Satre (Etruscan god) explained

Satre or Satres^[1] was an Etruscan god who appears on the Liver of Piacenza, a bronze model used for haruspicy. He occupies the dark and negative northwest region, and seems to be a "frightening and dangerous god who hurls his lightning from his abode deep in the earth."^[2] It is possible that Satre is also referred to with the word "satrs" in the Liber Linteus ("Linen Book," IX.3), the Etruscan text preserved in Ptolemaic Egypt as mummy wrappings.^[3]

Satre is usually identified with the Roman god Saturn, who in a description by Martianus Capella holds a position similar to that of Satre on the liver.^[4] The name Satre may be only an Etruscan translation of Saturnus,^[5] or Saturnus may derive from the Etruscan;^[6] it is also possible that the two deities are unrelated.^[7] No image in Etruscan art has been identified as Satre: "this deity remains a riddle."^[8]

Notes and References

1. Satres is probably the genitive form: Giuliano Bonfante and Larissa Bonfante, The Etruscan Language: An Introduction (Manchester University Press, 2002 rev. ed.), p. 204; Susanne William Rasmussen, Public Portents in Republican Rome («L'Erma» di Bretschneider, 2003), p. 132.
2. H.S. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual (Brill, 1993, 1994), p. 145, citing Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.138, 52; Massimo Pallottino, "Religion in Pre-Roman Italy," in Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 31.
3. Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, p. 204; Jean-René Jannot, Religion in Ancient Etruria, translated by Jane K. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 166.
4. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, pp. 138 (especially note 10) and 145.
5. Jannot, Religion in Ancient Etruria, p. 167.
6. Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, p. 204.
7. As is the case with the similarly named Roman Mars and Etruscan Maris: Erika Simon, "Gods in Harmony: The Etruscan Pantheon," in The Religion of the Etruscans (University of Texas Press, 2006), p. 59.
8. Simon, "Gods in Harmony," p. 59.