In Etruscan mythology

Etruscan mythology

The Etruscans were a diachronically continuous population, with a distinct language and culture during the period of earliest European writing, in the Mediterranean Iron Age in the second half of the first millennium BC...

, Aita was the name for the underworld, as well as the corresponding anthropomorphized deity, borrowed from Greek

Greek mythology

Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...

 Hades

Hades

Hades , Hadēs, originally , Haidēs or , Aidēs , meaning "the unseen") was the ancient Greek god of the underworld. The genitive , Haidou, was an elision to denote locality: "[the house/dominion] of Hades". Eventually, the nominative came to designate the abode of the dead.In Greek mythology, Hades...

. Etruscans depicted him as a bearded male wearing a wolfskin cap.
The Etruscans depicted the underworld god Aita with a wolfskin cap. He is shown with his snake-crowned queen Phersipnei (Persephone

Persephone

In Greek mythology, Persephone , also called Kore , is the daughter of Zeus and the harvest-goddess Demeter, and queen of the underworld; she was abducted by Hades, the god-king of the underworld....

) on a famous wall painting from the Tomb of Orcus

Tomb of Orcus

The Tomb of Orcus , sometimes called the Tomb of Murina , is a 4th century BC Etruscan hypogeum in Tarquinia, Italy. Discovered in 1868, it displays Hellenistic influences in its remarkable murals, which include the portrait of Velia Velcha, an Etruscan noblewoman, and the only known pictorial...

 in Volterra, Chiusi, Italy. Between their heads is his name, AITA, in "backward"-reading Etruscan.

Nowhere in Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

 or in Greek art was Hades depicted in a wolf-skin cap or helmet. But the Greek Hades had a similar helmet, the proverbial "Aidos kune" or "Hades' helmet", created for him by the Cyclops

Cyclops

A cyclops , in Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead...

 during the war of the Olympian gods against the Titans

Titan (mythology)

In Greek mythology, the Titans were a race of powerful deities, descendants of Gaia and Uranus, that ruled during the legendary Golden Age....

. That helmet made the wearer invisible ("aidou", hence the name Aides or Hades, "The Invisible" or "Unseen One"). Not even the gods could see its wearer. Athena wore it, says Homer, during the Trojan war

Trojan War

In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...

 to make her invisible, even to Ares

Ares

Ares is the Greek god of war. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera. In Greek literature, he often represents the physical or violent aspect of war, in contrast to the armored Athena, whose functions as a goddess of intelligence include military strategy and...

 (Iliad

Iliad

The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

, Book 5, lines 544-5). And, says Hesiod

Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

, Hermes borrowed it and lent it to Perseus

Perseus

Perseus ,Perseos and Perseas are not used in English. the legendary founder of Mycenae and of the Perseid dynasty of Danaans there, was the first of the mythic heroes of Greek mythology whose exploits in defeating various archaic monsters provided the founding myths of the Twelve Olympians...

, to make him invisible in his fight with the terrible Gorgons (The Shield of Achilles 126).

The Greek word for "helmet" (kune) means "dog's hair," "dog's hide," or "dog's skin." "Hades' helmet" was thus a dog-skin cap. And this the Etruscans turned into the wolf-skin cap or helmet of Aita. Jean-Rene Jannot, in his "La peinture etrusque," says Aita in the Tomb of Orcus is "covered in the skin" of a hybrid, a "chien loup" or wolf-hound. But most authorities call it a wolf-skin.

On an ash urn from the same period as the tomb painting appears a humanized Aita, bearded and fur-capped, about to lead away into the Underworld the man whose ashes were inside the box, and whose spirit is seen on the outside passing through the portal to the world beyond. He wears the pointed metal cap of a haruspex

Haruspex

In Roman and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry...

, a wizard and seer who could foretell the future by reading patterns in the guts of animals or blasts of thunder and bolts of lightning. Now he takes his last farewell from his young wife and baby. (Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, Los Angeles: The J.Paul Getty Museum, 2000, p 342; for the image, see http://www.ancientworlds.net/aworlds_media/ibase_1/00/11/60/00116007_000.jpg)

Above them are two bare-breasted, torch-bearing female demons or "vanths" with snakes in their hair like Phersnipei in the tomb painting. Beside the door is a short-skirted female who could be Culsu, or Vanth herself, guarding the door. One of the overhead vanths points her torch down toward the mother and child.

Aita, Lord of the Dead, strides toward the dead man to take him into the Underworld. He wears a beard and a fur cap, probably a wolfskin cap like that worn by Aita in the tomb painting above. On the right, the death demon Charun

Charun

In Etruscan mythology, Charun acted as one of the psychopompoi of the underworld, not to be confused with the lord of the underworld, known to the Etruscans as Aita...

, wearing an animal hide, waits with his hammer and a paddle to deal the dead man the coup de grace, while above him is a dog-headed demon.