Nortia
Nortia is the goddess of Volsinii, and what is remembered of her is a rite rather than a myth: each year a nail was driven into the wall of her temple, and the nails standing there counted the years. Livy reports the custom and makes her its custodian; the Roman clavus annalis, the year-nail of the Capitoline temple, is its counterpart. Because the nail fixes what cannot then be moved, she is generally understood as a goddess of fate and of fixed time. Tertullian, writing in 197 from a lost work of Varro, lists her with Valentia of Ocriculum and Visidianus of Narnia among the gods Italian towns had taken for their own — the same passage that gave this registry those two Umbrian figures. Her Etruscan name-form is not securely recovered, and none is invented here.
Domains
- fate
- time
Powers
- to have the year fixed and counted by a nail driven into her temple wall
Sources
- Livy, on the nails fixed in the temple of Nortia at Volsinii.
- Tertullian, Apologeticum 24.8, naming Nortia of Volsinii.
- Reference discussion of Nortia among the Etruscan deities of indigenous origin.