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