Haruspicy: reading the divine will in the entrails of animals
Liver, heart and lungs of sacrificial victims: how the Etruscan and Roman haruspex worked and which signs were held to be favourable or ill-omened.
The core of Etruscan divination was the examination of entrails, which the Romans called extispicium. After an animal had been sacrificed, usually a sheep or a bovine, the haruspex observed its internal organs, the exta, to understand whether the gods had accepted the offering and what their will was. The libri haruspicini, the first of the three parts of the Etrusca disciplina, gathered the rules of this reading and the cases that served as reference.
The organs observed
The exta included the liver, the gall bladder, the heart, the lungs and the membrane that wraps the intestines. The liver was the most important organ. Latin authors speak of a part of it called caput iecoris, the head of the liver, which had to appear well formed. A distinction was also made between a part called familiaris, concerning the person offering the sacrifice and his community, and a part called hostilis, referring instead to the enemy or adversary.
The absence or deformity of an organ was regarded as a grave omen. Livy relates that in 208 BC, shortly before the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus fell into an ambush near Venusia, the liver of a sacrificed victim was found without its head. Similar episodes recur frequently in the sources as announcements of misfortune, and they are mostly reported after the event, when the misfortune had already occurred.
The haruspex at work
Ancient images show the haruspex in a distinctive costume: a tall pointed cap and a cloak fastened with a brooch. A bronze mirror from Vulci, now in the Vatican Museums and datable to around 400 BC, depicts the Greek seer Calchas, shown with wings, bending over a liver that he holds in his hand. The Etruscan inscription Chalchas, engraved beside the figure, allows him to be identified with certainty.
The examination had two distinct stages. The first served to establish whether the sacrifice had been accepted: in Latin the verb litare was used when the gods had welcomed it. In Rome a magistrate could repeat the sacrifice until he obtained this result, a custom that ancient critics saw as revealing the conventional character of the practice. Only afterwards did the actual consultation take place on the future of an undertaking or a public decision.
In both cases this was not a personal intuition but a regulated interpretation. The haruspex compared what he saw with what was laid down in the books and formulated a response according to recognised criteria. For this very reason his authority depended on the training he had received and on his belonging to a tradition, rather than on any individual gift of second sight.
Origins and comparisons
The idea of reading the divine will in entrails was not exclusive to the Etruscans. In Mesopotamia hepatoscopy was an extremely ancient science, documented by texts and by clay models. The Greeks too consulted entrails before battles, as Xenophon repeatedly records in the Anabasis. The Etruscans, however, turned it into a complex theological system, linked to the division of the sky and to the placing of the gods in its different regions.
For the Romans haruspicy always remained a foreign art, respected but distinct from the properly Latin tradition of the augurs. This very foreignness gave it prestige: the haruspices were the experts one turned to when signs were obscure. Their knowledge survived for centuries, until the laws of the Christian empire banned sacrifices and, with them, the reading of entrails.