Turan

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On the back of a polished bronze disc from Vulci, a woman engraved in fine line stands at the center of a crowd of named figures, and beside her — close to her body, where the engraver wanted no doubt about whose company this was — a small winged spirit leans in with a flask of scented oil. The names run around them in the Etruscan hand, read right to left: Hercle, Tinia, Elinai, and among them Turan. The mirror was a thing held in the hand, breathed on, used to dress a face; its reverse carried a whole assembly of the gods. The lady at the center of so many of these scenes, the one the perfume-flask attends, is the Etruscan power of love.

The lady of love among the Tyrrhenian gods

Turan is the goddess of love and desire, of beauty and fertility, and of the vitality that quickens a living body. She belongs to the high company of the Etruscan pantheon, named beside the sky-king Tinia, the sovereign queen Uni, and the armed wisdom Menrva, and like them she is one of the powers the Etruscans figured most often in their art. Where the other great goddesses govern sovereignty and craft and war-wisdom, Turan governs the bond between lovers and the bloom of the body — the appetite that draws one person toward another, and the health and fertility that come with it.

Her name itself carries a shade of mastery. The reading most often offered connects Turan to a pre-Greek root behind the word for an absolute ruler — so that the name would mean something like “the mistress,” “the lady,” the one who holds sway. The reading is a philologist’s inference, not a certainty, for the Etruscan language is recovered word by word and resists confident etymology; but it suits a goddess who, on the engraved scenes, presides. Votive inscriptions from her cult call her Turan ati — Mother Turan — a title that sets her, in the Etruscan reckoning, among the goddesses who give and protect life.

She is among the most frequently named and pictured of all the Etruscan deities on the engraved bronze mirrors, the medium that is her chief witness. Female powers — Turan and Menrva above all — fill the mirror-backs, and Turan’s domain made her especially apt for the object: a goddess of beauty engraved on the instrument of the toilette. In the earlier and later engravings she stands richly robed and jeweled; under the spread of Hellenistic taste, in the third and second centuries before the common era, she comes to be shown nude or half-draped, in the manner the Greek world had made standard for its own goddess of love.

That Greek goddess, and her Roman counterpart, stand behind every modern attempt to place Turan. In the reckoning of the Greeks she answered to Aphrodite; in the Roman reckoning she answered to Venus, the goddess of love and generation whom the Romans would in time crown with their own elaborate cult. The Etruscans themselves drew the equation: their artists, retelling the Greek stories of the gods on the mirror-backs, set Turan into the scenes where a Greek would have set Aphrodite, and her votaries spoke of her in terms a Roman would later recognize in Venus the mother, the bringer-forth. But the equation is a comparison, not an identity. Turan is not Venus in Etruscan dress. She is a power of the Tyrrhenian world with her own birds, her own winged ministers, her own place in the calendar and the cities — known on her own monuments before any Roman antiquarian came to name her.

The winged spirits, the swan, and the dove

What sets Turan apart in the engraved scenes, more than her own figure, is the small society of winged women who move about her. These are the Lasas — Lasa in the singular — a class of minor female spirits who attend the great goddess and serve as the ministers of love. They are shown youthful, often naked, lightly winged, and they carry the apparatus of beauty and of the rite of dressing: the alabastron, the slender flask of perfumed oil; the wreath; the mirror itself. In a toilette scene a Lasa kneels to help the goddess robe and adorn; in a scene of courtship or marriage she hovers at the edge, a presence at once decorative and charged. Individual Lasas bear their own names on the mirrors — Achavisur, Alpan, Zipna, and others — so that the class shades into a roster of distinct attendant powers, each a small figure of grace and of fate at the threshold of love.

The Lasa is one of the most graceful inventions of Etruscan religious art, and one of the most particular to it. She is no Greek borrowing tidily explained; she is a native figure, the genius of perfume and adornment given wings. The name Lasa itself is Etruscan and has no clean Greek or Latin equivalent, which is part of why the spirits resist easy translation into the categories of Greek myth — they are not quite the Erotes, the winged boy-loves of the Greek scenes, nor quite the Graces, nor quite the Fates, but something of the Etruscan world’s own devising, female where the Greek love-spirits are male, and bearing the homely instruments of the toilette rather than the bow. Through her, love in the Etruscan imagination acquires a retinue — a court of small winged women who carry the oil-flask and the wreath, who attend the goddess at her glass and the bride at her dressing, and who hover, as fate hovers, over the moment two lives are joined. To picture Turan fully is to picture this company around her. The same winged figures spill beyond Turan’s circle onto mirrors and other objects that have nothing to do with her, so that the Lasa becomes a kind of free presence in Etruscan art, a sign of grace and of the charged threshold; but it is in attendance on the goddess of love that she is most at home, and most herself.

To the goddess herself belong the birds of love. The swan is hers above all — named on the mirrors Tusna, “the swan of Turan” — and with the swan she is given the dove and the goose, the soft, paired, amorous birds that the engravers set beside her as her creatures. The swan in particular became almost a sign of her presence: where it appears at a goddess’s feet or in her hand, the scene declares itself Turan’s. These are the same birds the Greeks and Romans gave to their own love-goddess, and here the shared symbol marks a real kinship of conception across the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean — the dove and the swan as the natural emblems of desire — even as the goddess they attend keeps her Etruscan name.

Turan moves through the Greek love-stories as the Etruscans retold them. She is paired on the mirrors with a beautiful youth, Atunis — the figure the Greeks called Adonis — the mortal beloved whose death and mourning belonged to the cult of the love-goddess across the Mediterranean. In some scenes she stands as the consort of Laran, the Etruscan war-power, a pairing of love and war that the Greek imagination knew in Aphrodite and Ares and that the Etruscan artists found their own way to picture. Around her gather the named heroes and gods of the old stories — the wooing of Helen, the judgment that set the gods of love and wisdom and sovereignty in contest — for the mirror-back was the surface on which Etruria kept and reworked the common stock of myth, and Turan, as the power of the desire that drives so many of those stories, is rarely far from the center.

Her name reached even into the count of the year. The Etruscans named one of their months for her; the month survives only in its Latinized form, recorded as Traneus, and is taken to answer to the Roman July. A goddess written into the calendar is a goddess with a public cult and a place in the civic round, not merely a figure of private devotion — though the private devotion is real too, attested in the perfume-flasks and the dedications and the whole intimate world of the mirror.

Her city, her sanctuary, and the documentary record

Turan’s cult had its anchors in particular places. The wealthy southern city the Etruscans called Velch — Vulci to the Romans, the great center of bronze-working from which so many of the finest engraved mirrors come — appears, on the evidence of its inscriptions and its finds, to have held her as a special patroness. The connection is an inference drawn from the material rather than a fact handed down in words, for the Etruscans left no civic chronicle to confirm it; but it is a reasonable one, given that Vulci was both a seat of her imagery and a probable home of her cult. Down the coast, at the port-sanctuary of Gravisca near the city of Tarquinia — a harbor where Greek and Etruscan traders met and worshiped side by side — votive dedications name her among the goddesses received, the Turan ati of the inscriptions, the Mother who there stood near to the Greek Aphrodite whose sailors and merchants shared the shrine. The pairing at such a place is telling. Gravisca was a meeting-ground of cults as much as of goods, a shore where a Greek trader could dedicate to his own goddess of love and an Etruscan to hers in the same precinct, and where the two were near enough in domain that the one slid easily into the other in the worshipers’ minds. The interpretatio that the later Romans would formalize — Turan for Venus, Venus for Aphrodite — was already happening here in the practical piety of a working port, not as a scholar’s equation but as the ordinary commerce of gods among people who traded across the sea.

Everything that can be said of Turan must be said with one fact held steadily in view: the Etruscans left no surviving literature. No hymn to the goddess of love comes down in their own words, no myth of her in connected narrative, no theological treatise. Their religion survives instead through their monuments — the painted tombs, the dedications, the engraved bronzes — and through the divinatory learning that the Romans received and set in order, the discipline of reading the lightning and the liver of the sacrifice. Of the great Etruscan sacred texts only one survives even in part: the Liber Linteus, the linen ritual book that came down to the modern world because its cloth was cut up to wrap an Egyptian mummy, the longest text in the language and a calendar of rites naming gods such as Tinia and Uni. Turan’s witness is of the other kind. She is a goddess recovered almost entirely through images — through the hundreds upon hundreds of engraved mirror-backs, some three to four thousand of which survive from the late sixth century to the early second century before the common era, on which her name and her figure and her winged Lasas were cut in line.

This gives her recovery its particular character. She is known not from what was said about her but from how she was shown — and shown, above all, on the most intimate of objects, the mirror a woman lifted to her own face. The inscriptions that name her on those mirrors are short: a label beside a figure, turan, fixing the identification. From the accumulation of such labels and scenes the modern study of Etruscan religion has reconstructed her: her domains, her company, her birds, her place among the gods. It is a reconstruction built from line-drawings and single words, and where it runs thin — on the inner shape of her cult, on what her worshipers said to her, on the myths the Etruscans may have told of her in their own right rather than borrowed from the Greeks — it says so, because the evidence simply stops.

The goddess of the mirror-back

The afterlife of Turan is, fittingly, an afterlife in art. When the Roman world absorbed Etruria, it was Venus who carried forward the cult of the love-goddess in Italy, and Turan’s name faded from worship as the Etruscan language faded from speech. But the mirrors remained in the ground, in the tombs where they had been laid with the dead, and from the eighteenth century onward, as the great necropolises of southern Etruria were opened, they came back into the light by the thousand. Engraved, inscribed, often beautiful, they became one of the foundations of the modern recovery of Etruscan religion — and Turan, the figure who fills so many of them, became one of the best-attested of all the Etruscan gods precisely because of the medium she haunts.

She survives now in the cases of the great museums — in Florence and in the Vatican, in the British Museum and the Metropolitan, wherever Etruscan bronzes are kept — a winged or robed woman with her perfume-bearing spirits, identified by the four letters of her name. The line-drawings made of her mirrors in the nineteenth century, gathered into the vast scholarly corpora of Etruscan mirror-art, carried her image into the libraries of Europe, and through them the goddess of Velch entered the modern study of antiquity. The World History Encyclopedia and the standard reference works place her where the Etruscans placed her: among the named powers of the pantheon, the lady of love and vitality, equivalent in domain to Aphrodite and to Venus but native, particular, and her own.

What remains of her is small and exact: a flask of scented oil in a small winged hand, a swan at a goddess’s side, a name cut in a mirror’s bronze. From these the Etruscan power of love and of the life-force can still be made out — the patroness of a rich coastal city, the mistress of the winged Lasas, the goddess of the swan and the dove. She is a deity known almost wholly through the surface on which her people loved to picture her, and the intimacy of that surface is part of what she is: the love-goddess of a people who kept their gods, and her among the first of them, on the backs of the glasses they held up to their own faces.

Line engraving on the back of an Etruscan bronze mirror from Vulci, with the figures labeled in the Etruscan hand — among them Turan, Tinia, and the winged Lasas Thimrae and Racuneta. Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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