A Revealed Religion, and What Survives of It

Etruscan religion understood itself as revealed: its sacred science was said to have been disclosed by two prophetic figures, the child-sage Tages, who sprang from a ploughed furrow and taught the art of divination, and the nymph Vegoia, who revealed the lore of boundaries and lightning, and set down in sacred books, the libri of the discipline. Its deep concern with the fate of the dead fills the painted tombs of Tarquinia and other cities with a vivid, sometimes grim underworld and its native demons, Charun and Vanth.

The tragedy for its study is the loss of the Etruscan language: it is only partially understood, written in a script we can read but a tongue we cannot fully translate, so the religion is known chiefly through Roman reports, through art, and through short inscriptions rather than through its own extended texts. Much of what the libri contained is gone, and the religion is reconstructed from the outside as much as read from within.