Today we will discuss the religious practices of a people lost to time. A people who perceived each banal action of the material universe to be an expression of a deeper metaphysical truth. Schizos obsessed with sign. Much like us. The Etruscans.
The Etruscans (900BC-27BC) were a civilization that occupied the middle of the Italian peninsula, they arose from the earlier Villanovan culture, and were finally assimilated into the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC. Their origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery, and their language is still not fully understood by us moderns. The Etruscans had a profound cultural influence upon the Romans, artistically, architecturally, and religiously. It is the last of these that we will be focusing on today.
The Romans themselves considered the Etruscans to be a deeply religious and superstitious people, even by their standards. The Etruscan religion was a revealed one, and focused primarily on divination. Divining natural phenomena in a religious context to learn the will of the Gods. The founding “prophet” of the Etruscan religion was Tages, a mythological lump of clod that took the form of a boy sage, to teach the Etruscans the arts of divination. Cicero reports the myth in the following manor:
“They tell us that one day as the land was being plowed in the territory of Tarquinii and a deeper furrow than usual was made, suddenly Tages sprang out of it and addressed the ploughman. Tages, as it is recorded in the works of the Etrurians (Libri Etruscorum), possessed the visage of a child, but the prudence of a sage. When the ploughman was surprised at seeing him, and in his astonishment made a great outcry, a number of people assembled around him, and before long all the Etrurians came together at the spot. Tages then discoursed in the presence of an immense crowd, who noted his speech and committed it to writing. The information they derived from this Tages was the foundation of the science of the soothsayers (haruspicinae disciplina), and was subsequently improved by the accession of many new facts, all of which confirmed the same principles. We received this record from them. This record is preserved in their sacred books, and from it the augurial discipline is deduced.”
The core holy text of the Etruscans was the Etrusca Disciplina. The document is now lost to us, but we can reconstruct bits and pieces from Roman authors writing on the subject. Parts of the Disciplina include the Libri Haruspicini, which explained the theory and practice of divining animal entrails. The Libri Fulgurales, which discussed the divination of lightning bolts, and the Libri Ritualis, which discussed religious rituals in general. Augury, the divination of the will of the gods from the flight patterns of birds also played a significant role. I hope you are beginning to get a clearer picture of the Etruscan religious imagination. Divination was king. Religion for them was not a matter of ethics, it was about divining natural phenomena to gaze into the νοῦς of the κόσμος.
Seneca has an enlightening quote on the matter. “'This is the difference between us Romans and the Etruscans. We believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to gods, they are led to believe not that events have a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a meaning.''
Do you grasp this subtle but profound difference? Every single event, from the croaking of a frog to a flash of lightning, expressed some deeper, underlying metaphysical truth. And it was the goal of their religion, to divine what these external events revealed about the Gods who instigated them. A kind of immanent polytheism, this incredible schizo world intuition where no event is acausal, everything happens to express meaning.
The individual who performed the divination of animal entrails was called a haruspex. A combination Latin term, “Haru” meaning entrails, and “Spec” meaning to observe. The greek equivalent was called ἡπατοσκοπία. Before we can delve into the intricacies of Haruspicy, we must examine some important fixtures of the Etruscan religious worldview. The Etruscans divided the heavens into 16 equally spaced regions, which were the dwelling places of the Gods. (This is fundamental to understanding their methodology for divination). This 16 part division was unique in the ancient world, the Romans for example had only a four part division of the cosmos. Let me give a practical example of how this affected divination. If a soothsayer was divining lightning, they would partition their immediate area into sixteen sectors, and depending on the direction lightning struck in relation to themselves and the cardinal points, it would correspond to the God governing the particular sector.
In any form of Etruscan soothsaying, wether augury, haruspicy, or lightening divination, the sacred area used by the soothsayer would become a divine microcosm for the 16 part macrocosm of the heavens. In the case of liver divination, in the ritual removal of a sheep's liver, the liver itself transmutes into the larger cosmic households, and one could divine the will of the Gods based on aberrations in certain sectors. We will return to this shortly, but first we must finish explaining the 16 part cosmic division in the Etruscan religious imagination. I’m going to try and keep this as simple as possible.
Basically, in the Etruscan mapping of the heavens, the Gods moved depending on the season. This is something unique to the Etruscan cosmology. Each God in their divine habitation, would move depending on the season. For example, the God Tin could either be in the first, second or third quadrant, depending on what month of the year it was. This had to do with the degree of sunrise movement and direction, the suns path shifting the gods abode. There was a rotation. Again, the entirety of this mechanism is incredibly complex and beyond the scope of this paper.
The same applied for Etruscan temples. The Gods could move from temple to temple, explaining why inscriptions to a temple devoted to a particular God would also include references to a couple others. Because they moved domiciles depending on the season. This complex celestial cosmology is wholly unique in the ancient world. It is far more complicated than this, but you get the gist.
The northern quadrants of the 16 part model were home to the more celestial and therefore powerful gods, while the south held the more nature oriented and weaker Gods. The East was the home of the more benevolent deities, and the west that of the malevolent. So a sign in the North East quadrant was the most auspicious, while one in the North West was the most inauspicious.
Okay, let’s return to Haruspicy. We are lucky enough to have an incredible artifact, called the Liver of Piacenza, which was a 3rd century BC bronze model of a sheep's liver. The liver is divided into several quadrants, each corresponding to a gods habitation. Basically, it was a breakdown of the 16 part cosmic model, grafted onto the liver itself. Remember, microcosm to macrocosm, the liver in the sacred act becomes the divine cosmos. As above, so below. The model liver itself was a teaching tool for young Haruspices. A haruspicy ritual generally went like this: The haruspex kills the goat or sheep and removes the entrails. He first examined the caput iocineris, and if the element was not present, it was a very bad omen. The Haruspex would then examine the visceral side of the liver, mentally dividing the liver up into quadrants reflecting the celestial partition, projecting the macrocosm on the micro. An aberration in a certain gods section would imply a metaphysical causality particular to that gods domain.
I would rather not have this drag on much longer, as we will continue this in Part 2.
The Etruscan Haruspex was feared and revered by the Romans, even hundreds of years after the Etruscan assimilation into Rome. I'm guessing you've heard of the term “Beware the Ides of March.” The ides of March in the Roman religious calendar was the 15th of march. The holiday was sacred to Jupiter, analogous to the Etruscan deity Tin. An Etruscan Haruspex had warned Julius Caesar “Beware the Ides of March!” Well the 15th of March came, and Caesar saw the same Haruspex while walking to the Theater of Pompey. Caesar remarked to the Haruspex, “Well the ides of March have come.” And he responded, “Aye, they are come, but they are not gone.” Hours after, the most famous assassination of all time would come to pass. Forever changing history, precipitating the formation of the most famous empire in all of human history. The point being that the Etruscan Haruspex is fundamentally tied to the mythos of Rome.
What can we learn from such men? Men who believed the all natural phenomena was the shade of a deeper, more meaningful metaphysical truth. Men who had a profound influence on the Later Roman mythical imagination and religiosity.
All of us moderns practicing a similar schizo hermeneutic, our own form of conspiratorial divination, could learn a thing or two from the Etruscans. But what?
Reflect on all of this and then we will continue this discussion in Part 2.
Where can I find part two