Haruspex
Encyclopedia
In Roman
and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex (plural haruspices; Latin auspex, plural auspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination
called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animal
s, especially the liver
s of sacrificed sheep
and poultry
. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning
strikes, of the flight of birds (augur
y), and of other natural omen
s. Practitioners during the period of Roman dominance gradually adopted the title auspex
from the older word haruspex, or from the Latin avis (bird) and specere or spectare (to look/see).
Being a specific form of the general practice of extispicy
, haruspicy is not original to Etruscans nor Romans
. Rather, it is now considered to have originated from the Near East
where one would once find Hittites
and Babylonia
ns performing similar rites with entrails
and producing comparable stylized models of the sheep's liver.
ns deemed the liver of special sheep the means to discover the will of the gods. The priest, called a bārû, was specially trained to interpret the "signs" of the liver. The liver was divided into sections with each section representing a particular deity.
The Nineveh
library texts name more than a dozen liver-related terms and before cuneiform
writing was even deciphered, hints of the existence of Babylonian hepatoscopy were recorded in the Bible
. One Babylonian clay model of a sheep's liver, dated between 2050 and 1750 BC, is conserved in the British Museum
. The model was used for omen divination which was important to Mesopotamian medicine. This study was carried out by priests and seers who looked for signs in the stars, or in the organs of sacrificed animals, to tell them things about a patient’s illness. Wooden pegs were placed in the holes of the clay tablet to record features found in a sacrificed animal's liver. The priest or seer then used these features to predict the course of a patient's illness.
Haruspicy was part of a larger study of organs for the sake of divination, called extispicy, paying particular attention to the positioning of the organs and their shape. There are many records of different peoples using the liver and spleen of various domestic and wild animals to forecast weather. There are hundreds of ancient architectural objects, labyrinths composed of cobblestones in the northern countries that are considered to be a model of the intestines of the sacrificial animal, i.e. the colon of ruminants.
sculpture
of a liver called the "Piacenza Liver" was discovered in 1877—and dating to c. 100 BC—near the town of Piacenza
in northern Italy
, complete with the name of regions marked on it which were assigned to various gods
. It has been connected to the practice of haruspicy. By 1900, a professor of anatomy, Ludwig Stieda, sought to compare this artifact with a Mesopotamian one dated to a millennium earlier.
Etruscan haruspicy probably reached Etruria
via the Hittites
, perhaps because the Etruscans originated in Asia Minor
. The art of haruspicy was taught in the Libri Tagetici, a collection of texts attributed to Tages
, a childlike being who figures in Etruscan mythology
, and who was discovered in an open field by Tarchon
.
. It was a haruspex, Spurinna, who warned Julius Caesar to beware the Ides of March. The emperor Claudius
was a student of Etruscan
and opened a college to preserve and improve their art, which lasted until the reign of Theodosius I
. Further evidence has been found of haruspices in Bath, England where the base of a statue was inscribed to honour a god
for a haruspex.
", the third of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
.
Christopher Priest's story "I, Haruspex" set in a Europe on the brink of the Second World War deals with a haruspex fighting off an invasion of earth by the forces of Hell
.
"Heiruspecs
" is the (purposefully misspelled) name of a hip-hop group from Minnesota.
Ben Kane's series of novels about "The Forgotten Legion" (the second part of the series is "The Silver Eagle") features Tarquinius, an Etruscan haruspex, who trains the central character Romulus, an unrecognized bastard son of Julius Caesar
, in the art of soothsaying. Set in the latter half of the first century BC during the Roman civil war after the first triumvirate fell apart, the hero Romulus is a survivor of Crassus
's defeat at Carrhae
and uses haruspicy to survive and reunite with his twin sister.
The Maryland rock band Clutch
refers to 'the false haruspex' in the song "Never Be Moved" and the 'Haruspectre General' in the song "Minotaur", from the albums "Robot Hive" and "Strange Cousins From the West," respectively.
In the video game Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
Haruspex is the character class name for a player who selects "Hunting" and "Dream Mastery" as their primary and secondary masteries.
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex (plural haruspices; Latin auspex, plural auspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination
Divination
Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic standardized process or ritual...
called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animal
Animal sacrifice
Animal sacrifice is the ritual killing of an animal as part of a religion. It is practised by many religions as a means of appeasing a god or gods or changing the course of nature...
s, especially the liver
Liver
The liver is a vital organ present in vertebrates and some other animals. It has a wide range of functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and production of biochemicals necessary for digestion...
s of sacrificed sheep
Domestic sheep
Sheep are quadrupedal, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name "sheep" applies to many species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries...
and poultry
Poultry
Poultry are domesticated birds kept by humans for the purpose of producing eggs, meat, and/or feathers. These most typically are members of the superorder Galloanserae , especially the order Galliformes and the family Anatidae , commonly known as "waterfowl"...
. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning
Lightning
Lightning is an atmospheric electrostatic discharge accompanied by thunder, which typically occurs during thunderstorms, and sometimes during volcanic eruptions or dust storms...
strikes, of the flight of birds (augur
Augur
The augur was a priest and official in the classical world, especially ancient Rome and Etruria. His main role was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds: whether they are flying in groups/alone, what noises they make as they fly, direction of flight and what kind of...
y), and of other natural omen
Omen
An omen is a phenomenon that is believed to foretell the future, often signifying the advent of change...
s. Practitioners during the period of Roman dominance gradually adopted the title auspex
Auspex (disambiguation)
Auspex is a defunct computer company of the United States.Auspex is a French metal band.Auspex may also refer to:* Auspice, a diviner who reads omens from the flight of birds....
from the older word haruspex, or from the Latin avis (bird) and specere or spectare (to look/see).
Being a specific form of the general practice of extispicy
Extispicy
Extispicy is the practice of using anomalies in animal entrails to predict or divine future events. Organs inspected include the liver, intestines, and lungs. The animal used for extispicy must often be ritually pure and slaughtered in a special ceremony.The practice was first common in ancient...
, haruspicy is not original to Etruscans nor Romans
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
. Rather, it is now considered to have originated from the Near East
Near East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
where one would once find Hittites
Hittites
The Hittites were a Bronze Age people of Anatolia.They established a kingdom centered at Hattusa in north-central Anatolia c. the 18th century BC. The Hittite empire reached its height c...
and Babylonia
Babylonia
Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia , with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged as a major power when Hammurabi Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged as...
ns performing similar rites with entrails
Gastrointestinal tract
The human gastrointestinal tract refers to the stomach and intestine, and sometimes to all the structures from the mouth to the anus. ....
and producing comparable stylized models of the sheep's liver.
Babylonian haruspicy
The Babylonians were famous for hepatoscopy. The liver was considered the source of the blood and hence the base of life itself. From this belief, the MesopotamiaMesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
ns deemed the liver of special sheep the means to discover the will of the gods. The priest, called a bārû, was specially trained to interpret the "signs" of the liver. The liver was divided into sections with each section representing a particular deity.
The Nineveh
Nineveh
Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and capital of the Neo Assyrian Empire. Its ruins are across the river from the modern-day major city of Mosul, in the Ninawa Governorate of Iraq....
library texts name more than a dozen liver-related terms and before cuneiform
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
writing was even deciphered, hints of the existence of Babylonian hepatoscopy were recorded in the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
. One Babylonian clay model of a sheep's liver, dated between 2050 and 1750 BC, is conserved in the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
. The model was used for omen divination which was important to Mesopotamian medicine. This study was carried out by priests and seers who looked for signs in the stars, or in the organs of sacrificed animals, to tell them things about a patient’s illness. Wooden pegs were placed in the holes of the clay tablet to record features found in a sacrificed animal's liver. The priest or seer then used these features to predict the course of a patient's illness.
Haruspicy was part of a larger study of organs for the sake of divination, called extispicy, paying particular attention to the positioning of the organs and their shape. There are many records of different peoples using the liver and spleen of various domestic and wild animals to forecast weather. There are hundreds of ancient architectural objects, labyrinths composed of cobblestones in the northern countries that are considered to be a model of the intestines of the sacrificial animal, i.e. the colon of ruminants.
Etruscan haruspicy
The Etruscans were also well known for the practice of divining by the entrails of sheep. A bronzeBronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
of a liver called the "Piacenza Liver" was discovered in 1877—and dating to c. 100 BC—near the town of Piacenza
Piacenza
Piacenza is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Piacenza...
in northern Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, complete with the name of regions marked on it which were assigned to various gods
Pantheon (gods)
A pantheon is a set of all the gods of a particular polytheistic religion or mythology.Max Weber's 1922 opus, Economy and Society discusses the link between a...
. It has been connected to the practice of haruspicy. By 1900, a professor of anatomy, Ludwig Stieda, sought to compare this artifact with a Mesopotamian one dated to a millennium earlier.
Etruscan haruspicy probably reached Etruria
Etruria
Etruria—usually referred to in Greek and Latin source texts as Tyrrhenia—was a region of Central Italy, an area that covered part of what now are Tuscany, Latium, Emilia-Romagna, and Umbria. A particularly noteworthy work dealing with Etruscan locations is D. H...
via the Hittites
Hittites
The Hittites were a Bronze Age people of Anatolia.They established a kingdom centered at Hattusa in north-central Anatolia c. the 18th century BC. The Hittite empire reached its height c...
, perhaps because the Etruscans originated in Asia Minor
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
. The art of haruspicy was taught in the Libri Tagetici, a collection of texts attributed to Tages
Tages
Tages was a founding prophet of Etruscan religion who is known from reports by Latin authors of the late Roman republic and Roman empire. He revealed a cosmic view of divinity and correct methods of ascertaining divine will concerning events of public interest. Divination was undertaken in Roman...
, a childlike being who figures in Etruscan mythology
Etruscan mythology
The Etruscans were a diachronically continuous population, with a distinct language and culture during the period of earliest European writing, in the Mediterranean Iron Age in the second half of the first millennium BC...
, and who was discovered in an open field by Tarchon
Tarchon
In Etruscan mythology, Tarchon and his brother, Tyrrhenus, were culture heroes who founded the Etruscan Federation of twelve cities, the Dodecapoli. One author, Joannes Laurentius Lydus, distinguishes two legendary persons named Tarchon, the Younger and his father, the Elder...
.
Roman haruspicy
Haruspicy continued to be practised throughout the history of the Roman EmpireRoman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
. It was a haruspex, Spurinna, who warned Julius Caesar to beware the Ides of March. The emperor Claudius
Claudius
Claudius , was Roman Emperor from 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he was the son of Drusus and Antonia Minor. He was born at Lugdunum in Gaul and was the first Roman Emperor to be born outside Italy...
was a student of Etruscan
Etruscan language
The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...
and opened a college to preserve and improve their art, which lasted until the reign of Theodosius I
Theodosius I
Theodosius I , also known as Theodosius the Great, was Roman Emperor from 379 to 395. Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire. During his reign, the Goths secured control of Illyricum after the Gothic War, establishing their homeland...
. Further evidence has been found of haruspices in Bath, England where the base of a statue was inscribed to honour a god
Deity
A deity is a recognized preternatural or supernatural immortal being, who may be thought of as holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, and respected by believers....
for a haruspex.
Popular culture
"Haruspicate or scry" is part of a line in "The Dry SalvagesThe Dry Salvages
"The Dry Salvages" is the third poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and marks the beginning of when the series was consciously being formed as a set of four poems. It was written and published in 1941 during the air-raids on Great Britain, an event that threatened him while giving lectures in the...
", the third of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
Four Quartets
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, "Burnt Norton", was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral...
.
Christopher Priest's story "I, Haruspex" set in a Europe on the brink of the Second World War deals with a haruspex fighting off an invasion of earth by the forces of Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
.
"Heiruspecs
Heiruspecs
Heiruspecs is a live rap/hip hop band based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, specifically the Midway neighborhood. The band's name is based on a deliberate misspelling of haruspex.Their album, 10 Years Strong, was released in December of 2007...
" is the (purposefully misspelled) name of a hip-hop group from Minnesota.
Ben Kane's series of novels about "The Forgotten Legion" (the second part of the series is "The Silver Eagle") features Tarquinius, an Etruscan haruspex, who trains the central character Romulus, an unrecognized bastard son of Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....
, in the art of soothsaying. Set in the latter half of the first century BC during the Roman civil war after the first triumvirate fell apart, the hero Romulus is a survivor of Crassus
Marcus Licinius Crassus
Marcus Licinius Crassus was a Roman general and politician who commanded the right wing of Sulla's army at the Battle of the Colline Gate, suppressed the slave revolt led by Spartacus, provided political and financial support to Julius Caesar and entered into the political alliance known as the...
's defeat at Carrhae
Battle of Carrhae
The Battle of Carrhae, fought in 53 BC near the town of Carrhae, was a major battle between the Parthian Empire and the Roman Republic. The Parthian Spahbod Surena decisively defeated a Roman invasion force led by Marcus Licinius Crassus...
and uses haruspicy to survive and reunite with his twin sister.
The Maryland rock band Clutch
Clutch (band)
Clutch is an American rock band from Germantown, Maryland, formed in 1990. The band's first release was an EP entitled Pitchfork, which debuted in October 1990. Their first studio album, Transnational Speedway League, was released three years later in 1993. To date, Clutch has released nine studio...
refers to 'the false haruspex' in the song "Never Be Moved" and the 'Haruspectre General' in the song "Minotaur", from the albums "Robot Hive" and "Strange Cousins From the West," respectively.
In the video game Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
Titan Quest: Immortal Throne is an action RPG developed by Iron Lore Entertainment. It is the first expansion pack to the 2006 RPG hit, Titan Quest...
Haruspex is the character class name for a player who selects "Hunting" and "Dream Mastery" as their primary and secondary masteries.
External links
- Haruspices, article in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities
- Figurine of Haruspex, 4th Cent. B.C. Vatican Museums Online, Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Room III