The di inferi or dii inferi (Latin, "the gods below")[Varro, De lingua latina 6.13.] were a shadowy collective of ancient Roman deities associated with death and the underworld.[Entry on "Death," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 366.] The epithet inferi is also given to the mysterious Manes,[Tacitus, Annales 13.14: inferos Silanorum manes.] a collective of ancestral spirits. The most likely origin of the word Manes is from manus or manis (more often in Latin as its antonym immanis), meaning "good" or "kindly," which was a euphemistic way to speak of the inferi so as to avert their potential to harm or cause fear.[Robert Schilling, "The Manes," Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 133.]
Sacrifices
Varro (1st century BC)
[Varro, Divine Antiquities, book 5, frg. 65.] distinguishes among the
di superi ("gods above"), whose sites for offerings are called
altaria; the
di terrestres ("terrestrial gods"), whose altars are
arae; and
di inferi, to whom offerings are made by means of
foci, "hearths," on the ground or in a pit. In general,
animal sacrifice to gods of the upper world usually resulted in communal meals, with the cooked victim apportioned to divine and human recipients. Infernal gods, by contrast, received burnt offerings (holocausts), in which the sacrificial victims were burnt to ash, because the living were prohibited from sharing a meal with the dead. This prohibition is reflected also in funeral rites, where the deceased's passage into the realm of the dead is marked with a holocaust to his Manes at his tomb, while his family returns home to share a sacrificial meal at which his exclusion from the feast was ritually pronounced. Thereafter, he was considered part of the collective Manes, sharing in the sacrifices made to them.
[John Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," in A Companion to Roman Religion (Blackwell, 2007), p. 271.]
Thus, victims for public sacrifices were most often domesticated animals that were a normal part of the Roman diet, while offerings of victims the Romans considered inedible, such as horses and puppies, mark a chthonic aspect of the deity propitiated, whether the divinity belonged to the underworld entirely. Secret ritual practices characterized as "magic" were often holocausts directed at underworld gods, and puppies were a not uncommon offering, especially to Hecate.[Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," pp. 263–264, 269; Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 357–358; Fritz Graf, "What Is New about Greek Sacrifice?" in Kykeon: Studies in Honour of H.S. Versnel (Brill, 2002), p. 118.] Di inferi were often invoked in binding spells (defixiones), which offer personal enemies to them.[Auguste Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae (A. Fontemoing, 1904), pp. lxii, xcvi, with examples p. 253; Francisco Marco Simon, " Formae Mortis: El Tránsito de la Muerte en las Sociedades Antiguas (University of Barcelona, 2009), p. 170; Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," p. 269.] The infernal gods were also the recipients on the rare occasions when human sacrifice was carried out in Rome.[Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors," p. 269.] The ritual of devotio, when a general pledged his own life as an offering along with the enemy, was directed at the gods of the underworld under the name Di Manes.[Frances Hickson Hahn, "Performing the Sacred: Prayers and Hymns," in A Companion to Roman Religion, p. 239.]
Festivals and topography
Religious sites and rituals for the
di inferi were properly outside the
pomerium, Rome's sacred boundary, as were tombs.
[A.L. Frothingham, "Vediovis, the Volcanic God," American Journal of Philology 38 (1917), p. 377.] Horse racing along with the
propitiation of underworld gods was characteristic of "old and obscure"
such as the
Consualia, the
October Horse, the
Taurian Games, and sites in the
Campus Martius such as the Tarentum and the
Trigarium. The Taurian Games were celebrated specifically to propitiate the
di inferi.
[John H. Humphrey, Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing (University of California Press, 1986), pp. 544, 558; Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, Manuel des Institutions Romaines (Hachette, 1886), p. 549; "Purificazione," in Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum ( LIMC, 2004), p. 83. See also the Lusus Troiae.]
The rarely raced three-horse chariot (triga, from which the trigarium, as a generic term for "field for equestrian exercise", took its name) was sacred to the di inferi. According to Isidore of Seville, the three horses represented the three stages of a human life: childhood, youth, and old age.[Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 18.36.]
Arbores infelices
In the Etruscan tradition of tree divination, the
di inferi were the
tutelary deity of certain trees and shrubs, on one list the
buckthorn,
European Cornel,
fern,
ficus, "those that bear a black berry and black fruit,"
holly,
European Pear, butcher's broom,
rubus, and
."
[Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.20, citing the lost work De Ostentario Arborario by Tarquitius Priscus: Arbores quae inferum deorum avertentiumque in tutela sunt, eas infelices nominant: alternum sanguinem filicem, ficum atram, quaeque bacam nigram nigrosque fructus ferunt, itemque acrifolium, pirum silvaticum, pruscum rubum sentesque quibus portenta prodigiaque mala comburi iubere oportet. Modern English identifications by Robert A. Kaster in his translation of the Saturnalia for the Loeb Classical Library.] The wood of these trees, called
arbores infelices ("inauspicious trees"), had
apotropaic powers and was used for burning objects regarded as ill omens.
Christian reception
The
early Christian poet
Prudentius regarded the
di inferi as integral to the ancestral religion of Rome, and criticized the
gladiator held for them as representative of the underworld gods' inhumane and horrifying nature. To Prudentius, the other Roman gods were merely false, easily explained as
euhemerized mortals, but an act of devotion to the
di inferi constituted
devil worship, because Christians assimilated the
di inferi to their beliefs pertaining to
Hell and the figure variously known as the
Devil,
Satan, or
Lucifer.
[Prudentius, Contra Symmachum I.379–399, II.1086–1132, and V.354; Friedrich Solmsen, "The Powers of Darkness in Prudentius' Contra Symmachum: A Study of His Poetic Imagination," Vigiliae Christianae 19.4 (1965), pp. 238, 240–248.]
List of underworld or chthonic deities
The following list includes deities who were thought to dwell in the underworld, or whose functions mark them as primarily or significantly
chthonic or concerned with death. They typically receive nocturnal sacrifices, or dark-colored animals as offerings. Other deities may have had a secondary or disputed chthonic aspect. Rituals pertaining to Mars, particularly in a form influenced by Etruscan tradition, suggest a role in the cycle of birth and death. Mercury moves between the realms of upper- and underworld as a
psychopomp. The agricultural god
Consus had an altar that was underground, like that of Dis and Proserpina. Deities concerned with birth are often cultivated like death deities, with nocturnal offerings that suggest a theological view of birth and death as a cycle.
The deities listed below are not to be regarded as collectively forming the di inferi, whose individual identities are obscure.
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Dis pater or Dis pater ("Father Dis"), the Roman equivalent of Greek Plouton, who presided over the afterlife as a divine couple with Proserpina
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Februus, Etruscan god of purification and death, absorbed into the Roman pantheon
-
Hecate or Trivia ("three paths"), an aspect of the triple goddess, along with Luna and Proserpina, adapted in Rome
-
Lemures, the malevolent dead
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Libitina, one of the indigitamenta associated with death and the underworld
-
Manes, spirits of the dead
-
Mana Genita, an obscure underworld goddess who was concerned with infant mortality
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Mater Larum ("Mother of the Lares"), a goddess of obscure identity and underworld associations variously identified as Larunda or Dea Tacita ("Silent Goddess") or Muta "(Mute Goddess)"
-
Mors, personification of death
-
Nenia Dea, goddess of the funeral lament
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Orcus, an archaic underworld deity whose name was also used for the underworld itself; compare Hades
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Parcae or Morta, one of the three fates who determines mortality
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Proserpina, daughter of Ceres and queen of the underworld with her husband Dis; also Erecura
-
Erebus, god of darkness. Greek Erebos; deep, shadow and one of the primordial deities.
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Summanus, god of nocturnal thunder who was later identified with Pluto
-
Vediovis, an obscure archaic god, perhaps a chthonic Jove
