Nortia
Nortia is the Latinized name of an Etruscan goddess whose sphere of influence was time, fate, destiny[1] and chance. The Etruscan form was perhaps Nurtia.[2]
Ritual of the nail
Nortia's attribute was a nail,[3] which was driven into a wall within her temple at Volsinii annually to mark the New Year. The Roman historian Livy took note of the ritual:
Cincius, an industrious researcher of antiquarian matters, confirms that at Volsinii nails are in evidence at the temple of the Etruscan goddess Nortia, fixed to mark the number of years.[4]
The ritual seems to "nail down" the fate of the people for the year. H.S. Versnel conjectured that it was associated with the annual meeting of the Etruscan league, and that Nortia's consort could have been Voltumna. The rite is analogous to, or a borrowed precedent for, a similar ritual at Rome originally held in the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, near a statue of Minerva.[5] Nortia may thus have been related to the Etruscan Menerva.[6] At Rome, the goddess Necessitas, the personification of necessity, was also depicted with a nail.[7]
The ritual of the nail illuminates the otherwise puzzling iconography on the back of an Etruscan bronze mirror. Meleager is depicted under the wings of another Etruscan goddess of fate, identified by inscription as Athrpa (the counterpart of the Greek fate goddess Atropos, one of the three Moirai), who holds a hammer in her right hand and a nail in her left. With Meleager is his beloved Atalanta (both names given in the Etruscan spelling), who will be parted by his death in a boar hunt presaged at the top of the composition. Turan and Atunis (the Etruscan Venus and Adonis myth) also appear, as another couple whose love is destroyed by the savagery of the hunt. The hammer ready to drive in the nail symbolizes "the inexorability of human fate."[8]
Evidence
Little or no Etruscan evidence for Nortia survives. She appears a few times in Latin literature. She is mentioned in one of Juvenal's satires and identified with the Roman goddess Fortuna,[9] and Martianus Capella lists her along with other goddesses of fate and chance such as Sors, Nemesis, and Tyche.[10]
A name has been deciphered as possibly Nortia among those of other deities in an inscription found within an Umbrian sanctuary at the Villa Fidelia, Hispellum.[11] The 4th-century writer and consul Avienus, who was from Nortia's seat in Volsinii, addressed the goddess in a devotional inscription:
Nortia, I venerate you, I who sprang from a Volsinian lar,[12] living now at Rome, boosted by the honor of a doubled term as proconsul, crafting many poems, leading a guilt-free life, sound for my age, happy with my marriage to Placida and jubilant about our serial fecundity in offspring. May the spirit be vital for those things that, as arranged by the law of the fates, remain to be carried out.[13]
The ancient location of Volsinii is vexed, and the Etruscan town was refounded by the Romans. At Bolsena, the most likely candidate for the new Volsinii, there is a ruin outside the Florence gate that is known locally as the Tempio di Norzia, but as George Dennis pointed out, no evidence other than the existence of the cult of Nortia supports this identification, and the architecture is Roman.[14]
References
- ^ Massimo Pallottino, "Religion in pre-Roman Italy," in Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 30; Nancy Thomson de Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2006), p. 96 online.
- ^ Erika Simon, "Gods in Harmony: The Etruscan Pantheon," in The Religion of the Etruscans (University of Texas Press, 2006), p. 59.
- ^ For other ritual practices involving a nail, see Curse tablet.
- ^ Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 7.3.7: Volsiniis quoque clavos indices numeri annorum fixos in templo Nortiae, Etruscae deae, comparere diligens talium monumentorum auctor Cincius adfirmat.
- ^ H.S. Versnel, Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman Triumph (Brill, 1970), pp. 274–276, 295 (unless otherwise noted, Versnel provides the primary sources used in this article). This is view is shared by Simon, "Gods in Harmony," p. 53.
- ^ Simon, "Gods in Harmony," p. 59.
- ^ Horace, Carmen 1.35.18 and 3.24.5.
- ^ Simon, "Gods in Harmony," pp. 52–52, with line drawing of mirror on p. 22.
- ^ Scholion to Juvenal, Satire 10.74.
- ^ Martianus Capella 1.88: alii Sortem asserunt Nemesimque nonnulli Tychenque quam plures aut Nortiam.
- ^ Guy Bradley, Ancient Umbria: State, Culture, and Identity in Central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 100 and 201, citing F. Coarelli, "La Romanizacion de Umbria," in La Romanizacion en Occidente, edited by J. Blázquez and J. Alvar (Madrid, 1996), p. 63.
- ^ The lar was a household deity, used here as a metonymy for one's home or place of birth.
- ^ Teuffel, History of Latin Literature (English edition of 1892), vol. 2, p. 362, citing CIL 6.537 (= ILS 2944). See also Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great (University of California Press, 1949, reprinted 1983), pp. 129–130. In Latin:
Nortia, te veneror, lare cretus Vulsiniensi,
Romam habitans, gemin[o] proconsulis auctus honor[e]
carmina multa serens, v[i]tam insons, integer aevum,
coniugio laetus Placidae numeroq[u]e frequenti
natorum exsultans. Vivax sit spiritus ollis
cetera composita fato[r]um lege trahentur.
Text as construed by J. Mangas and D Plácido, Avieno: Ora martima: Descriptio orbis terrae; Phaenomena (Ediciones Historia, 2000), p. 16. - ^ George Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, (London, 1878), vol. 2, p. 24.
External links
- Nortia The Obscure Goddess Online Directory