Summary
Charun is a demon of death among the Etruscans who stands at the gate of the underworld and at the doors of tombs with a hammer in his hand. His face is ugly, his nose hooked like a beak, his beard unkempt, his ears an animal's, he is often winged, and in many tomb paintings his skin is bluish or grey-green. The Etruscans took his name from the Greek Charon, ferryman of the dead, but the Greek is an old man poling his boat and the Etruscan is a demon guarding a door: one name, a different task.
No text tells Charun's story; his story is seen on tomb walls. On the wall of the Tomb of the Aninas at Tarquinii, of the third century BCE, he stands to the left of the tomb's door, fully clothed, with his beak-like nose, unkempt beard and animal ears, and Vanth stands to the right with her wings, not clothed as he is. In the Tomb of the Charuns at Tarquinii there are four of him, each with a name added to his own, standing at doors painted on the wall, so that for the later Etruscans he is a company rather than a single person. In the François Tomb at Vulci, of 340–320 BCE, Achilles slaughters Trojan prisoners at the funeral of Patroclus, and Charun and Vanth stand in the scene, though the Iliad has no place for them.
As for the hammer, the scholar Jannot takes it as the tool with which Charun opens and shuts the bars of the gate of the city of the dead. Krauskopf says the Etruscans had two pictures of him: a ferryman with an oar who carries the dead over the sea, and a guide on the land route with the hammer or a torch. In the Tomb of the Blue Demons, of about 400 BCE, Charun stands at one end of the antechamber of the underworld, though his figure is poorly preserved, with a large seagoing ship before him, not a little skiff like the Greek Charon's, and demons drive the dead woman toward it. Pictures of Charun attacking the dead are very rare; mostly he and Vanth go with the dead and even defend them against the monsters of the road.
The idea his pictures turn on is that death is a closed gate that opens only at its guard's hand. The Greek Charon takes the fare and ferries the dead over the river; the Etruscan Charun crosses no river but stands at the boundary and raises the hammer, and the hammer opens and shuts the gate. Whoever passes does not come back, except the dead who have gone before and come out to welcome the newcomer. He belongs to the pictures of the descent to the underworld, as the guard of the road every dead person takes. The house at whose gate he stands is ruled by Aita and Phersipnei, the Greek Hades and Persephone, and the dead sit with them at the table of their ancestors.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Χάρων, Charōn, is a Greek name, and the Etruscans write it χaru and χarun; the n and the vowel before it are the Greek ending. Khar remains, and Arabic kh becomes Greek χ regularly, so the name is kharra. In Lane kharra has two faces: water kharra when it made a sound and ran with a sound, the murmur called kharīr; and a thing kharra when it fell from a high place to a low one with a sound to be heard, and then kharra came to mean "he died", because a man falls down when he dies. The first face fits the Greek ferryman who crosses the water, the second the Etruscan who stands at the hour of death, when a person falls dead, and then shuts the gate behind him with his hammer. It is a reading proposed on the method.
Linguistic Root
Charun and kharra
| Form | Where |
|---|---|
| Χάρων | Greek, the ferryman of the dead |
| χaru | Etruscan, beside his pictures on walls and sarcophagi |
| χarun | Etruscan, with the n |
| χarus | "of Charu(n)", a dedication on a sixth-century BCE vessel |
Lane: water kharra, kharīr, when it sounded, or ran vehemently so as to make a noise; the wind kharrat when it sounded among reeds. A thing kharra, khurūr, when it fell; originally, fell making a sound heard at the same time, then used for any falling: kharra al-bināʾ, the building fell down; kharra sājidan, he fell down prostrate; "as though he fell from the sky". And kharra means "he died", because a man, when he dies, falls down.
The sounds: in the Juthoor table of Greek correspondences Arabic ḥ and kh become Greek χ or drop, and kh is the steadier of the two. The Etruscans took the letter χ from the Greeks and wrote with it a heavy aspirated k. R is r, and the doubled r of kharra answers the single r after the long vowel. The ending -ōn is a Greek formation common in personal names, and it is gone in Etruscan χaru.
Greek or Etruscan?
Simon takes the name to be borrowed from the Greek Charon, and Colonna connects the dedication χarus on an Attic cup in the Louvre with the Greek name too. Krauskopf thinks the dedication may point to a single old demon with an originally Etruscan name, and that the Etruscans found in the Greek Charon a visible form for demons they already had, who led the dead to the gates of the underworld. The Arabic reading is the same either way, since it reads the name Greeks and Etruscans both spoke. The limit that remains is that the origin of the Greek name itself is not settled.
Key Mythic Narratives
The Greek Charon in Virgil
Virgil describes the ferryman of the dead at the river Acheron: a fearful old man in terrible squalor, a mass of white uncombed hair on his chin, his eyes fixed and flaming, a filthy cloak knotted at his shoulder; he pushes his craft with a pole, tends the sail, and carries the bodies in his dusky boat, old now, but a god's old age is fresh and green. This is the Greek and Roman picture, from which the Etruscans took the name but not the task.
The road between tomb and city
Some scholars take the gate Charun guards to be the gate of the city of the dead, others the door of the tomb itself. Krauskopf says both can be guarded by demons, and that the first door the dead pass, the door of the tomb, may foreshadow in its shape the second, the battlemented gate of the city of the dead.
Symbolic Reading
The Greek rereading essay in this project reads the Greek Charon as a reading of the burial rite: the coin placed in the dead person's mouth is a real burial custom confirmed by archaeology, the "crossing" is the passage from the world of the living into the soil, and the river that parts the living from the dead is the water table. The Etruscan Charun moves this from the river to the door: no fare and no boat, only a hammer that shuts the bar of the gate behind the dead. His picture beside the tomb door at Tarquinii tells those who enter to bury their dead that this door is a boundary the living do not cross.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
In the epic of Gilgamesh Urshanabi, boatman of Utnapishtim, takes Gilgamesh across the waters of death, as the Greek Charon ferries the dead over the Acheron in Virgil, and in Apuleius's tale, told under Cupid, Charon demands his fare. The Etruscan takes the boatman's name, keeps the boat only rarely, and carries a gatekeeper's hammer. His nearest Egyptian likeness is Anubis, who takes the dead by the hand to the balance, but Anubis takes the dead by the hand and raises nothing over them. Among the Greeks the dog Kerberos guards the gate of the house of Hades, and Hermes leads the souls there.