Tartaruchi

The iron has three hooks. Of everything a visionary could have recorded about the angels holding it, that is the detail the Apocalypse of Paul keeps: not their faces, not their wings, not their voices, only the shape of the tool. Paul, led along the bank of a river of fire, watches them drive it into the bowels of an old man and asks who he is. The answer is flat. A presbyter who did his ministry badly, who ate and drank and committed fornication and then offered the host to the Lord anyway.

Their name began as a job title. Tartarouchos is Greek for keeper, or holder, of Tartarus, built the way a word for an office is built, and in the earliest text that uses it the word describes what the angel does rather than who he is. English takes it as tartaruchus for one and tartaruchi for the crew. M. R. James, translating the Christian apocrypha in 1924, pointed out what happened next: later readers took the description for a proper name. The Ethiopic translators did it, the Apocalypse of Paul did it, and so did other writings, and the keepers of Tartarus acquired an identity nobody had ever issued them.

The same accident happened to a second word. Temelouchos, which James glosses as care-taking, was used for angels given charge of children who died too young to have sinned. Methodius of Olympus repeated the idea in the third century: children born untimely are delivered to care-taking angels. The word was rare enough that it too hardened into a name, and the Apocalypse of Paul was later remembered as having borrowed “the angel Tartaruchus or Temeluchus” from its predecessor, the two names running together. Two ordinary Greek nouns had become a chain of command.

That predecessor was the Apocalypse of Peter, written in Greek probably around 135 and regarded as holy scripture by Clement of Alexandria. Near the end of its tour of the punishments the damned plead for mercy, now that they understand the judgment of God, and the angel Tatirokos comes to chastise them with greater torment still. They answer that the judgment of God is righteous. The Ethiopic version, the fullest to survive, treats Tatirokos as a person.

The Apocalypse of Paul, most likely composed at the very end of the fourth century, took over that machinery and made it routine. A dead soul is brought before God. Its own guardian angel testifies to what it did in life, and so does the spirit that lived in it. Then the sentence falls, in a set formula: let him be handed over to the angel Tartaruch, who is set over the punishments, and let him place him in outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. For another soul the words run that it is to be led down into the lower prison, put in torments, and left there till the great day of judgment. A thousand thousand angels sing that the verdict is just. The angel who carries it out has no lines at all.

Nobody describes them. The same vision is perfectly willing to describe angels when it wants to. It shows Paul a band sent to meet the souls of the impious at the hour of death: angels without mercy, their faces full of madness, their teeth sticking out beyond their mouths, their eyes shining like the morning star, sparks of fire coming from their hair and their mouths. The text never says those are the Tartaruchi. The keepers themselves are recorded entirely through the iron in their hands and the places where they work. They are known the way a jailer is known, from the other side of a door.

The places are thoroughly furnished. A river of fire, with men and women standing in it to the knees, to the navel, to the lips, to the hair. People hanging by their eyebrows and their hair while a fiery river drags at them. A pit of pitch and sulphur. Away to the south a well sealed with seven seals, its mouth so narrow it admits one person at a time, and when it is opened Paul is told to stand well back, because the stench rising from it is harder to bear than any punishment he has yet been shown. Whoever is put in there will never be remembered again in the sight of the Father and the Son. In another quarter there is no fire at all, only cold and snow and gnashing teeth, and worms a cubit long with two heads apiece. If the sun rose on that place, it would not warm it.

One passage changes the look of the whole apparatus. Paul sees men and women punished without end and learns that they destroyed their infants. The infants themselves accuse them: their parents gave them as food to dogs, left them to be trampled by swine, threw them into the river. Then the text does something unexpected with the children. They are handed over to the angels of Tartarus who were set over the punishments, so that those angels might lead them to a wide place of mercy. The hands that work the hooks carry the babies out.

That is the whole shape of their authority, and every part of it is delegated. A tartaruchus judges nobody and accuses nobody. It receives a soul and a sentence and takes both where they are meant to go. What it holds is custody, and in this system custody is nearly total, because the term runs until the last day and the sealed well is outside memory altogether.

Their limits come from the same place. They cannot begin a punishment, only execute one. Nothing they do is final either, since every torment in the vision is held open until the great judgment, which makes the tartaruchi the staff of a prison rather than of a scaffold. They have no hold on the innocent, and the one time the innocent pass through their hands, they are escorted out. And they could not even keep their own name, which was only ever the word for the work.

The book that spread them was never accepted. It opens with a story of its own discovery: in the consulship of Theodosius and Cynegius an angel told a nobleman living in Paul’s old house at Tarsus to dig up the foundations and publish what he found. Augustine wrote that some people had concocted an Apocalypse of Paul which the true church does not accept. Sozomen reported that none of the ancients had known it, and that an old presbyter of Tarsus, asked about it, called it a fraud. The Decretum Gelasianum listed it among the rejected books. It was copied regardless, in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic, and in versions current in almost every European language. Dante’s Inferno alludes to Paul’s visit to hell in its second canto, and the angels with the three-hooked irons went with the book into nearly every medieval hell that followed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Tartaruchi?

The Tartaruchi are the angels set over the punishments of hell in early Christian apocalyptic writing. Their name comes from the Greek tartarouchos, meaning keeper of Tartarus, and it began as a description of their job rather than a personal name. They appear in the Apocalypse of Peter and take a fixed role in the later Apocalypse of Paul, where condemned souls are formally handed over to them.

Are the Tartaruchi angels or demons?

The texts call them angels. In the Apocalypse of Paul they are the angels set over the punishments, carrying out a sentence passed by God rather than rebelling against him, and the same angels lead murdered infants to a wide place of mercy. They are usually filed among demonic beings today because their work is the torment of the damned.

What do the Tartaruchi do in the Apocalypse of Paul?

The Tartaruchi take custody of condemned souls and carry out their punishments until the last judgment. The Apocalypse of Paul shows Tartaruchian angels piercing the bowels of a corrupt presbyter with an iron that has three hooks, beside the river of fire. Souls are handed to the angel Tartaruch with the sentence that they be placed in outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Is Tartaruchus a real name?

Tartaruchus was originally not a name. M. R. James noted that the Greek tartarouchos, keeper of hell, and the rarer temelouchos, a care-taking angel for children who died young, were ordinary nouns that later readers mistook for the proper names of angels. That is how the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Peter came to have an angel called Tatirokos and the Apocalypse of Paul an angel called Tartaruch.

Why was the Apocalypse of Paul rejected?

The Apocalypse of Paul was rejected because church authorities did not accept it as genuine. Augustine said it was concocted, Sozomen reported that an old presbyter of Tarsus called its discovery story a fraud, and the Decretum Gelasianum listed it among the books not accepted. It was still copied and translated widely, and Dante alludes to it in the second canto of the Inferno.

Related Entries

Angels, Guardian angel, Satan, Lucifer, Sheol, Azrael, Tartarus, Hades, Charon, Minos, Rhadamanthus, Erinyes (Furies), Vanth, Ahemait, Yanluo