered.
New Years Eve came, and I was out of polenta. I wondered where I had read about that tradition. An online search brought up nothing. I skimmed through the pertinent titles of my library–null. Then I came to thinking about polenta itself. Polenta is a cornmeal based food, often a porridge, which means that this tradition couldn’t be that old since corn is a new world food.
I visited etymology online, a dictionary that charts out word roots and history, to find guidance. Guidance I found and more truth than I expected. It turns out that polenta historically has referred to any grain like flour, with its earliest Italian reference being chestnut meal. It comes from the Latin polenta, which refers to “peeled barley.” The word came into the English language by way of Italy in the 19th century, with its common association of corn porridge, a staple in northern Italian diets.
It just so happens I had chestnut flour in the pantry, a vestige from a holiday chestnut cake past, but I couldn’t understand how the birds would find nourishment from it once it was strewn in the rain kissed grass nor the connection between Janus and ground chestnuts. I left an offering of rice and whiskey instead, which represents hard work and beneficence, offering up a tributary prayer and petition for safe keeping. Besides, the chestnut flour is several years old, and like any nut, the years turn its flavor. If anything, remembering I own some chestnut flour is more of a reminder to throw it away rather than offer it up to a god. Perhaps that is some aspect of the point. To ascend one must slough off.
Birds congregating and singing remind the average American of wedding processions on sunny days, down the church steps, to a crowd of well-wishers, but the birds and their ecstatic celebration of life can also be seen as a microcosm of human ways in the human world, so many tiny lives traveling through the expanses of their reality within a cosmic second, within a fragment of a space, self-important to extents that make them giants or gods within their own heads, sometimes not realizing how small we really are. Like many types of birds, people congregate to survive, eating the sustenance of the earth, their words a human-like chirping, an affirmation of their existence, their will to life. There is the saying “a little bird told me.” Birds in their song are the aviary equivalent to gossiping humans, and no human endeavor is official without word being passed around, without humans witnessing the act, without a celebration to mark the existence of some new thing. That is why wedding proposals so often happen in view of loved ones and passerby alike. It’s not official unless everyone remarks, even if the remarks is but a gasp of surprise or an inhalation marking the symbolic act within the mind.
Unlike birds, if we want Janus to open doors, if we want to follow his gaze forward into the future, we must meet his eyes in the past and resolve to move forward despite what was; we must do this as part of the song of our world, the melody and harmony of our being tied to place and time. As we follow his gaze, one face transforms into another. With rectitude, he points the direction, the only possible direction of physical movement. To flow within the moment introduced by his eyes is to take the path of least resistance.
The past was once the future, but now it is gone. It exists in mental space, losing its dimension and gravity, becoming something to contemplate, something to learn from. For those who lose themselves in a backwards gaze, they find themselves stuck. The only bird song in the past is that which is remembered. The only human agency available in the times that are now spent is how we think of what no longer is.
The pathway forth should be nourished by the past’s exalted form: tradition, for to feed the future’s path with only the past’s mistakes, the troubled memories we house in our minds, is to build an unsteady foundation. Tradition is the positive aspect of past. It is the best of humanity passed on age after age.
The offering to Janus is one that tells stories of our labors and endeavors, our sorrows and joys. It is a tradition that speaks of reaping what we sow, of gifts from the earth, of celebration gracing our new path. With good faith, we humans might close our eyes while strewing the grain and when we hear the bird song, we might take it as an official blessing. Our future is legitimized.
