Culsu

Also Known As: Etruscan culśu; read by nineteenth-century antiquarians as “Culmu”; built on culś-, “gate”, the same root that gives the god Culśanś
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Etruscan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: She holds the doorway between the living and the dead, and the two things she carries there are a lit torch and a large pair of shears.
Role in Mythos: She is the figure stationed at the door of the underworld, coming out of it rather than travelling anywhere with the dead.
Relation to Humans: No Etruscan text describes what she does to a person, and the one image that names her shows her waiting rather than seizing. She belongs to the moment of arrival at the door, which is the moment every Etruscan funerary relief was made to picture.

In a museum in Palermo there is a chest of chalky alabaster with a woman carved on its lid, and along its front a farewell that has been going on for twenty-two centuries. Her name was Hasti Afunei. Her relatives are grouped between her and the way out, three of the men holding scrolls, one hand laid on the shoulder of a grieving old man as if to remind him what still ties him to living. A winged figure has taken Hasti gently by the arm to walk her the short distance left. And at the far left of the panel a door stands part way open, and someone is coming out through the gap. She has a torch resting on her shoulder and a heavy pair of shears in her fist. The sculptor cut her name into the stone above her head.

That name is culśu, and the panel it sits on is very nearly the whole of the evidence. There is no story about her, no parent, no quarrel, no death, no second picture that anyone can point to and say with confidence that it is her again. What survives is a single labelled figure on a single Etruscan sarcophagus, plus two contested lines of writing elsewhere. It is an unusually small record even by the standards of a people whose literature is gone.

The name is doing more work than a name usually does. Etruscan culś means gate, and the same root produces Culśanś, the two-faced god who stood at city gates and whom the Romans recognised in their own Janus. Bronze statuettes of Culśanś were buried near the north gate at Cortona, naked but for boots and a cap, one hand on the hip, the other holding something that has not survived. Culsu is the same idea turned toward the underworld. Jean-René Jannot argued that the label is barely a personal name at all, more a word for someone in charge of a door, which puts her closer to an office than to a personality.

George Dennis saw the sarcophagus in the 1840s, when it still belonged to the Chiusi landowner Pietro Bonci Casuccini, who had dug it out of a field called Il Colle in 1826. Dennis read the inscription as Culmu and described what he saw plainly: a Fury or Fate with a flaming torch on her shoulder and large shears in her hand, issuing from a gateway, the portal of Death. Beside her stood a second named figure, Vanth, carrying what Dennis could only call a nondescript instrument tucked under her arm. Later observers identified it as an enormous key or door-bolt. Two women, then, at the same threshold, one with the means to open it and one standing in it.

Nobody knows what the shears are for. The usual reading is the obvious one, that they cut a life free of a body, and Dennis reached for the same explanation while flagging its weakness. The shears looked to him like a borrowing from Greek storytelling rather than anything native: Atropos, who cuts the thread her sister has spun, or Proserpine severing a lock of hair from the head of the doomed before the death is allowed to happen. He noted that the carving was late work, the faces frontal, the drapery loose, the whole thing made when Etruria was already living in Rome’s shadow. The sarcophagus is now dated to the last quarter of the third century BCE, and the shears may be a late idea wearing an old costume.

What she is not is winged, and this matters, because the two figures sharing the panel with her are. Vanth and her winged double wear the same short rolled chiton, the same crossed straps, the same high hunting boots, a costume borrowed from the huntress rather than the mourner. Culsu wears all of it and has nothing at her back. The wings are the part of Etruscan death iconography that everyone remembers, and she does without them, which fits a figure who does not travel. Vanth escorts. Culsu occupies a doorframe.

Traces of a cult exist, thinly. On his own sarcophagus at Tarquinia, a magistrate named Laris Pulenas had almost sixty words of Etruscan carved into a half-unrolled scroll, listing what he had been and done, including the writing of a book on divination. The word culśl appears in that list, and Larissa Bonfante and Judith Swaddling take it as a record of Culsu’s cult. On the bronze liver from Piacenza, the model haruspices used to learn their trade, one of the sixteen divisions of the sky carries the abbreviation cvl. It could stand for Culśanś. Bouke van der Meer argued it more likely stands for Culsu, since the surrounding compartments hold underworld powers and only she has any claim to be one.

Her strength is entirely positional. The torch is the light at the entrance, and the shears are the one irreversible act, and both of them work in the same square metre of the world. She does not judge, does not ferry, does not punish, does not appear at battles or murders the way Vanth does. Everything she can do, she does standing in a doorway with her back to the dark.

The limitation runs deeper than that, and it is not really hers. Two of the scholars who first published the Chiusi collection, Migliarini and Valeriani, concluded that the word culmu on the relief labelled the gateway rather than the woman standing in it. They may have been wrong. But a being whose name might turn out to be the name of a door is a being held together by very little, and the honest description of Culsu is that she is a figure of enormous visual precision about whom almost nothing else can be said.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Culsu in Etruscan mythology?

Culsu is an Etruscan underworld figure who stands at the door between the living and the dead. She is known from one labelled image, on the alabaster sarcophagus of Hasti Afunei from Chiusi, where she steps out of a partly opened door carrying a torch and a pair of shears. Her name comes from the Etruscan word culś, meaning gate.

What do Culsu’s torch and shears mean?

The torch lights the entrance to the underworld, the same attribute carried by the Etruscan figure Vanth. The shears are usually read as the instrument that separates a life from a body, though no Etruscan text says so. George Dennis, who described the sarcophagus in the 1840s, thought the shears looked like a late borrowing from Greek stories about Atropos cutting the thread of life.

Is Culsu the same as Vanth?

No, although they appear together on the Hasti Afunei sarcophagus and wear the same costume of rolled short chiton and high hunting boots. Vanth is winged and moves with the dead as an escort, and on that relief she carries a large key or door-bolt. Culsu has no wings at all and stays in the doorway rather than travelling.

How is Culsu related to Culsans?

Both names are built on the Etruscan root culś, meaning gate. Culsans is a two-faced god associated with city gates, often compared to the Roman Janus, and known from bronze statuettes buried near the north gate at Cortona. Culsu holds the equivalent position at the gate of the underworld.

Why is so little known about Culsu?

Etruscan literature has not survived, so almost everything known about Etruscan religion comes from images, inscriptions and objects. In Culsu’s case that amounts to one named figure on one sarcophagus, a possible mention of her cult on the epitaph of Laris Pulenas at Tarquinia, and a disputed abbreviation on the bronze liver from Piacenza. Some early scholars even argued that the name on the sarcophagus labelled the gateway rather than the figure.