Almost everything known about Etruscan belief comes from tombs, because the literature is lost — the Etruscan language survives mainly in funerary inscriptions, and the Roman books about their rites did not come down to us. What did survive is a few thousand painted chambers in Tarquinia, Cerveteri, and elsewhere, and they are unusually direct about death because they were built as places to be dead in.
The early tombs, sixth and fifth centuries BCE, are cheerful in a way that startles visitors. The walls show banquets: couples reclining together on couches, servants pouring, musicians, dancers, hunting, athletics, sometimes the sea. Etruscan women recline alongside the men and are named in the inscriptions with their own family lines, which scandalized Greek writers and tells us something about the society doing the painting. The dead are shown arriving and being greeted by relatives already there. Whatever else the Etruscan afterlife was, it was social, continuous with the household, and equipped.
The personnel are the strange part. Charun — Charu, Karun — is not the Greek Charon with his ferry, though the names are related. He is a demon with blue or greenish flesh, a hooked beak of a nose, pointed animal ears, sometimes tusks and snakes, and he carries a heavy mallet. Scholars still argue what the hammer is for: the blow that ends a life, the mallet that seals the tomb door, or simply an emblem of irreversibility. He is not the ruler of the underworld — that is Aita, with Phersipnai beside him, the Etruscan reading of Hades and Persephone — and he is not a judge. He stands at the door. Beside him is Vanth, a winged female figure with a torch to light the road and a scroll on which the fate is already written. She is not a threat either. She attends, and she witnesses.
This is the point worth holding: an afterlife staffed by frightening beings that nonetheless conducts no trial. Nothing in the Etruscan repertoire weighs a heart, tallies deeds, or divides the dead into the deserving and the damned. The demons do not decide anything; the scroll is already written when Vanth arrives with it.
The mood does change. From the fourth century, in tombs like the Tomb of the Blue Demons and the Tomb of Orcus, the pictures grow darker — more demons, more monsters, more emphasis on the journey and less on the banquet — and scholars have read that shift as Etruscan confidence failing under Roman expansion, or as Greek underworld imagery arriving and taking hold. Both may be true. What is certain is that a culture that spent two centuries painting the dead at dinner spent its last century painting what met them on the road.
