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 his _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.