Morningstar Entering the Underworld through Orcus's Mouth

 

 Many goddesses have been associated with the morning star, the planet Venus.  Venus is unique in that she is the morning star for 263 days, disappears behind the Sun for 50 days, reappears as the evening star, which she embodies for another 263 days, and finally, disappears again between the Earth and the Sun for 8 days, before finally rising once again as the morning star.  (diagram here) Where does she go?  Sometimes, she visits the underworld.

Morningstar Entering the Underworld original painting, prints, and merch available in shop or through RedBubble or Fine Art America.

Entrances to the underworld punctuate the countryside of the ancient world, often associated with caves, rivers, or hot springs.  Underworld dieties varied from culture to culture as well.  This entrance to the underworld is based on Orcus's mouth in the Gardens of Bomarzo.

Orcus was a god of the underworld, a punisher of broken oaths in Italic and Roman mythology.  He may originally have been an Etruscan god, or Celtic.  According to Wikipedia, "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."

This sculpture of the mouth of Orcus was constructed in the 16th century as part of a larger garden commissioned by a wealthy mercenary captain and art patron while grieving the death of his wife.  "During the 19th century, and deep into the 20th, the garden became overgrown and neglected, but after the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí made a short movie about the park, and completed a painting actually based on the park in the 1950s, the Bettini family implemented a restoration program which lasted throughout the 1970s, and today the garden, which remains private property, is a major tourist attraction."

Orcus is not well known today, but his descendants, the orcs, are wildly popular.  To quote Wikipedia, "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 (appearing first in Charles Perrault's fairy-tales) 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."  J.R.R. Tolkien's orcs were based on the Italian orco.  And today orcs are also plentiful in Dungeons and Dragons and a wide array of movies and artwork.