Searching via Google for a better pic of the Etruscan daemons on the Sarcophagus of Hasti Afunei at Palermo, the engine took me to your post here, which I find most interesting.
If you go to AncientWorlds and the Etruria group, or directly to home page under the persona SinUtnapishtim, you will find several recent posts by me on Charun & Vanth.
I'm still looking for some decent pics or articles online of the recent discoveries of the Quadriga tomb & its demons.
Do you know of any besides the head detail from Discovery?
cheers
Win
I have a post especially on the Charun & Vanth beside the tomb entrance that you show, tough my illustration is from the wonderful NG article that shows the two children about to enter the tomb.
I have a query about your statement here that Vanth is shown with eyes inside her wings. In my essay at the URL address I mention Charun's "all-seeing, Big Brother eye," but not Vanth's. And though I've seen many references to eyes on her wings, I have yet to see one. I'm beginning to suspect that online encyclopedia articles that claim this feature are recycling each other. Can you tell me where I can find one?
Yours,
Sin/Win
Sin Utnapishtim,
Very informatic articles ... thank you ... i'll return to your questions soon (just busy with a couple of boring jobs). So visit here in the next few days.
Posted by: Reza at December 1, 2004 02:14 PMThanks, Reza:
I see your eye was caught by Vanth's torch. My major post in the ETRURIA group at AncientWorlds is "Charun & Thanatos: Axe or Hammer, Sword or Torch" and gives my "final solution" to a controversy among, and with, Etruscan archeologists on whether Charun carries a double-edged axe or hammer, and whether the other demon's object is a sword or torch. I have several pics and paragraphs in this article on the Greek & Roman death god Thanatos that confirm it is a torch, but raise the new question, why Vanth is almost always shown with her torch upright and flaming, as your detail pic shows.
Cheers,
Win/Sin
By the way: I do believe that the discovery of the new tomb, the so-called Tomb of the Infernal Quadriga, is genuinely Etruscan and not, as you suggest, a modern forgery. But the discoverers seem to be taking special pains to hide its details from the prying eyes of tourists and rival
scholars until they can "publish" first -- a ritual on which their reputations & livelihoods depend!
Thanks I actually read your articles ... just a misunderstanding: I didn’t suggest that the piece is a modern forgery (my archeologist friend imagined it is a modern piece) but of course, the mysterious atmosphere all belongs to Etruscans who were on the verge of collapse; I’m not an expert in Etruscans but at least I have studied the archeology and culture of ancient Persia and Mesopotamia: IMHO, the decline period of the Etruscans which is all infested by demons and avatars of the Outside is shocking similar to the decline period of Babylonia and Assyria. More on your informatic materials soon.
Posted by: Reza at December 1, 2004 04:19 PMSorry I wrongly suggested Reza suggested the Etruscan fresco was a modern forgery. Not so. Rereading the article, I see it was implied that the archeologist friend wondered if it were one.
As for all the fuss about the demonic shade or shadow behind his/her red-haired head, I have no ideas -- yet. The latter's face, however, is much too regular and clean to be Charun's, almost always (?) portrayed as grizzled, bearded, and hook-nosed.
In the famous, puzzling mural in the Tomb of the Blue Demons, a winged red-haired demon with snakes is facing, and, seemingly, about to ward off, a truly evil-looking, black-skinned demon rushing toward the newly-deceased arrivals in the Underworld. And the interpretation of THAT pair remains a mystery. One I'm working on.
Winslow Shea/aka Sin Utnapishtim @ AncientWorlds
While I am writing these comments here in Miami, Florida, around 11 AM, I see the posts here are after 4pm. So this site must be somewhere in Europe, right?
From there, things must look really weird over here, right now, with our newly recrowned Emperor of the World loved by his admirers, the Evangelicals who believe that the milennium must be soon and that they will soon witness the defeat of the Anti-Christ and their own Rapture, where "No Child (of true Faith, at least), will be left behind."
Since you guys are somewhat interested in the occult, you might be interested to visit, perhaps by way of the red-haired demon in the Infernal Quadriga, in these ways in which ancient people's believed, and portrayed themselves as, getting into heaven or hell (neither of them too far off!:
[Ways to Heaven: by ladder, winged horse, winged chariot, eagle.
(Or levitation)]
< Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans. New York: Dover Books, 1969.
< Lecture VI: Eschatology
p 101
2. This brings us to the second question which we have set before ourselves: How did souls rise to the stars? It may be said that originally they made use of every method of locomotion: they ascended to heaven on foot, on horseback, in carriages, and they even had recourse to aviation. Among the ancient Egyptians the firmament was conceived as being so close to the mountains of the earth that it was possible to climb up to it witb the aid of a ladder. Although the stars had been relegated ated to an infinite distance in space, the ladder still survIved m Roman paganism as an amulet and as a symbol. Many people continued to place in tombs a small bronze ladder which recalled the naive beliefs of distant ages; and in the mysteries of Mithra a ladder of seven steps, made of seven .different metals, still symbolised the passage of the soul across the planetary spheres.
Though it had become difficult to reach heaven on foot, it was still possible to get there on horseback, on the back of a winged horse. Thus the large cameo of Paris called "The Apotheosis of Augustus," represents a prince of his house, Germanicus or Marcellus, borne by a "Pegasus," which doubtless has no connection with Bellerophon's mount. Sometimes a Griffin is preferred to Pegasus: the monster flies heavenwards carrying on its sturdy back the deceased raised to the level of the gods. The dead, however, more frequently travelled in a car, --the car of the Sun. The idea that the divine charioteer drives a team across the heavenly fields existed in very early times in Syria as well as in Babylon, Persia, and Greece. The horses of fire and the chariot of fire, which carried up the prophet Elijah in a whirlwind, are very probably the horses and chariot of the Sun. In the same way, when Mithra's mission on earth was fulfilled, he had been conveyed in the chariot of Helios to the celestial spheres over the ocean, and the happy lot which the hero had won for himself he granted also to bis followers. The Emperors in particular were commonIy reputed to become companions of the Sun-god after death, as they had been his protégés in life, and to be conducted by him in his chariot up to the summit of the eternal vaults.
Finally, there is a very wide-spread belief of Syrian origin [p102]
that souls fly to heaven on the back of an eagle.1 According to the story, Etana in Babylon, like Ganymede in Greece, had been carried off in tbis way. The pious shared tbis bappy lot. This is wby the eagle is used as the ordinary decorative motif on sepulchral stelae at Hierapolis, the holy city of tbe great Syrian goddess, and it appears with the same meaning in the West. At the funeral rites of Emperors at Rome there was I always fastened to the top of the pyre on which the corpse was to be consumed, an eagle, wbich was supposed to bear aloft tbe monarch's soul, and art frequently represents the busts of the Cresars resting on an eagle in the act of taking flight, by way of suggesting their apotheosis. The reason is that in the East the eagle is tbe bird of the Baals, solar gods, and it carries to its master those who have been his servants in the world below.
All these supposed methods of reaching heaven are very primi!ive: they start from the supposition that a load has to be carried; they hardly imply a separation of bod and sou1, and they are anterior to the distinctions which pbilosophers established between different parts of man's being. They are religious survivals of very ancient conceptions, which only vulgar minds still interpreted literally.
[Levitation]
The same idea is involved when magicians by secret proIcesses professed to assure the credulous of the possibility of raising themselves upwards. If we are to believe Arnobius, they asserted that they could cause wings to grow from the backs of their dupes, so as to enable them to fly up to the stars. One of the wonders which miracle-mongers most frequently boasted of working was that of soaring up into the air. The phenomena of levitation are produced at all periods. Tbe power which magic professed to bestow on its adepts, is merely one particular application of this art to eschatology or rather deification (apothanaomós). Of this tbe papyrus erroneously called a "Mithraic liturgy" is the most typical example.3
These mechanical means of raising oneself, body and soul, 103
to the starry vault...."
________
1 For further details see my paper "L'aigle funéraire des Syriens et l'apothéose des empereurs" (Revue de l'histoire des religions), 1910.
2 Arnob., Ad v. Nat., ii, 33, 62 (p. 65, 5; 97,27, Reifferscheid).
3 Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1910, compare my Oriental Religions (1911), p. 260.