Orcus was a god of the underworld,
punisher of broken oaths in Italic and
Roman mythology. As with Hades, the name
of the god was also used for the
underworld itself. In the later
tradition, he was conflated with Dis
Pater. Hades is the Greek equivalent of
Pluto.
Orcus 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. It
is likely that he was transliterated
from the Greek daemon Horkos, the
personification of Oaths and a son of
Eris.
Origins
The origins of Orcus may have lain in
Etruscan religion. The so-called Tomb of
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.
The Romans sometimes conflated Orcus
with other gods such as Pluto, Hades,
and 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,
"Orcus" could also mean the land of the
dead.
Orcus was chiefly worshipped in rural
areas; he had no official cult in the
cities. This remoteness allowed for him
to survive in the countryside long after
the more prevalent gods had ceased to be
worshipped. He survived as a folk figure
into the Middle Ages, and aspects of his
worship were transmuted into the wild
man festivals held in rural parts of
Europe through modern times. Indeed,
much of what is known about the
celebrations associated with Orcus come
from medieval sources.
Survival and later use
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 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 was the inspiration to J. R.
R. Tolkien's orcs in his The Lord of the
Rings. In a text published in The War of
the Jewels, Tolkien stated:
Note. The word used in translation of
Q[uenya] urko, S[indarin] orch, is Orc.
But that is because of the similarity of
the ancient English word orc, 'evil
spirit or bogey', to the Elvish words.
There is possibly no connexion between
them. The English word is now generally
supposed to be derived from Latin Orcus.
Also, in an unpublished letter sent to
Gene Wolfe, Tolkien also made this
comment:
Orc I derived from Anglo-Saxon, a word
meaning demon, usually supposed to be
derived from the Latin Orcus—Hell. But I
doubt this, though the matter is too
involved to set out here.
From this use, countless other fantasy
games and works of fiction have borrowed
the concept of the orc.
The name Orcus plays a role in the
Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game as
Orcus, Prince of the Undead.
Orcus appears as a character in
Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job.
The Kuiper belt object 90482 Orcus is
named after Orcus. This was because
Orcus was sometimes considered to be
another name for Pluto, and also because
Pluto and 90482 Orcus are both plutinos.
See also
Demogorgon
Ogre
Pluto
90482 Orcus
Notes
References
Bernheimer, Richard. Wild men in the
Middle Ages, New York : Octagon books,
1979, ISBN 0-374-90616-5
Grimal, P.. The Dictionary of Classical
Mythology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Richardson, L.. A New Topographical
Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
External links
"Tomb of the Orcus," Tarquinia
