Orcus (mythology)
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In Roman mythology, Orcus was a god of the underworld, punisher of broken oaths, more equivalent to Pluto than to the Greek Hades, and later identified with Dis Pater. He was portrayed in paintings in Etruscan tombs as a hairy, bearded giant. A temple to Orcus may have existed on the Palatine Hill in Rome.
The origins of Orcus may have lain in Etruscan religion. Orcus was a name used by Roman writers to identify a Gaulish god of the underworld. The so-called "Tomb of the Orcus", an Etruscan site at Tarquinia, is a misnomer, resulting from its first discoverers mistaking as Orcus a hairy, bearded giant that was actually a figure of a Cyclops.
'Orcus', in Roman mythology, was an alternative name for Pluto, Hades, or Dis Pater, god of the land of the dead. The name "Orcus" seems to have been given to his evil and punishing side, as the god who tormented evildoers in the afterlife. Like the name Hades (or the Norse Hel, for that matter), "Orcus" could also mean the land of the dead.
From Orcus' association with death and the underworld, his name came to be used for demons and other underworld monsters, particularly in Italian where orco refers to a kind of monster found in fairy-tales that feeds on human flesh. The French word ogre (appearing first in Charles Perrault's fairy-tales) may have come from variant forms of this word, orgo or ogro; in any case, the French ogre and the Italian orco are exactly the same sort of creature. An early example of an orco appears in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, as a bestial, blind, tusk-faced monster inspired by the Cyclops of the Odyssey; this orco should not be confused with the orca, a sea-monster also appearing in Ariosto.
This orco probably inspired, at least in part, J. R. R. Tolkien's orcs in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. From this use, countless other fantasy games and works of fiction have borrowed the concept of the orc. Additionally, Orcus appears as the Lord of Demons in Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series; in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, Orcus is a demon prince and lord of the undead; through this latter use Orcus appears in the computer game NetHack. He also appears as a character in Christopher Moore's novel, A Dirty Job, in which he is associated with the Morrigan, although no such connection exists in classical mythology. In Nethack, Orcus is a demon prince found in Gehennom, and holds a wand of death.
There is also a trans-Neptunian object called 90482 Orcus after this deity.
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[edit] References
- Grimal, P. (1986). The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (p. 328)
- Richardson, L. (1992). A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. (p. 278)
