The Guide of the Dead

Turms answers to Greek Hermes and Roman Mercury, but his most developed Etruscan role is as psychopomp, the conductor of souls to the world below. Etruscan funerary art is unusually preoccupied with the journey of the dead, and Turms appears in tomb painting and on mirrors leading shades across the boundary of death, moving freely between the living world and the underworld peopled by native demons such as the hammer-wielding Charun and the winged Vanth. In scenes of necromancy, the raising of ghosts, including the summoning of the seer Teiresias, it is Turms who brings the spirit up and returns it. His name may derive from Greek Hermes through an intermediary form, but the emphasis on his mortuary function is Etruscan: in a culture that gave the fate of the dead such weight, the messenger-god became above all the one who walks the road between the worlds.

A bronze mirror from Vulci names him explicitly in this role: the inscription Turms Aitas, "Turms of Aita," pairs him with Aita, the Etruscan underworld lord roughly comparable to Greek Hades, and a painted vase found at Bettolle shows the same "Turms of the underworld" escorting a traveller into the world below, inscriptional and painted confirmation of the role hinted at in his mirror-scenes with Charun and Vanth.