Aita (mythology)

In Etruscan mythology, Aita was the Etruscan name for the underworld and also the corresponding anthropomorphized deity, borrowed from Greek Hades. Etruscans depicted him as a bearded male wearing a wolfskin cap.

The Etruscans depicted the underworld god Hades, whom they called Aita, with a wolfskin cap, as seen above, with his snake-crowned queen Phersipnei (Persephone) on a famous wall painting from the tomb of Orcus in Volterra, Chiusi, Italy. Between their heads is his name, AITA, in "backward"-reading Etruscan.

Nowhere in Homer, or in Greek art, was Hades depicted in a wolf-skin cap or helmet. But the Greek Hades had a similar helmet, the proverbial "Aidos kune" or "Hades' helmet," created for him by the Cyclops during the war of the Olympian gods against the Titans. That helmet made the wearer invisible ("aidou", hence the name Aides or Hades, "The Invisible" or "Unseen One"). Not even the gods could see its wearer. Athena wore it, says Homer, during the Trojan war to make her invisible, even to Ares (Iliad, Book 5, lines 544-5). And, says Hesiod, Hermes borrowed it and lent it to Perseus, to make him invisible in his fight with the terrible Gorgons (The Shield of Achilles 126).

The Greek word for "helmet" (kune) means "dog's hair," "dog's hide," or "dog's skin." "Hades' helmet" was thus a dog-skin cap. And this the Etruscans turned into the wolf-skin cap or helmet of Aita. Jean-Rene Jannot, in his "La peinture etrusque," says Aita in the Orcus tomb is "covered in the skin" of a hybrid, a "chien loup" or wolf-hound. But most authorities call it a wolf-skin.

On an ash urn from the same period as the tomb painting appears a humanized Aita, bearded and fur-capped, about to lead away into the Underworld the man whose ashes were inside the box, and whose spirit is seen on the outside passing through the portal to the world beyond. He wears the pointed metal cap of a haruspex, a wizard and seer who could foretell the future by reading patterns in the guts of animals or blasts of thunder and bolts of lightning. Now he takes his last farewell from his young wife and baby. (Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, Los Angeles: The J.Paul Getty Museum, 2000, p 342; for the image, see http://www.ancientworlds.net/aworlds_media/ibase_1/00/11/60/00116007_000.jpg)

Above them are two bare-breasted, torch-bearing female demons or "vanths" with snakes in their hair like Phersnipei in the tomb painting. Beside the door is a short-skirted female who could be Culsu, or Vanth herself, guarding the door. One of the overhead vanths points her torch down toward the mother and child.

Aita, Lord of the Dead, strides toward the dead man to take him into the Underworld. He wears a beard and a fur cap, probably a wolfskin cap like that worn by Aita in the tomb painting above. On the right, the death demon Charun, wearing an animal hide, waits with his hammer and a paddle to deal the dead man the coup de grace, while above him is a dog-headed demon.