Templum Digitalis - The Digital Temple

You walk into the dimly lit temple and look upon the various statues of the gods.

Choose which one you want to make an offering to:

To the right, behind the statues, lies a darkened apse where the mystery cults reside. Choose where you want to go:

To the left of the statues is the apse where the Heroön reside. Choose where you want to go:

Honoured figures — Atalanta, Pandora, Paris and Penthesilea — are celebrated in myth, though no hero cult for them is known.

Down a narrow stair lies a small chapel under a painted terracotta roof, where the gods of the Etruscans are kept. Choose one:

One shrine at a time — choosing one leaves the others in peace.

Choose an offering Your name, to be carved on the votive stone (optional — it never leaves your browser):

This page in itself does not do anything, it is your intention that makes the difference. Set your intention and click the button.

Etrusca Disciplina

Beside the chapel, a haruspex in a tall fringed cap sits with the sacred books of the Etruscans: the libri haruspicini on reading entrails, the libri fulgurales on lightning, and the libri rituales on founding cities and the ages of peoples.

The bronze liver

The Liver of Piacenza, a bronze model from about 100 BC, is divided like the sky into regions each named for a god. Ask the haruspex to read a sign.

Reading the lightning

The haruspex faces south, so the east lies on his left. The Etruscans split the sky into sixteen regions: the eight on the eastern, left-hand side were lucky; the eight on the right were not. The sky below is drawn as the haruspex sees it, facing south. Where did you see the lightning?

The thunder calendar

Among the Etruscan books was a calendar of thunder, giving for each day of the year what a thunderclap would foretell. It survives only in Greek, in On Portents by John Lydus, a sixth-century official in Constantinople. He copied it from the Latin of Nigidius Figulus, the scholar and friend of Cicero, who claimed to have translated it word for word from the books of Tages, and who held that it was valid for Rome alone. Its months follow the moon: each begins at a new moon, and the year starts in June, when the sun enters Cancer.

Or choose a day of the moon:

The whole calendar, day by day

Each month counts from a new moon; for today's date the moon is named after the calendar month in which that new moon fell. The short renderings here were made from Lydus' Greek (De Ostentis 27–38, edited by Curt Wachsmuth, 1897). For a full English translation with commentary, see Jean MacIntosh Turfa, Divining the Etruscan World: The Brontoscopic Calendar and Religious Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Tages, Vegoia and the sacred books

Cicero tells how a ploughman at Tarquinia drove his share deep into a furrow and up rose Tages, a child with the wisdom of an old man, who taught the gathered Etruscans the whole discipline before vanishing. The nymph Vegoia revealed the laws of boundaries and warned that whoever moved a boundary stone would be cursed. Their teachings filled the books of the haruspices, now lost — we know them only from Roman and Greek writers.

Tinia's three thunderbolts

Nine gods could hurl lightning, but Tinia had three kinds. The first, a gentle warning, he threw on his own. The second, which could do harm as well as good, needed the advice of the twelve counsellor gods. The third, which destroyed and changed the state of things, he could throw only with the consent of the higher, hidden gods — the dii involuti, the veiled gods.

Spurinna and the Ides of March

The haruspex Spurinna warned Julius Caesar to beware of danger that would come no later than the Ides of March. On the day, Caesar mocked him that the Ides had come; Spurinna answered that they had come, but not yet gone.

The ten saecula of the Etruscans

The Etruscans believed their people had been granted ten saecula, ages measured from birth to the death of the longest-lived person born at their start, each ended by signs from the gods. During games held in Caesar's honour in 44 BC, as a comet blazed overhead, the haruspex Vulcanius announced that the ninth saeculum had ended and the tenth begun — the last. By their own reckoning, the Etruscan ages have run their course.

The last haruspices

Emperor Claudius, who wrote a twenty-volume history of the Etruscans, had the senate protect the order of haruspices. They were still being consulted in AD 408, when some offered to drive off Alaric's Goths from Rome with thunder and lightning. A day-by-day thunder calendar from their books also survives, preserved in Greek by John Lydus in the 6th century.