#voltumna deity

[lostpeace]

Voltumna, an ancient Etruscan deity of death the changing of seasons.

#etruscan mythology #Greek Mythology #voltumna #Persephone #Hades #oc

[taperwolf]

The Algorithm pushed a video at me titled something like "The seven grossest things worshipped by people for some reason", and I was terribly disappointed to discover they meant in video games — because people have absolutely worshipped some gross things! Off the top of my head, there's:

Vertumnus (or Voltumna): the original god of Rome, a vegetation god of the city's primal swamp. He's emphasized, above and beyond other gods, as a shapeshifter; his main surviving myth is about how he turned himself into a repulsive and ancient old woman in order to seduce a dryad. From Ovid: "Vertumnus' hot kisses ill suit an old woman's disguise"

Priapus, Greek god of fertility, consistently portrayed as a misshapen, deformed man who is just swingin' pipe; in most depictions, his penis is actually the largest of his limbs

Sterquilinus, another early Roman god, considered possibly an aspect of Saturn, who is sometimes delicately described as the god of odors; his name comes from the Latin "stercus", which means manure — yes, this is the god of poop

Glycon, a serpent god worshipped by a large cult in second century Rome, and by Alan Moore today. Lucian wrote at the time that the Glycon cult was a grift by its prophet, Alexander of Abonoteichos, and that the vast and terrifying serpent that the cult was worshipping was, in fact, a hand puppet. (Moore says that that's exactly what makes Glycon a good god to worship, as he is "not likely to start believing that glove puppet created the universe or anything dangerous like that.")

Tokoyo-no-kami, a caterpillar enshrined in 644 CE by shaman Ōube-no-Ō, with the usual promises that if you gave the insect all your money, the poor would become rich and the old become young. Ōube-no-Ō was soon shut down by the local lord Hata-no-Kawakatsu, and the cult immediately switched to worshipping Kawakatsu; after all, what better proof of great divinity could there be than defeating Tokoyo-no-kami?

Ah Puch, Maya god of death, a decomposing corpse with exposed ribs and spine, and whose alternate title is Kisin, the Flatulent

The video mentioned, of course, Cthulhu, and there are people out there — mostly various flavors of chaos magicians and offshoots of the Church of Satan — who claim to worship the various Lovecraftian deities and aliens

(And of course there's that obscure deity that's somehow three people but only one god, who is explicitly beyond comprehension, who despite being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent still created puppy cancer and fish that swim up your urethra, ordered such thorough genocides that even the victims' farm animals had to be killed, and will condemn you to eternal firey punishment if you don't worship — correctly — the person of him that he impregnated a 14 year old girl with.)

#religion #mythology #gods #yes that last bit is a cheap shot

[dwellordream]

“Perhaps the most arresting thing about the Etruscans was their language. Etruscan is a language isolate – it doesn’t appear to be related to any other known language (there is occasionally some very technical debate on this point, but not any that will affect what I am going to say here). All of the other languages of pre-Roman Italy (not counting any Phoenicians who had large settlements in Sicily; Sicily was not considered part of ‘Italy’ by the Romans) are members of the Indo-European language family, which spread out (probably through a series of migrations) from the eastern Pontic Steppe perhaps around 3000 BC or so, reaching Italy around 1000 BC.

The Etruscan language – and we may assume the ancestors of the Etruscans themselves – were probably already there when Indo-European arrived; for whatever reasons the Etruscans kept their language and evidently control of their homeland. Consequently, the Romans, linguistically speaking, were more closely related to (Old) Persian and Hindi speakers – both Indo-European languages – than they were to the Etruscans.

Etruscan religion was also distinct. A lot of Indo-European-speaking cultures share some basic mythological elements (linguistically reconstructed backwards to a lost proto-Indo-European religion), but Etruscan religion was a blend of indigenous non-Indo-European religious elements with syncretically adapted Greek and Italic elements (as we’ve discussed, polytheistic religions are very good at this kind of adaption. According to Varro, the supreme god of the pantheon was Voltumna (also called Veltha), an underworld deity which the Romans adopted as Vertumnus (Var. De Ling. Lat. 5.46), but which is quite different from the standard set of Indo-European gods.

The Etruscan practice of haruspicy – reading the will of the gods from the entrails of animals – was also clearly distinct and the Romans adopted this too. Even into the first century BC, haruspicy seems to have been a distinctively Etruscan art in Rome and non-Etruscan haruspices were less preferred (though Roman priests practiced augury, divining the will of the gods from birds). Though the extensive later Roman borrowing of elements of Etruscan religion can disguise this, Etruscan religion was quite distinct from Latin and Roman religious practices.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends.”

#bret devereaux #history #etruscan #ancient #who were the romans