Annese: An Etymology

The inhabitants of St. Anne are called "Annese". There is no parallel term for the inhabitants of St. Croix. Wolfe probably chose the name St. Anne just to get to the designation "Annese".

Ani was the Etruscan Sky god. He was possibly associated with the two-faced Roman god of doorways, Janus. The "Annese", the so-called native inhabitants of St. Anne, are "Anis".

The term for a god of doorways is a "liminal" god. Their faces point forward and behind, toward the end and the beginning, the past and future, life and death, Heaven and Hell.

For Dr Marsch, young Victor is the liminal god of the doorway to Back of the Beyond, the Faerieland world of St. Anne.

Two-faced liminal gods have other connections to the themes of Time and forgetting, so integral to the parts of this story that are set on St Anne.

"[The Aloeid twins] punishment in Tartarus, like that of Theseus and Perirthous seems to be turned back to back, on either side of a column, as they sit on the Chair of Forgetfulness. The column, on which the [Nymph Styx] the Goddess of Life-In-Death perches, marks the height of summer [...]. In Italy, this same symbol became two-headed Janus [...]."~ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 37.2

In the third novella, "V.R.T.", V, the boy, imitating Dr Hagsmith, tells the story of a man with a two faced image tattooed on his chest:

“It’s all falsity; everything Is false, Dr Marsch. Wait, let me tell you a story. Once in the iong dreaming days when Trackwalker was shaman of the abos, there was a girl called Three Faces. An abo girl, you see, and she used the colored clays the abos found by the river to paint a face on each breast-one face, sir, forever saying No!-that was the left breast-and the other, the right, painted to say Yes! She met a cattle-drover in the back of beyond who fell very much in love with her, and she turned her right breast toward him! Well, sir, they lay together all night in the pitch darkness that you find at night in the back of beyond, and he asked her to come and live with him and she said she would, and learn to cook and keep house and do all the things human women do. But when the sun rose he was still asleep, and when he got up later she had gone and washed herself in the river-that’s for forgetfulness in the tales, you see-and had only her one, natural face; and when he reminded her of all the things she had promised in the dark, she stood and stared at him and wouldn’t talk, and when he tried to take hold of her, she ran away. [...] When the drover began to dress himself-after the girl was gone-he found he had the images of the two faces on his own chest, the Yes! face on his left side and the No! face on his right. He put his shirt on over them and rode into Frenchman’s Landing where there was a man who did tattoos and had him trace them with the tattoo needle. People say that when the drover died the undertaker skinned his chest inside the coat, and that he has the two faces of Three Faces preserved, rolled with cardamom in his desk drawer in the mortuary and tied with a black ribbon; but don’t ask me if it’s true-I haven’t seen them.’ ”

Other references to Janus, or doorways, are the following:

• There are Doors is about doors and doubles.
  
• Soldier of the Mist: Latro is transported as a spirit to his family's farm on the Italian peninsula. As he approaches the doorway of his homestead, a large dog-like monster sits in the doorway. This is Janus in the form of the Dog star, a head at either end a postulated by Robert Graves in The Greek Myths, 34.3.
  
• Book of the Long Sun: Myrtle is planted in doorways just as a liminal god is, representing a passage from an End to a Beginning. Robert Graves says the following of myrtle:

"Myrtle is originally a death-tree [...] but it became symbolic of colonization, because emigrants took myrtle0boughs with them to dmonstrate that they had ended an epoch. "

~ The Greek Myths 82.2