Summary
Fufluns is the Etruscan god of wine, ecstasy and the mysteries, the counterpart of the Greek Dionysus and the Roman Bacchus; in his later cult he was called Pacha, the Etruscan form of the Greek Bakchos. No Etruscan text tells his story, so it is told on the bronze mirrors on which the Etruscans wrote the names of figures beside their images. On one, Tinia and Semla, the Greek Semele, mother of Dionysus, conceive Fufluns. On a mirror from a workshop at Vulci, of the second quarter of the fourth century BCE, now in Berlin, Semla and Fufluns embrace while Apulu looks on with a small satyr piping beside him. Erika Simon reads the scene as the Delphic festival Herois, which commemorated Dionysus going down to the underworld to bring his mother up to heaven.
Fufluns appears in cult in many places. The bronze liver found near Piacenza puts him in the right lobe with the gods of heaven and lights: Tin, Uni, Cath and Fufluns. He was worshipped with Catha, a goddess connected with the sun, and the two shared priests: Laris Pulenas held the priesthoods of Catha and Pacha, and others are called maru of Pacha and Catha. At the sanctuary of Pyrgi, the harbour of Caere, the foot of a wine krater of about 480–470 BCE, painted with Herakles drinking and a satyr serving him, carries the inscription mi fuflunusra, "I am the Fuflunian", which Colonna takes as the epithet of a male god, most probably Śuri, worshipped in the southern area of the sanctuary as a god of the afterlife and matched by Colonna with the Roman Dis Pater, lord of the dead. In tombs at Vulci vases carry the dedication fufluns paχies, marking the dead as his follower, and the Etruscans painted his ivy in their tombs beside Apulu's laurel. The coins of Populonia call the city Pupluna, that is Fufluna, the city of Fufluns. His mysteries reached Rome from Etruria, and the Senate banned them in 186 BCE.
The idea his image turns on is that the Etruscan god of drink is also a god of the dead. He is the son who goes down to the dead and brings his mother up, which is why the Etruscans put his ivy and his wine vessels in their tombs and painted satyrs in the banquets on tomb walls, for they pictured the afterlife as a banquet. At Pyrgi his epithet is carried by the god of the afterlife worshipped in the south of the sanctuary. The wine that gathers the living at the feast gathers them with the dead as well.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the Roman essay does not read Fufluns but reads Bacchus, the Etruscan Pacha, from bakhkha or bakā. We take off the ending -ns that closes other Etruscan god names, such as Selvans, leaving fufl-. This part alternates with pupl- in the name of the city itself, Pupluna and Fufluna. Etruscan has no b, and wrote the Greek Bakchos as Pacha with p; so pupl- and fufl- may be a repeated b and l, the letters of Arabic balbala. Lane: balbala is to put people in motion, rouse and excite them; balbala as a noun is the confusion of tongues and intense anxiety; and the root is balla, to moisten a thing with water, with bilāl, anything that moistens the throat, water or milk. The drink that wets the throat and the crowd that is roused and confused in its speech are what Fufluns's mirrors show: the wine, and the satyrs and maenads around him.
Linguistic Root
Forms of the name
| Form | Where | Source |
|---|---|---|
| fufluns | mirrors, the Piacenza liver | Simon, de Grummond |
| fufluns paχies | vases from tombs at Vulci | Krauskopf |
| fuflunusra | the Pyrgi krater, "the Fuflunian" | Colonna |
| Pacha | the later cult name | Simon, Bonfante |
| Pupluna, Fufluna | coins of Populonia | Bonfante |
Bonfante says Pacha is the Etruscan for Bacchus, and Simon calls it the cult name of Fufluns in later Etruria, the god, like the Greek Bakchos, especially of the Dionysiac mysteries. Colonna takes fuflunusra as an adjective formed from Fufluns, "Fuflunian".
Ending and root
Other Etruscan god names end in -ns: Selvans, whom Simon derives from Latin Silvanus, and Culśanś, god of gates. What remains of Fufluns is fufl-, with its first consonant repeated. P and f alternate in the city's name, which points to a single lip consonant at the start, and Etruscan writes the voiced lip consonant, b, as p, as it wrote Βάκχος as Pacha.
Balla and balbala
Lane: ballahu is to moisten a thing with water; "the camels moistened their thirst" is said when they drank a little; "he moistened his ties of kinship" is to keep them close, for things cohere by moisture and fall apart when dry. Bilāl is water, and anything with which the throat is moistened, water or milk. Balbala is to put people in motion, rouse and excite them; balbala as a noun is the confusion of tongues, and intense anxiety and the whisperings of the breast; tabalbalat al-alsun, the tongues became confused. The reading takes fufl- as b and l with the b repeated, and finds the sense in the drink that wets the throat and in the crowd that is roused. It remains that balbala has two l and the Etruscan name one, and that the b behind f and p is inferred from Etruscan spelling, not written.
Pacha and Bacchus
The Roman essay in this project reads Bacchus from bakhkha, to sprinkle, generosity, or from bakā, ritual wailing, and the Bacchus page develops bakā. Pacha is the same name in Etruscan, so the reading covers it. The two roots, b-l-l and b-kh-kh, meet in water sprinkled and moistening.
Key Mythic Narratives
The Castel Viscardo mirror
In 1989 a Late Classical mirror was found near Orvieto with the same composition as the Berlin mirror but different names: Apulu stays in the centre, accompanied not by a satyr but by the winged love god Turnu, child of Turan, and the couple are Turan and Atunis. Simon says the mirror shows that the type of a figure and its name need not match: Fufluns and Semla, son and mother, can be represented like Atunis and Turan, the beautiful boy and his divine lover.
The priestess
A sarcophagus in the British Museum, said to come from the Tomb of the Triclinium at Tarquinii, shows a woman with a thyrsos and a kantharos, a fawn drinking from her hand; she has been called a priestess of Fufluns from her appearance, not from any inscription.
Symbolic Reading
The essay rereading the Roman myths reads the Etruscan science of entrails and lightning as a training in classifying places and directions by which the priests regulated people's decisions. Fufluns's place in that classification is known: in the right lobe of the Piacenza liver, with the gods of the sky and lights, not with the gods of the earth and the dead. Yet the tombs and the mirrors make him the companion of the dead, so the division the liver draws is not the division of what he does in cult.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
The Library attributed to Apollodorus tells that Dionysus, once people knew him as a god, brought his mother up from Hades, named her Thyone and ascended with her to heaven. That is what Simon reads on the Berlin mirror, and it belongs with the descent to the underworld. The Etruscans knew the story from Delphi, with which they had close ties, where Apollo and Dionysus shared the sanctuary.
Herodotus says Osiris is Dionysus in the Greek tongue, and the Roman essay sets Bacchus beside Osiris as god of wine, death and rebirth. Among the Egyptians as among the Etruscans the god of plants and drink became a companion of the dead.