Ganesha in World Religions - Speculation Related To Janus

Speculation Related To Janus

In 1806 Sir William Jones drew a close comparison between a particular form of Ganesha, known as Ganesha-Jayanti, and Janus, the two-headed Roman god. Jones felt the resemblance between Ganesha-Jayanti and Janus was so strong that he referred to Ganesha as the "Janus of India." The Ganesha-Jayanti form is a very unusual depiction in which Ganesha is shown with the head of an elephant looking toward his right and a human head at his left. It was possessed of four arms. Nagar says that the Ganesha-Jayanti form was associated with the region around Bombay.

There was no clear claim by Jones either that Ganesha was worshipped by the Romans or how Janus could have evolved from Ganesha as a prototype (or vice versa). Another early 19th century Indologist, Edward Moor, repeated the speculation by Jones, helping to keep the Janus idea alive. Moor expanded the claims of an association based on functional grounds, noting that Janus, like Ganesha, was invoked at the beginning of undertakings, a liminal god who was the guardian of gates. Moor made various other speculations on the connection between Janus and Ganesha. These fanciful connections proposed by early Indologists no longer appear in modern academic reviews of Ganesha's history.

Ganesha is represented as having anywhere from one to five heads, so depictions with two heads are not reliable evidence of a connection with Janus. Representations of Ganesha with two heads are uncommon, and according to Nagar, textual references to the adoration of Ganesha with two heads are difficult to trace. There are no other examples of two-headed forms in which one head is human other than the Ganesha-Jayanti form. In the thirty-two mediation forms of Ganesha that are described in the Sritattvanidhi only one has two heads (Dvimukha Ganapati, the Ganapati with two faces), and both of those are heads of elephants, like all the other forms described.