The Etruscans: A Captivating Guide to the Etruscan Civilization of Ancient Italy That Preceded the Roman Republic by Captivating History

Author:Captivating History [History, Captivating]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6 – Mythology and Religion

Etruscan religion comprised a conglomeration of the religious practices and beliefs of the preceding Iron Age Villanovan culture and the nearby Greeks and Phoenicians. Etruscan religion would additionally share similarities with Roman mythology which developed concurrently and also heavily borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Over time, as the Etruscans found themselves assimilated into the Roman Republic during the late 4th century BCE, their mythology would become part of classical Roman culture since the Romans tended to absorb the local customs and deities of the peoples they conquered.

The Etruscans possessed a system of belief called immanent polytheism. Polytheism refers to the practice of believing in and worshiping more than one god while the immanent part means that visible phenomena were thought to be the manifestations of divine power. For examples, thunder and lightning was the domain of one god and caused directly by that deity while the growth of crops could be the work of another. The Etruscans further believed their deities could influence human affairs and people and could be persuaded, angered, dissuaded, or pleased by the actions of mortals. This ability to potentially influence the gods explains many of the Etruscan rituals and superstitions, as pleasing the deities to convince them to bestow favor was a central part of their culture. After all, an angered deity could cause war, strife, famine, disease, and death.

As usual, the Romans had something to say about the Etruscan religion. Livy described them as the most religious of men, a culture and society based around steadfast worship and theocratic control with a series of learned priests responsible for the well-being of the populace. Others, such as Seneca the Younger—a Roman Stoic philosopher—wrote at one point that the difference between the Romans and the Etruscans was simple:

Whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning.[18]

Here, Seneca the Younger references a crucial part of Etruscan mythology, which was that everything happened for a reason. Nothing in the natural world was meaningless, and all was the work of the gods. When a storm arrived, it possessed a meaning that needed to be interpreted by the proper authorities. If the crops did not grow, then a deity was displeased and needed to be pacified through rituals. Furthermore, such logic did not extend only to major events but even the minutiae of day-to-day life. The wind blows with a purpose and not just because a light breeze came off of the Mediterranean Sea.

However, Roman interpretations of Etruscan religion need to be swallowed with a grain of salt because the two cultures possessed similar yet disparate systems of worship and overarching tenets and beliefs. According to Roman sources, the Etruscans were plagued by a gloomy

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