Vegoia

What it is

Within the Etruscan religious system Vegoia is a sibyl, a prophet and a nymph. She is named as the writer of one portion of the Etruscan sacred books. Those books set out the proper way to found a city or a shrine, drain a field, frame a law or an ordinance, lay out space and divide time.

Where it comes from

Nearly everything told of Vegoia comes out of the traditions of Chiusi, an Etruscan city that the Romans called Clusium, the Etruscans Clevsin and the Umbrians Camars, now in the province of Siena. The Etruscan religious system itself stays largely opaque. Few bilingual documents exist to help read the language, so texts from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE give up little, and between the fifth and first centuries BCE Etruscan culture absorbed much Greek material before dissolving into the Greco-Roman world. The sacred books were mostly lost, and late first-century Roman writers quote or summarise them, perhaps colouring what they report. Two figures were set over the making of these books: Vegoia, and Tages, a monstrous child-shaped being credited with an old sage's knowledge and foresight.

How it is done

The revelations attached to Vegoia are gathered as the Libri Vegoici. One strand concerns lightning: strokes are held to be sent by the gods, and the books supply the means of telling what each one means by way of a chart of the sky. Sectors of the horizon are allotted to particular deities, an arrangement credited to her, and the same pattern is read in small on the liver of a sacrificed animal. The division of the sky appears again in the measuring and parcelling of land, which from the earliest Etruscan times answered to religious rules, and her rulings taught how space was to be measured.

Tools and materials

The equipment named is mostly not an object you can hold. There is the sky map, a division of the horizon into sectors belonging to named gods. There is the liver of a sacrificed animal, on which the same divisions are read in miniature. The sacred books themselves, and the body of rules for measuring and dividing land, count as instruments of the system. Vegoia's authority hangs over all of it: the rules are to be kept, and breaking them is said to bring severe misfortune or a curse.

What it is for

What the system is for is order. Through Vegoia the Etruscans are said to have received their arts, the rules for marking out land, and the laws governing waterworks, so that she stands over landed property and the rights that go with it, over laws and over contracts, though not over contracts of trade. She also presides over the reading of lightning, which is taken to carry a deity's meaning. Those who ignore the rules are held to invite grave misfortune or a curse.

Peoples and places

Vegoia belongs to the Etruscans and is known above all from Chiusi. The Etruscan system of revealed texts left a deep mark on neighbouring Italic peoples, and the evidence is broad. The Etruscan alphabet, itself taken from Greek, is accepted as the model for the Latin one, and Etruscan decimal numbering is recognised as the ancestor of Roman numerals. Symbols of supreme power, the shape of the Roman calendar and even the word "Greeks", from the Etruscan Craeci, travelled the same way. Etruscan culture is described as having permeated the Latin and Sabine communities around it.

What people believe

The world behind the books is one in which gods speak through lightning and the sky is portioned out among them. Correct practice is revealed rather than invented: Vegoia and Tages are the figures through whom the books are said to have come, one by inspiration, the other by speech or lecture. The same sacred divisions appear in the sky, on the liver of a sacrificed animal and in the measuring and dividing of land, so that all three are read by one scheme. Holding to those divisions is what is held to keep woe away.

How scholars and sceptics see it

The sacred books are known chiefly through quotation and commentary by Roman authors of the late first century, which may distort them. Georges Dumézil and Jean-René Jannot are among those who have written on Etruscan religion. The link between Vegoia and Egeria, the nymph said to have instructed Numa Pompilius, is offered as a suspicion rather than a finding. Plutarch's account of Numa's buried books, drawn from Valerius Antias, leaves the reason for their suppression unstated.

Compare and confuse

Vegoia is easily confused with two other figures. Tages is the second being held to have given the Etruscans their books, a childlike monster with a sage's knowledge. Egeria is the nymph who, in Roman legend, dictated laws and rituals to Numa Pompilius, and a link between her and Vegoia has been suggested. The Etruscan name Vecu appears in Latin writers also as Vecui, Vecuvia, Vegoe, Begoe and Bigois.

Law and persecution

Roman practice kept certain texts out of general reach. The Sibylline Books, an obscure collection in Roman religion, were held by the duumviri, later the decemviri, and opened only when the state faced extreme danger; they were said to have reached Rome through Tarquinius Superbus, last of the legendary kings. Separately, Numa's books, uncovered by accident some five hundred years after burial, were judged by the Senate unfit for the people to see and ordered destroyed. What made them unfit was never passed down.

Questions people ask about Vegoia

Good reading and sources

• Vegoia on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data