Charun

Also Known As: also written Charu in Etruscan inscriptions; recorded with the bynames Charun Chunchules, Charun Huths and Charun Lufe
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Etruscan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He carries a heavy mallet with which the door between the living and the dead is opened and shut.
Role in Mythos: He is the gatekeeper and escort of the Etruscan underworld, stationed at the threshold the dead have to cross.
Relation to Humans: He meets every Etruscan at the end, walks beside the coffin or the horse or the wagon, and hands the dead through the door. Someone was leaving him inscribed offerings by the late sixth century BCE, which suggests the living hoped to be on good terms with him before they needed him.

The chamber is cut into rock and it is cold in there all year. Painted on the wall above a grave sunk into the floor, a blue man leans against a boulder with his mallet lying on the ground beside him, in front of a low door studded with three raised bosses. A woman and a child are being brought towards that door. They are reaching backwards, hands out, towards relatives who went ahead of them years ago and have come to the threshold to meet them. The blue man does not hurry anybody. He simply waits by the door, because the door is his.

His name is Charun, and he turns up over a hundred times in Etruscan art, which makes him one of the most frequently painted figures the Etruscans left behind. In the tombs he is often labelled, letter by letter, beside his own head, so there is no guessing involved. The Etruscans had adopted the Greek alphabet centuries earlier for a language nobody has since managed to read, and the happy result is that short inscriptions like a name can still be sounded out even when the sentences around them cannot.

Everything about how he looks is grave-cold and deliberate. The blue-grey skin is the colour of flesh several days past living. The nose is a great hook, the brow heavy, the eyes sunk back. He dresses for terrain rather than ceremony, in a short tunic belted at the waist and tall leather hunting boots, as though the underworld were rocky ground that had to be walked. In the Tomb of the Orcus at Tarquinia his wings survive in astonishing condition after more than two thousand years, feathers alternating dark red and greyish blue with a deep golden yellow patch on the inner surface, and the outer rim worked in a diamond pattern that matches the skin of the adder, still the most venomous snake in Italy. Sometimes he has no wings at all, and it seems to make no difference to what he does.

The mallet is the thing everyone remembers. It is the tool of a gatekeeper: the door of the underworld is opened and closed with it, which is a workman’s job rather than an executioner’s. Scholarship has gone back and forth on whether it is also a weapon, and the paintings themselves refuse to settle it. In the Anina family tomb he seems to be holding it ready, and the guess is that a tomb robber was the intended reader of that particular threat. In the chamber described above he is leaning on a rock with the head of the hammer resting in the dirt, about as menacing as a man waiting for a bus. The hammer is not for the dead. He escorts them; he does not punish them, and the Etruscan afterlife as these tombs present it involves no judgement and no torment at all.

His name is the obvious problem, because it looks exactly like Charon, and the temptation is to file him away as the Greek ferryman with an Etruscan accent. The resemblance is real and probably not accidental. The difference is that Charon rows. On a Greek oil flask of the fifth century in the Ashmolean, the ferryman is a benign and thoroughly human boatman reaching out for a small fluttering soul, and the boat is the entire point of him. Charun has no boat. He is never the man on the water. He stands at a door with a hammer, which is a completely different job, and the leading specialist on Etruscan underworld figures has gone so far as to call the whole crowd of Etruscan demons an Etruscan peculiarity for which Greek parallels can scarcely be found. There is supporting evidence in the dirt: an inscribed offering to Charun on the foot of a black-glazed bowl dates to roughly 530 to 520 BCE, a century after a similar inscribed gift to his colleague Vanth, and both are far older than any surviving picture of either of them. People were leaving him presents long before anybody painted him.

Then there is the matter of how many of him there are. In one third-century tomb at Tarquinia, now called the Tomb of the Charuns, two painted false doors are each flanked by a pair of winged Charuns, four in all, and every one of them is named by inscription. Three of the four names carry a second element, a byname, and the fourth inscription has crumbled to nothing. One figure is covered in black pock marks that look uncomfortably like decomposition. Another holds a sword in his right hand and the customary mallet in his left. A third wears a mantle of dark bluish-green feathers over a brown tunic and carries an axe. Snakes move in their hair, two of them are blond, and all four wear the boots. Faced with that, some scholars have concluded that Charun is less a person than a kind, a category of doorkeeper filled by several beings, and the parallel usually offered is the female figure labelled Culsu on a Chiusine sarcophagus, whose name may be less a name than a job description meaning something like the one in charge of a door.

He is rarely alone. The pairing that recurs most often puts him with Vanth, the winged female escort who carries a torch, and the division of labour is neat: he guards, she guides. In the Anina family tomb the two of them stand nearly life-size on either side of the entrance wall, both turned to face the doorway, ready for anyone going either direction.

The Etruscans also enjoyed dropping him into Greek stories where he had no business being, which is how we know something about what they thought he was for. On a wine-mixing bowl from Vulci of about 350 BCE, Alcestis and Admetus stand together and a wingless Charun waits at her side with his mallet while the bird-beaked demon Tuchulcha menaces her husband with snakes. Admetus was supposed to die and did not, and the two demons have arrived to correct the accounting. In the François Tomb at Vulci a wingless Charun stands over a mortally wounded prisoner while Achilles cuts the throats of Trojan captives, with Vanth opposite him holding not a torch but a scroll. The Greek heroes are borrowed. The blue man with the hammer is entirely Etruscan, and his presence converts the scene into an Etruscan one.

What he can do is narrow and absolute. He opens and shuts the only door that matters, he walks the newly dead to it, and he keeps the boundary between the two worlds from being crossed by anyone who has not earned the crossing by dying. What he cannot do is anything else. He has no parents in the record, no birth, no adventure of his own, no moment where he wants something. No surviving text puts a single word in his mouth, because no Etruscan literature survives at all. One reconstruction of the sixteen-part Etruscan sky, argued from the bronze liver of Piacenza and a very late Latin account, places the doorkeepers of the earth in the last region of the heavens along with the other powers of the underworld, which if it is right means he was assigned the furthest, darkest slice and left there.

The hammer outlived him. Centuries later, in the Roman arena at midday, an attendant costumed as a god came out to clear the dead, and Tertullian recalls laughing at the sight of Father Pluto, brother of Jove, hauling off the remains of the gladiators while brandishing his hammer, with a second figure dressed as Mercury prodding the bodies with a smouldering staff tip to see whether they were only pretending. Tertullian does not use the Etruscan name, and the connection is an inference rather than something a Roman wrote down. But somebody in Italy had decided long before that the person who comes for the corpses carries a mallet, and nobody in the stands needed that explained.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Charun?

Charun is the Etruscan demon who guards the door of the underworld and escorts the newly dead across the threshold. He appears more than a hundred times in Etruscan art, usually with blue-grey skin, a hooked nose, hunting boots and a heavy mallet, and in tomb paintings he is often identified by an inscription written beside him.

Is Charun the same as the Greek Charon?

No. The names are close and the resemblance is probably not a coincidence, but the Greek Charon is a ferryman whose defining attribute is his boat, and Charun has no boat and is never shown on the water. Charun’s post is the door of the underworld, and his tool is a mallet rather than an oar.

What is Charun’s hammer for?

The mallet is the instrument by which the door between the living and the dead is opened and shut, so it belongs to his work as a gatekeeper. Whether it doubles as a weapon is genuinely disputed, since some paintings show him holding it as though ready to use it while others show it lying on the ground at his feet. It is not used on the dead he escorts.

Why are there several Charuns?

In the third-century Tomb of the Charuns at Tarquinia, four winged figures flank two painted doors and each is labelled by inscription, with three of the names carrying a second element such as Chunchules, Huths or Lufe. That has led some scholars to conclude that Charun is a category of underworld doorkeeper rather than a single individual, in the same way that the name Culsu may describe an office rather than a person.

Is Charun evil?

Charun is frightening to look at but he is not a tormentor. The Etruscan afterlife as its tombs depict it involves no judgement and no punishment, and his function is to guide and protect the dead rather than to harm them. He is a guardian of a boundary, and the only people he appears to threaten are the living who might break into a tomb.