- chapter 28: Etruscan religious rituals –
Well-versed, with the aid of special structures or cultic equipment, in honor of the
infernal-catachthonian gods or of the dead themselves, for the benefi t of their souls, the
offerings of blood more than any others had to have the power to “feed” and “reinvigorate”
the spirits of those who had passed over, endowing them with the same principle of
life. And it is in just this “unifi ed revitalizing program,” implemented by separate
sacrifi cial rites, that it connects in itself the multiplicity of forms and designs of Etruscan
funerary cult, with connotations of the initiatory and mystery valences in the Dionysiac
tradition,^135 carried out mainly through the blood-offering, intended to placate with
blood the eternal and inextinguishable “thirst” of the souls of the dead.
RITUAL AND SIGNIFICANCEBuilding on that sort of “mystical fi nality”^136 that seems to spring from the analysis of
the well-known passage of Seneca (Quaest.Nat. 2.32.2),^137 coming to permeate all aspects
of the earthly and otherworldly life of the Etruscan people, we could therefore claim in
this regard that the ritual, understood as religious practice that underlies every action –
and which is itself a performative action – punctuated each stage of the life journey of
man, whether conceived as an individual or as a social community.^138 Warden’s metaphor
of the temple, identifi ed as a “living thing,”^139 is extended to all elements, animate and
inanimate, that make up the social, religious, ideological and political universe of the
Etruscans, united by the fundamental moments of birth and death (of the end and the
beginning), placed under the guardianship of one or more gods.^140
The same principle of life understood, in line with the main Heracleitan philosophical
principles, as a stream in motion of an eternal becoming, then as a continuous cycle of
transformation, is inexorably marked by the stages in which this becoming is articulated,
and each of these phases is accompanied by a ritual. Here van Gennep’s rites of passage,^141
set free and at the same time validated by the two stages of birth and inevitable death, ratify
and regulate all forms of passage, and surging to the parameters with which the whole life
process of becoming is unifi ed. The offering itself, in the dual and often complementary
form of bloodless and bloody offering, is accomplished according to a precise and unalterable
sequence of steps and operations to which its progress and its outcome are shackled. The
“closed” and chained mechanism of the ritual procedure, the ordering principle of the rite
itself, becomes at the same time, the director and guarantor before the deities, refl ecting in
the sacred action that same (divine) order that informs the cosmos.
Man and gods participate equally in the formation of that cosmos, where the sacred
action elevates a key reading of the order based on the dialogue between man and god, of
which the ritual, within which the offering is fulfi lled, becomes the ineffable instrument
of decoding. And it is “essentially in the scrupulous fi delity to the ritual and to the
religious tradition” that comes to reveal itself, that “centrality of the sacred”^142 emerges
solidly “in the Roman vision of the Etruscan culture” and that forms the principal
characteristic of a people who, echoing the very famous words of Livy (5.1.6), “excelled
in the art of cultivating religious practices.”
NOTES1 Warden 2009a: 107.
2 Warden 2011: 55.