From a quick Bing search:
"Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings in ancient Roman religion and myth. He is usually depicted as having two faces looking at opposite ways, one towards the past and the other towards the future. Janus represented the middle ground between both concrete and abstract dualities such as life/death, beginning/end, youth/adulthood, rural/urban, war/peace, and barbarism/civilization. His worship traditionally dated back to Romulus and a period even before the actual founding of the city of Rome."and
"Janus was a two- faced god of Roman mythology who kept the gate of heaven. He was widely regarded as the god of beginnings and ends. He was the custodian of the universe. The Romans named the month of January (Januarius) in his honor. "images:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=janus+roman+god&form=hdrsc3&first=1Certainly a strange form for a deity to take, and one wonders if the Romans themselves considered the notion of such a two-faced god as more symbolic than real. But the concept of a divine entity looking simultaneously back at the past and forward toward the future serves as a starting-point for the kind of self-examination that is merited as we move from one year forward into the next.
And possibly from one state of health into another. That the progression of one such state into another is measurable by the passage of time, as from one year into another.
Janus was also the god of crossroads, and thus would be relevant for the making of decisions regarding future health, based on past experience, which treatment to follow, which medication to take.
Symbolically he is present, whenever we think of our health experiences of the past, and then of what these may be in the future.
Two faces, one seeing the past, the other anticipating what is to come.
Much as we will do as 2024 nears, and as we are perhaps mindful of Janus, as we think of our own pasts and ponder our own futures, as we stand at our own crossroads, as the new year approaches.