Di inferi
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The di inferi or dii inferi (Latin, "the gods below")[1] were a shadowy collective of ancient Roman deities associated with death and the underworld.[2] The epithet inferi is also given to the mysterious Manes,[3] a collective of ancestral spirits. The most likely origin of the word Manes is from manus or manis (more often in Latin as its antonym immanis), meaning "good" or "kindly," which was a euphemistic way to speak of the inferi so as to avert their potential to harm or cause fear.[4]
Sacrifices
Thus, victims for public sacrifices were most often domesticated animals that were a normal part of the Roman diet, while offerings of victims the Romans considered inedible, such as horses and puppies, mark a chthonic aspect of the deity propitiated, whether or not the divinity belonged to the underworld entirely. Secret ritual practices characterized as "magic" were often holocausts directed at underworld gods, and puppies were a not uncommon offering, especially to
Festivals and topography
Religious sites and rituals for the di inferi were properly outside the
The rarely raced three-horse chariot (
Arbores infelices
In the
Christian reception
The
List of underworld or chthonic deities
The following list includes deities who were thought to dwell in the underworld, or whose functions mark them as primarily or significantly chthonic or concerned with death. They typically receive nocturnal sacrifices, or dark-colored animals as offerings. Other deities may have had a secondary or disputed chthonic aspect. Rituals pertaining to Mars, particularly in a form influenced by Etruscan tradition, suggest a role in the cycle of birth and death. Mercury moves between the realms of upper- and underworld as a psychopomp. The agricultural god Consus had an altar that was underground, like that of Dis and Proserpina. Deities concerned with birth are often cultivated like death deities, with nocturnal offerings that suggest a theological view of birth and death as a cycle.
The deities listed below are not to be regarded as collectively forming the di inferi, whose individual identities are obscure.
- Dis or Dis pater ("Father Dis"), the Roman equivalent of Greek Plouton, who presided over the afterlife as a divine couple with Proserpina
- Februus, Etruscan god of purification and death, absorbed into the Roman pantheon
- Trivia ("three paths"), an aspect of the triple goddess, along with Luna and Proserpina, adapted in Rome
- Lemures, the malevolent dead
- Libitina, one of the indigitamenta associated with death and the underworld
- Manes, spirits of the dead
- Mana Genita, an obscure underworld goddess who was concerned with infant mortality
- Mater Larum ("Mother of the Lares"), a goddess of obscure identity and underworld associations variously identified as Larunda or Dea Tacita ("Silent Goddess") or Muta "(Mute Goddess)"
- Mors, personification of death
- Nenia Dea, goddess of the funeral lament
- Orcus, an archaic underworld deity whose name was also used for the underworld itself; compare Hades
- Parca Maurtia or Morta, one of the three fates who determines mortality
- Proserpina, daughter of Ceres and queen of the underworld with her husband Dis; also Erecura
- Erebos; deep, shadow and one of the primordial deities.
- Summanus, god of nocturnal thunder who was later identified with Pluto
- Jove
References
- Varro, De lingua latina 6.13.
- ^ Entry on "Death," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 366.
- ^ Tacitus, Annales 13.14: inferos Silanorum manes.
- ^ Robert Schilling, "The Manes," Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 133.
- ^ Varro, Divine Antiquities, book 5, frg. 65.
- ^ John Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," in A Companion to Roman Religion (Blackwell, 2007), p. 271.
- ^ Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," pp. 263–264, 269; Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 357–358; Fritz Graf, "What Is New about Greek Sacrifice?" in Kykeon: Studies in Honour of H.S. Versnel (Brill, 2002), p. 118.
- ^ Auguste Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae (A. Fontemoing, 1904), pp. lxii, xcvi, with examples p. 253; Francisco Marco Simon, "Formae Mortis: El Tránsito de la Muerte en las Sociedades Antiguas (University of Barcelona, 2009), p. 170; Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," p. 269.
- ^ Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," p. 269.
- ^ Frances Hickson Hahn, "Performing the Sacred: Prayers and Hymns," in A Companion to Roman Religion, p. 239.
- ^ A.L. Frothingham, "Vediovis, the Volcanic God," American Journal of Philology 38 (1917), p. 377.
- ^ John H. Humphrey, Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing (University of California Press, 1986), pp. 544, 558; Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, Manuel des Institutions Romaines (Hachette, 1886), p. 549; "Purificazione," in Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (LIMC, 2004), p. 83. See also the Lusus Troiae.
- ^ Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 18.36.
- ^ Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.20, citing the lost work De Ostentario Arborario by Tarquitius Priscus: Arbores quae inferum deorum avertentiumque in tutela sunt, eas infelices nominant: alternum sanguinem filicem, ficum atram, quaeque bacam nigram nigrosque fructus ferunt, itemque acrifolium, pirum silvaticum, pruscum rubum sentesque quibus portenta prodigiaque mala comburi iubere oportet. Modern English identifications by Robert A. Kaster in his translation of the Saturnalia for the Loeb Classical Library.
- ^ Robert A. Kaster, Studies on the Text of Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 48.
- ^ Prudentius, Contra Symmachum I.379–399, II.1086–1132, and V.354; Friedrich Solmsen, "The Powers of Darkness in Prudentius' Contra Symmachum: A Study of His Poetic Imagination," Vigiliae Christianae 19.4 (1965), pp. 238, 240–248.