Religion was essential to the Etruscan people. The Etruscan religion was very different from those of the peoples that surrounded it, Greek and Latin, since it is a religion revealed by a fabulous character, Tages , which had emerged one day from the furrow opened by a farmer from the city of Tarquinia in the land he was plowing.
He had the appearance of a child, but the wisdom of an old man, and he would have taught the people who came to listen to him the principles of Etruscan discipline, which they put in writing, according to the account preserved by Cicero. It is said that the Greeks assimilated the little boy with the god Hermes Cthonius. In Ephesus, Tages is called Gení filius nepos Jovis and he teaches Etruscan discipline to the twelve peoples of Etruria.
Other ancient authors attribute part of this revelation to the nymph Begoe or Vegoia who would have taught the precepts related to the interpretation of lightning and the libri vegoici were preserved , from Augustus, in the temple of Apollo Palatine, together with compilations attributed to Latin diviners, such as the Macio brothers and the Sibylline Books. According to the gromatici , Roman surveyors, the rules of her specialty would have also been dictated by the nymph to a Tuscan named Aruns Veltimnus.
Unlike the Greek or Roman religions, where the protagonist was always man, the Etruscan religion is characterized by an annulment of the human personality that the others did not have and that the Romans resolved with a legal relationship above all.
The sources for the knowledge of the Etruscan religion are of two kinds:Direct Sources, such as the bandage of the mummy from Zagreb, the tile from Capua, some written objects, such as the liver from Piacenza, and figurative monuments, such as the remains of temples or tombs. , paintings, sculptures or decorated mirrors. Indirect sources are the news preserved in the works of ancient Greek and Latin writers of the imperial and post-classical times. Among them, the Iguvine Tables stand out, so called because they were discovered in 1444 in Gubbio, the ancient Iguvium , under the ruins of a temple of Jupiter. There were seven, and they are engraved in bronze, five in Etruscan characters and two in Latin characters. The epigraphic text seems to date from the 4th century BC, a time when Iguvium was still independent, so the ritual cannot be thought to have Roman influences. It contains prescriptions relative to the official lustration of the territory and, in particular, of the Fisienna hill, which was the city's augural observatory. This lustration, which corresponds to the amburbium and the ambarvalia of Rome, involved a series of successive processions and sacrifices, offered at different points in the territory. The ceremony was conducted, on behalf of the State, by the president or the procurator (arsfertur ) of a religious community of twelve Attidios brothers, analogous to that of the Roman Arvales brothers.
The ritual instructions are addressed to the assistant augur, who must guide the procurator in all the details of this complicated operation. As the auspices were imperative signs , that is, obtained by request, it is necessary to stipulate in advance with the gods what the expected signs are.
The ceremony begins , says the ritual to the augur, "for the observation of the birds, the raven and the owl on the right, the woodpeckers, male and female, on the left" (Este persclo aveis aseriater enetu:parfa curnase dersva, peiqu peica merstu ). The words that designate this orientation could not be translated satisfactorily. The iguvin ritual expressly states that if at the end of the ceremony they realize that some requirement is missing, they must start again.
The Etruscan discipline:The Holy Books
Etruscan religious science or Etruscan discipline included both theoretical doctrine and practical precepts and was contained in sacred books divided into three series.
Libri rituals
They are the most extensive and contain many more things than their title implies, since they dealt with the prescriptions related to the foundation of cities, the consecration of altars and temples, the inviolability of enclosures, everything related to war and peace and division of the people's existence in saeculam.
The libri rituals they should also include the libri acheruntici, corresponding to the books of the dead among the Egyptians and the ostentaria , a series of studies about the deceased prodigies likely to appear on earth and whose precise analysis allows us to discover their origin and meaning. The work as a whole formed a very complex doctrine that only educated and specialized priests could interpret and put into practice. This was the science of the haruspices, who occupied a privileged place in the history of Etruria, since it seems to have been exercised by the aristocracy, not only by men but also by women, such as Tanaquil, wife of Tarquin the Elder and the legendary Begoia or Ba-goia, transmitted by oral tradition, parents having the honor of educating their children. Although the augural art was not denied to lower classes and even foreigners, such as the Sabine Attus Navius, peerless augur.
Librifulgurals
The fulgural libri dealt with the interpretation of thunder and lightning. And each god had different rays at his disposal. There were eleven types of lightning and nine gods had the power to cast them. Thus, Jupiter-Tinia, alone or with the help of his advisers, launched three kinds of rays, benign or more or less devastating. The first was sent as a warning, the second was dangerous and he threw it only following the advice of the twelve gods who were his advisers and he refrained from throwing the third until he had consulted the divinities considered superior. Eight other gods threw theirs. The Byzantine Johannes Lydus has given us a brontoscopic calendar translated from the Etruscan towards the end of the Roman Republic, which explained the meaning of all the thunder for each day of the year. And according to Pliny the Tuscans had divided the sky into sixteen sections, in order to observe the sky, based on the cardinal points. Possibly the god who was responsible for sending him was identified by taking into account the starting point of the lightning bolt and the terrestrial point it reached. This science of lightning apparently has a distant Babylonian origin and is reminiscent of the terracotta models known in the Near East.
Libri haruspicini
The Libri haruspicini encompassed the experience gained by the Etruscans in observing the entrails of victims.
This divinatory art was so recognized that the Roman Senate appealed to them when they had news of prodigies that were difficult to interpret.
The examination of the liver of the victims (or hepotoscopy) is represented in the Etruscan mirrors. And a model of a bronze ram's liver is known, which has its convex part divided into 44 sections or boxes, each with the name of one or two gods. Oriented according to the cardinal points, it is an image of the Etruscan sky, with the indication of the place that each divinity occupies in it. It is a late object, since it appears to be from the 3rd century BC. A stripe divides the convex part into two lobes, one of which bears the inscription usils , the sun, the other bears the name tivr , the moon.
The Etruscan gods
The main place in the Etruscan Pantheon was occupied by Tinia, who was the omnipotent master of lightning, whose name appears four times on the liver of Piacenza. She is equated with the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter, though never being confused with either.
Together with Uni-Juno and Mnerva-Minerva, it formed the capital Triad of the Etruscan Pantheon, introduced in Rome by the Etruscan kings, dedicating the tripartite temple of Jupiter Capitalino in the year 509 BC, possibly decorated by the famous artist Vulca, of Veii and his school.
The existence in Etruria of an infernal or chthonic triad, corresponding to the celestial triad, has been supposed. The hypothesis is based on the existence in Marzabotto, near Bologna, of two tripartite sanctuaries, one of which, close to a mundus , well that communicates the terrestrial world with the lower world, would have been dedicated perhaps to a triad of this nature.
A very important divinity in the Etruscan pantheon was Vertumnus , a god originally from Volsinia, later welcomed by Rome, according to the narrative of Propertius, who saw his statue and addressed the following words to him:
«Tuscan of Tuscan strain, it does not happen to me to have abandoned, in the course of the wars, my home of Volsinios» .
Fufluns he is equivalent to the Greek Dionysus, to the Latin Liber and the figure of him was very popular in Etruria, judging by the number of artistic works in which he appears.
Other Etruscan gods were Sethlan , god of fire, worshiped in Perugia, Voltumna , in whose sanctuary the confederation of Etruscan cities met, Turms He is the homologue of the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury, with the characteristics of a chthonic god and guide of souls to the afterlife, as well as a god of commerce, who was worshiped in Arezzo and whose name is Mirqurios it appears in a late Etruscan mirror.
The Etruscan god Maris is the Roman Mars, the Greek Ares, whose legend spread throughout Etruria, becoming the lover of Turan -Venus, whose name has been related to a pre-Hellenic root from which the name tyrannos would come . She is the lady, the ruler, whose figure evokes that of the Greek Aphrodite. Also represented in Etruscan mirrors is the couple of Apollo and Artemis, who appear with the names Aplu, Apulu, Aplum and Artemes, Aritimi, Artumi; Hercle was the Etruscan Hercules, who had great importance, Velchans homologous to Hephastus and Vulcan, Satre-Saturn, were gods with similar characteristics, but the Etruscan was even bloodier than the Roman, since he required bloody sacrifices.
But together with these main gods, the proliferation of semi-gods and demonic powers, geniuses and spirits from beyond the grave stands out in Etruscan mythology, known by the continuous representations in the tombs and sarcophagi, which reveal the Etruscan conception of the Afterlife. .