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Nails of Fate

You may have heard the phrase, “The final nail in the coffin,” to refer to the imminent demise of a person or a project. What you might not know is that the association between nails and death goes back much farther than our use of the pointy metal spikes to hold coffins together. To some ancient civilizations, the hammering of a nail had the finality of Fate.

 

One of these civilizations was the Etruscans, a mysterious but civilized people who resided in what is now northern Italy before being absorbed by the ancient Romans. Even though relatively little is known about the Etruscans, we do know that they contributed much of their own pantheon of gods and goddesses to the Roman and Greek traditions, not to mention some of the practices associated with worship of these deities.

 

Among the Etruscan deities was the goddess Nurtia, also spelled “Nortia.” This goddess was probably the predecessor of the Roman goddess Fortuna and may also have been the prototype for the Greek Fates, whose job it was to clip the thread of life when it was time for a person to die. As these associations imply, Nurtia held sway over the fates of Etrsucans, a symbol of the inexorableness of fate and death as a part of life.

 

Nurtia’s importance among the Etruscans is clear from the fact that they built at least one Etruscan metropolis essentially devoted to her. This city, Velsna, had a huge temple dedicated to Nurtia, and the city was considered the moral center of the Etruscan federation. The custom at the temple of Nurtia was to drive a nail into the wall at the opening of each year. The nail was intended to symbolize the finality of fate and mark the passage of time.

 

The Romans absorbed this custom of a driven nail as a symbol of fate, even producing a Latin expression, “Clavus anni” to designate the beginning of the year; clavus is Latin for “nail.” Because the driven nails were also used to mark time, a person might be referred to as having lived long enough to see 63 nails driven, an indication that he or she was at least 63 years old.

               

Even though Velsna appears to have been the center of Nurtia worship, a recent find of several nails at another site in Italy suggests that she was held in widespread awe, possibly as one of the top goddesses in the Etruscan pantheon, along the lines of Minerva or Athena for the Romans and Greeks, respectively. At this second site, called Cetamura, which lies on an Italian hilltop, archaeologists have discovered some of the last remnants of a dying Etruscan civilization, dating back to about second century BC (or BCE, before the common era). It was around this time that the civilization disappeared, absorbed into Roman culture. The Etruscan ruins lie buried beneath the layers of history produced by a Roman villa and occupation of the site in medieval times. Nevertheless, the expert diggers have found some intriguing Etruscan artifacts.

 

Among the ritually shattered pots and large vessels designed to store food and wine, the archaeologists discovered 10 iron nails, perfectly preserved. The shattered pots appear to have been offerings to the deities of art created by the worshippers. The nails, however, imply specific worship of Nurtia. They would not be something the Etruscans had left lying around by accident since nails, to them, were such important symbols of fate and the passage of time, a small-scale manifestation of the end of motion.

 

Although the only written records describing Nurtia worship are actually Roman in origin, researchers have discovered some characteristic Etruscan evidence of the rituals surrounding tributes to the goddess. The Etruscans were renowned for the etchings that they placed on the backs of mirrors, stories in picture form. On one of these mirrors appears a representation of this goddess of Fate, and she is poised, frozen in time, preparing to hammer a nail into a wall.

 

This piece appeared in Biology Digest.

 

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