It may afford a clue if I advert to the circumstance that whilst in the Phoenician alphabet (_vide Bunsen's Egypt_. iv. 290, 293, 297), Dagon, Dagan = Corn (the Fish-man, _vide supra_, p. 200), stands for the letter D. "The door" is its hieroglyphic equivalent. Thus we get in strange juxtaposition what we may call symbols, connecting Janus with the Fish-god and with the god of agriculture.--_Vide supra_, p. 200, and _infra_. In the nomenclature of the calendar connected with any system of hero worship, worship of ancestors, or even spirit worship, who more fitly chosen to commence the year than Janus, supposing him to be Noah? There are, however, two what we may call primary explanations, and we must take our choice. The epithet is either applied to him, as exactly according with the reminiscence of Noah, who was pre-eminently acquainted with the past and the future; or we can take the astral explanation that Janus was called Bifrons,[182] because he opened the sun at his rising and shut it at his setting. As a symbol of Noah this double head appears to me very simple and natural, Noah forming the connecting link between the antediluvian and modern worlds; but as applied to the Sun or to Janus as in relation to the Sun, even allowing for personification, this twofold head of man strikes me as incongruous in the extreme. Besides, if it be allowed that it might apply to Saturn and Janus through the connecting idea of Chronos, how does it apply to _Bacchus_? Let us press this argument further. Here is a symbol common to Bacchus, Saturn, and Janus, and combining harmoniously in each instance with the representation of Noah. Can this symbol, common to these three, combine even congruously with any solar or astral legend? I have somewhere seen it noted as suspicious and as tending to confirm the solar theory that these mythological personages all "journey from _east_ to west, and meet their fate in the evening." But is this so? Have we not just seen that Bacchus, according to mythology, travelled from the _west_ into India?