What has reached its maximum can only decrease, while what has reached its minimum begins to grow. So there are tipping points, moments when the direction of an evolution reverses.
Such is the case with the annual cycle, which has its downward and upward paths. From the summer solstice onwards, the days get shorter and the light fades. It is through the sign of Cancer that the Zodiac begins our descent into darkness in the last days of June. It's in January that the curve is reversed, and although we're entering winter at this point, our days are starting to get longer and we're actually returning to light.
Janus is the god who gave his name to the month of January, and it is he who closes the door to the descending cycle and opens the door to the ascending cycle. This is why he is traditionally depicted with two keys, and also with two faces: one looking to the past, the other to the future.
Christianity has related these two aspects of Janus to the two feasts of Saint John: that of John the Baptist, born at the summer solstice, and that of John the Evangelist at the winter solstice. And popular folklore has preserved this image in the well-known figure of ‘John who cries and John who laughs’, even if the solstitial aspect of this opposition has long since been lost, and now generally only evokes the whims of childhood:
But Janus was above all the god of initiation, and his two golden and silver keys were the keys to the great and lesser Mysteries of Antiquity.
The root of the word initiation is in-ire, the literal meaning of which is to enter, and to enter ( as to leave, incidentally) you have to open a door. In the expression Kagami biraki, the ideogram used for biraki represents a closed door and two hands pointing towards it to open it. Kagami (the mirror) biraki is therefore the ‘opening of the mirror’. The mirror is the door that allows us to enter a new dimension of our understanding of the world.
Entering behind the mirror, isn't that precisely what the Janus initiation proposes?
Kagami biraki is celebrated on 11 January, just after the solstice, just like Saint John's Day in winter. And like Saint John's Day in winter, it aims to open a door that has been closed until now, so that we can enter into a new relationship of consciousness with the universe, such that widespread destruction appears to us for what it really is: a transformation.
The lesson to be learned from this comparison is that two cultures as apparently different as those of the East and the West are actually talking about the same things, and at the same time. Celebrating kagami biraki with Aikido is like celebrating Saint John's Day in winter, and thus bringing together two traditions in what they have in common, what is oldest and most fundamental.
But we take a further step forward in our understanding by discovering that the Aikido principle of action (irimi), which will be used for this celebration, is itself closely linked to the notion of entry. Indeed, the ideogram used for iri originally represents the triangular entrance to a house or cavern, so iri is the entrance itself. What a coincidence, isn't it, that two cultures whose languages are on opposite sides of the world can use the same word to designate the same idea of entering: ire in the West and iri / iru in the East.
In iri-mi, the ideogram used for mi shows a pregnant woman. Initially, this ideogram meant the body in its relationship to the origin of being; it was only later, and in a secondary sense, that it came to refer more simply to the body in general. The irimi of Aikido therefore has to do with a search for the origin of being, by means of the body's entry into the space and time of a situation of opposition.
And so it makes a lot of sense to celebrate Kagami biraki through the irimi of Aikido.
Kan geiko is this celebration; it is a pared-down, rigorous, even repetitive training, designed in such a way as to emphasise the essential, and which traditionally takes place on 11 January, at the time of Kagami biraki. At the height of darkness and cold, it's a way to celebrate light and life, which are dormant but ready to be born again, through the eternal return that drives this world.
I'm delighted to start 2025 by celebrating Kagami biraki in Corfe Castle, England on 11 and 12 January.
Philippe Voarino, 01/12/2024
