The Etruscan Books of the Underworld

On the wall of a painted tomb at Tarquinia, a blue-grey figure with a mallet stands near the door. Other tombs in the same style name him: Charun. He is not a torturer. His job is to see that the dead man gets where he is going.

The Etruscans wrote down what happened on that journey, and what a family could do to change its outcome. They wrote it in books. Every one of those books is gone, and the most detailed thing anyone ever quoted from them was quoted in order to laugh at it.

The third shelf

Etruscan religion came, by its own account, as a revealed body of knowledge: handed over by Tages, a child with the wisdom of an old man who was ploughed up out of a field near Tarquinia, and by a prophetic figure called Vegoia. The Romans called the whole system the Etrusca disciplina and took it seriously enough to keep consulting Etruscan priests for eight centuries.

Roman writers sorted the texts into groups. The libri haruspicini covered reading the organs of sacrificed animals, the practice the bronze model of a sheep's liver from Piacenza was a training aid for. The libri fulgurales covered lightning: which god had thrown a given bolt, and what the strike obliged you to do about it. The libri rituales covered everything else, including the founding of cities, the ordering of the people, and the disposition of the dead. Inside that last group sat a subdivision the sources call the libri Acherontici, the Books of Acheron, named for a river of the underworld.

Blood for immortality

Here is what those books are supposed to have promised, and almost the whole of it comes from one paragraph. Around 300 CE a rhetoric teacher named Arnobius, from Sicca in North Africa, converted to Christianity and wrote a long attack on the old religion called Adversus Nationes. In the second book he says that in the Acherontic books of Etruria there is a teaching: offer the blood of certain animals to certain named gods, and the souls of the dead are made divine, lifted clear of the law of mortality.

Arnobius brings it up to sneer. To him, the idea that you can buy godhood for a corpse with a list of animal sacrifices is a perfect example of how absurd his opponents' beliefs are. He is not trying to preserve the doctrine. He is trying to bury it, and he happens to be the best surviving witness to what it said.

The gods it produced had a label. Servius, annotating Virgil about a century later, refers to di animales: gods that had once been human souls, made divine by ritual. He credits the scheme to Cornelius Labeo, an antiquarian of the third century CE who wrote on Etruscan and Roman religion. Labeo's books are also lost.

Every link in the chain is late

Line the witnesses up and the trouble is obvious. Arnobius is writing roughly three hundred years after Etruscan died as a spoken language, and he is hostile. His source is probably Labeo, writing centuries after the Etruscan priesthood's heyday and suspected of blending genuine Etruscan material with the Neoplatonist ideas about the soul that were current in his own lifetime. Servius is later still.

So the honest answer is that we do not know how much of the Books of Acheron, as Arnobius describes them, is Etruscan, and how much is a Roman-era reconstruction wearing an Etruscan name. Scholars divide on it. Some read the transformation-of-the-soul material as broadly consistent with what Etruscan tombs actually show, and treat it as a real strand of the religion. Others put more weight on the Labeo filter and the Greek philosophical vocabulary, and suspect the tidy doctrine owes as much to the third century CE as to the fifth century BCE.

What the walls show

The painted tombs are the one check we have that does not run through a Roman book. From about 400 BCE the imagery gets darker. The one Etruscan religious book that physically survived, the linen calendar now in Zagreb, is a schedule of offerings and tells us nothing about the fate of the soul, so the walls have to carry it.

The Tomb of Orcus at Tarquinia shows Aita and Phersipnai, the Etruscan lord and lady of the dead, enthroned and receiving arrivals. The Tomb of the Blue Demons has a boat drawn up and waiting. The François Tomb at Vulci puts a scene from the Iliad on its wall: Achilles cutting the throats of Trojan prisoners over the grave of Patroclus, with the winged death-spirit Vanth standing calmly beside him, as though blood spilled for the dead were an ordinary transaction rather than a war crime Homer flagged as one. That is the single point where the tomb painting and Arnobius's sentence seem to touch. Blood, given to the dead, doing something.

What is left

We can read the demons' names off the plaster. We have the outline of the disciplina from Roman authors who used its rules for weather and boundaries and kept its priests on call. What we do not have is one line of a liber Acheronticus quoted directly, in Etruscan or in any language. The longest passage anyone ever set down is the sentence Arnobius included to prove the whole thing was a joke.