Their mythology was composed of Assyrian, Persian, and Egyptian notions, strongly tinged with gloomy superstitions. Petrifactions of the most astonishing forms abound in the plains where they settled. Near Cortona the bones of a whale have been found. The Arno valley resembles a vast elephant burial-place; and the bones of the mastodon, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, are scattered broadcast all over old Etruria, and are still used to fence in the fields. Besides the bones of these huge monsters, those of hyænas, panthers, bears, and wolves are found in such abundance, that the peasants to this very day believe they grew like mushrooms over night, having been sown by invisible spirits to give the poor the trouble of picking them up. The aspect of nature and the remains of an antediluvian world gave the Etruskan priesthood an irresistible sway over the minds of the people. Whilst in Greece, under the influence of a happy aspect of nature, the Indian, Assyrian, and Egyptian embodiments of the forces of nature lost their fearful forms; in Etruria they gained even more gloomy and melancholy figures in the presence of everlasting thunder and lightning, and volcanic disturbances.
The Etruskans had two sets of gods.
a. The veiled gods, with ‘Asar’ at their head, representing the cosmognical forces of nature; especially fire, water, earth, and ether, like the divinities of India and Egypt.
b. Twelve lower divinities presiding over the order of existing and visible things. Their gods have a great resemblance to those of the Scandinavians, uniting in one distinct chain the Aryans on the Ganges, those on the Nile, and those round the Delphic oracle, with the Hyperboreans of the farthest north. They all believed in an ‘inferno,’ only with the Greeks this was an Elysium, a land of shadows, a land of happiness. The divinities of the Etruskans were phantoms of horror. The whole of their creed was devoid of a comforting union between gods and men. This despairing faith impressed the people with a ferocious character. Their art under such impressions never could reach the beautiful. A tribe of whom it has been said that their priests attacked the Romans with hissing serpents and burning torches—a tribe that crouched in fear before invisible gods, and hated every other tribe—could never take an interest in the gentler emotions produced by poetry or art. They remembered the Greek expedition against Thebes, and adorned their burial urns with scenes from the battle at Marathon; they commemorated the heroic deed of a ploughman, who, in the midst of the battle, took up his plough and drove the Persians before him like a flock of frightened sheep, whilst the Greeks remembered the deed in mentioning Echetlos in connection with Marathon, but possessed no record of the fact on any of their monuments. The Etruscans, however, delighted in such scenes. At their funerals they had no dances, but sanguinary fights.
No less than twelve different thunderbolts were known to them. They believed in a thunderbolt of prophecy, one of authority, one of law, one of wish, one of admonition, one of approval, one of help, one of prosperity, one of falsehood, one of plague, one of threats, and one of murder. Every transaction in life, with the best or the worst of mankind, might have been accompanied by an approving or disapproving thunder-clap. They firmly believed the thunderbolts used by the Supreme Deity were all manufactured in the fiery interior of Mount Ætna. They possessed no ritual of the dead like the Egyptians, but a thunderbolt ritual. Every day of the year that brought thunder had its special signification. All the veiled gods, and nine of the secondary gods, had the power of thundering.
Their conception of angry, jealous, persecuting, thundering, and lightning divinities has much in common with the Jewish and Phœnician ideals of the Supreme Deity. This peculiarity the Northerns shared in their conception of Thor. The Etruskan belief, that aërolites were thunderbolts sent by the angels against the Titans, has a great analogy with the Persian legends assuming these to have been hurled by the Fervers against the Devas.
Their superior divinities are, like the kings or priests of Persia, Assyria, and Babylon, provided with wings. Jupiter, Diana, Minerva (a kind of female Mercury with the Etruskans, who had wings not only on her shoulders, but also on her feet) and Venus were all winged; others, like Proserpina (Persephone), Amor (Eros), and the Furies, had wings on their heads. White and black winged genii (angels and demons) are plentiful in the subterranean tombs of the old Etruskan town, Tarquinium. According to Dempster, their cars even are often provided with wings. What was a metaphor with the Greeks was turned by the Etruskans into matter-of-fact. Euripides in his ‘Orestes’ speaks of the winged car of Phœbus, and on some Eleusian coins Ceres is seen sitting in a winged car, drawn by two serpents.
From a gloomy contemplation of supernatural matters the Etruskans turned their minds to extremely worldly and practical purposes. They wished to secure their towns and to protect them against real and imaginary monsters, and they constructed excellent walls and most comfortable houses. The ‘cavœdium’ (‘cavum œdium’), with the impluvium and compluvium (the one for collecting and the other for preserving water), was altogether an Etruskan invention, and was called by the Romans who adopted it, Tuscanicum. They constructed temples differing only in some details from those of the Greeks. The cella was generally square; sometimes they had more than one cella; one in the Postica and one in the Antica (the rear and front of the temple). The portico was often filled with columns. The architectural style was a rough and primitive Doric. They never attained the majestic simplicity which distinguished this order in Greece. The columns had a base, were more slender (about fourteen moduli), stood more apart, and supported a wooden roof with clumsily-protruding beams, an unwieldy cornice, and a high pediment.
Cinerary chests they had in abundance with divinities on them, worked in reliefs of a decidedly Egyptian type. They used brazen tablets representing Osiris and Isis. Little clay figures were put into the graves to protect the dead. Amongst these has been found a winged Harpokrates or Horus, with the fore-finger of one hand on his lips, a lotus on his head, and a cornucopia in his other hand.
Their ancient pottery is more in the Egyptian than the Greek style. Their jars represent sphinxes and women; their drinking cups are in the form of human legs, with human faces replacing the knee; some are in the form of Mercury with a pointed, attached beard, like those to be seen in Egyptian divinities. Some of the patterns of their ornamentation, in general as well as in detail, are perfectly Mexican. On one of their lamps we have a winged Kentaur holding a rabbit, whilst four rabbits running after one another, form the spirited ornamentation of the border, intermixed with triangles, rosettes, or solar circles.