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Aita, the Etruscan Hades
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When you die, believed the Etruscans, you get to meet the wolf man, the wolf-headed or wolfskin-capped god of the Underworld. Alive, you may meet him on the walls of certain Etruscan tombs and funeral urns, some of them lovely, and some dark, mysterious, and disturbing.
 Persipne and Aita(Persephone and Hades) Tomb of Orcus II, 2nd c BC.
It seems that only the Etruscans depicted the underworld god Hades, whom they called Aita, as a god or demon with a wolf's head, as seen on one of the ash urns below, or with a wolfskin cap, as seen above, with his snake-crowned queen Phersipnei (Persephone) on a famous wall painting from the tomb of Orcus in Volterra, Chiusi, Italy. Between their heads you can clearly read his name, AITA, even in "backward"-reading Etruscan. The tomb, and its painting, must have been discovered by the 16th century, for there is a famous drawing of a similar wolf-capped and bearded man's head, formerly attributed to Michelangelo, but now to someone in his "circle." This is either an uncanny coincidence, or the artist had seen, or was told about, the head before you. Even more uncanny is the statue Michelangelo made for his Etruscanesque Medici Tombs that portrays Lorenzo as "Il Penseroso," brooding beneath a lion's-head helmet. (I was hoping to see a wolf's-head helmet.)  Nowhere in Homer, or in Greek art, was Hades depicted in a wolf-skin cap or helmet. Yet the Etruscans did not create Aita's wolf-skin helmet from whole cloth. For Hades had a similar helmet, the proverbial "Aidos kune" or "Hades' helmet," created for him by the Cyclops during the war of the Olympian gods against the Titans. That helmet made the wearer invisible ("aidou", hence the name Aides or Hades, "The Invisible" or "Unseen One"). Not even the gods could see its wearer. Athena wore it, says Homer, during the Trojan war to make her invisible, even to Ares (Iliad, Book 5, lines 544-5). And, says Hesiod, Hermes borrowed it and lent it to Perseus, to make him invisible in his fight with the terrible Gorgons (The Shield of Achilles 126). Now, it happens that the Greek word for "helmet" (kune) means "dog's hair," "dog's hide," or "dog's skin." "Hades' helmet" was thus a dog-skin cap. And this the Etruscans turned into the wolf-skin cap or helmet of Aita. Jean-Rene Jannot, in his "La peinture etrusque," says Aita in the Orcus tomb is "covered in the skin" of a hybrid, a "chien loup" or wolf-hound. But most authorities call it a wolf-skin. Why did the Etruscans show Aita in a wolfskin? Did they identify the Greek god with an ancient wolf or wolf-man they had once worshipped?  Chest of an ash urn with Aita about to lead away a haruspex to Hades. From Chiusi, 150-100 BC. Painted terra-cotta. Berlin, National Museum. Image from Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, fig 269. On this ash urn from the same period as the tomb painting we again see a humanized Aita, bearded and fur-capped, about to lead away into the Underworld the man whose ashes were inside the box, and whose spirit is seen on the outside passing through the portal to the world beyond. He wears a funny-looking pointed metal cap, like the funnel on the Tin Woodman in the Wizard of Oz, to show he was a haruspex, a wizard and seer who could fortell the future by reading patterns in the guts of animals or blasts of thunder and bolts of lightning. Now he takes his last farewell from his pretty young wife and baby. Above them are two bare-breasted, torch-bearing female demons or "vanths" with snakes in their hair like Phersnipei in the tomb painting. Beside the door is a short-skirted female who could be Culsu, or Vanth herself, guarding the door. One of the overhead vanths points her torch down toward the mother and child. Are they being threatened with death, or just driven off, back to the realm of the living? Meanwhile, Aita, Lord of the Dead, strides toward the dead man to take him into the Underworld. He wears a beard and a fur cap, probably a wolfskin cap like that worn by Aita in the tomb painting above. On the right, the death demon Charun, wearing an animal hide, waits with his hammer and a paddle to deal the dead man the coup de grace, while above him a dog-headed demon waits to devour him. Like Cerberus, the dog with three heads that guarded the Greek Hades, wild dogs would scavenge ancient graves and tombs to dig up and gnaw the flesh and bones of the dead.  The Conjuring of Oita. A relief carved on a 2nd c BC ash urn from Perugia, in the Museo Etrusco Romano at Perugia. Drawing from Otto Volcano, Die Etrusker. What in Hades is going on here? It seems the Wolf Man from Hell is being conjured up by force by a group of Etruscan soldiers. But why? What is it they want from him? Of no help in answering this question is the Etruscan writing across the top edge of the urn, which reads "backwards," from right to left. This is merely the name of the person whose ashes it held. Hardly more helpful is this blurb from the Superintendent of the Archeological Institute of Umbria: "A man with a wolf’s head who comes out of a well, creating utter confusion among a group of warriors, in the presence of a female demon...." "We need no ghost come from the grave to tell us this, Horatio." (Hamlet) So let us venture out on our own: The "female demon" is Vanth, the Etruscan angel of death (or a "vanth," one of her look-alikes), who is present when someone is about to die or be killed so that she can lead him or her into the Underworld. Here's a rough translation from the German of Oscar Vacano's description (with my comments in square brackets}: "Relief-decorated stone urns of the third and second century BC from Volterra, Chiusi and Perugia show the well-like verge of such an underworld pit, from which rises the torso of a wolf-headed monster. A bearded man with drawn sword stands behind him. He empties out the offering dish [called a "patera"; but I do not see it; perhaps it was lost?] over the monster that struck down with a powerful paw one of the armed young men, who try to hold him in check. [The stricken soldier is not, I think, the one on the ground at right, who is still trying to ward off a blow, but the one bent over the pit or well on the left. Is he peering down into it through a small opening? Or is he dying and emptying his soul into it?] Another soldier [standing, and about to hit Aita with a club or sword,] strains to haul the monster up from the depths with a heavy leash [the upper half of which has been broken off], which is hooked around the monster's neck. The winged Vanth in the background points to mischief and calamity."(Die Etrusker. Werden und Geistige Welt. Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer, 1951.) According to an old legend the underworld monster Oita (also called Volta) rose up from the earth around the city of Volsinii and threatened to destroy it, until Lars Porsenna, king of Chiusi, called down a thunderbolt upon him. (Pliny, Natural History, XI, 140.) Apparently King Porsenna was also a haruspex, or acting on the advice of one. Is it possible that the wolf-headed monster Oita was the ancient name and form of Aita, the Etruscan Lord of Hades? Could this be why Dante called Pluto (Hades) a "maledetto lupo," a "terrible/cursed wolf"? When Dante and Virgil meet Pluto raging in Hell, Virgil gets rid of him at once: "'Taci, maledetto lupo: Consuma entro te con la tua rabia.' .... tal cadde a terra la fiera crudele." "'Silence, accursed wolf! Burn up inside with your rage!' .... So fell the cruel monster to the earth." (Inferno, Canto VII, verses 8-9,15) The conjuring of underworld and celestial powers was taught by the Disciplina Etrusca - the bible and handbook of the haruspices. And the technical term for what seems to be taking place on this urn is "necromancy," the magical conjuring up of the spirits of the dead. The most famous case of necromancy is the biblical story of the so-called "Witch" of Endor, who conjured up the spirit of the prophet Samuel from the kingdom of the dead (Sheol). That sort of magic was punishable by death: As King James' translators put it, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." If what we see on the urn is an even more dangerous and violent form of necromancy, dragging up from Hades one of its monsters, perhaps even the Lord of Hades, no wonder the soldiers are dying left and right. If there are other interpretations of what is happening on this ash urn, let them come forth. Finally, is the urn trying to telll us that Death can't be toyed with - that Death cannot be defeated? R.I.P. "Requiescat in Pace," or "Rest in Peace,'" we read on stone after stone in our graveyards. And the urn reminds us that the real reason this prayer is engraved on our tombtsones is not so much to benefit the dead, as ourselves, the living. For we worry that the dead will not stay dead, that they will come back to haunt us. Which, of course, they do. They are always with us. |
Library
~ Table of Contents ~
TYCHE & OEDIPUS
Adonis & Aphrodite Fatal Boar Hunts, Fatal Loves: Meleager & Adonis A Valentine for Camille Flammarion The Met returns its Euphronios vase! Camille Flammarion: Romantic Astronomer The Fountains of Enceladus The Eye of God Is Ganymede the Boy from Marathon Bay? THE ANCIENT OLYMPIEIA FESTIVAL AT ATHENS Which satyr would you choose... The Marathon Boy and the Satyr Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy The Afternoon of a Faun The Dancing Satyr - A Lost Bronze of Praxiteles? Hermes, The Liar Who Invented the Lyre Inanna, Queen of Uruk Inanna Adored: The Uruk Vase The Moon-God Nanna-Sin Visits his Ziggurat at Ur Apollo Sauroktonos, or How the Romans Killed the Lizard-Killer Jacob's Ladder Inanna and the Harrowing of Hell Lilith: Wild Demon of Sex and Death DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP The Sun God in his Dragon Boat A Stairway to Heaven: The Ziggurat at Ur Lassalle's Post-Modern Male Torso Brancusi's Torsos: Pure Platonic Forms? Brancusi on Men and Women: Take the Tate Test? Four Gods Greet the Rising Sun God Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo Culsu & Vanth Lead the Dead into Hades A FATEFUL CHARIOT RACE: The STORY of PELOPS and OENOMAUS |
