Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...

and

Etruscan mythology Etruscan religion comprises a set of stories, beliefs, and religious practices of the Etruscan civilization, heavily influenced by the mythology of ancient Greece, and sharing similarities with concurrent Roman mythology and religion. As the Et ...

, Mania (or Manea) was a goddess of the dead. She, along with

Mantus In Etruscan myth and religion, Mantus ( ett, Manth) was a god of the underworld in the Po Valley as described by Servius. Servius, note to ''Aeneid'10.199./ref> A dedication to the god ''manθ'' from the Archaic period was found in a sanctuary ...

, ruled the

underworld The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underwo ...

. She was said to be the mother of

ghosts A ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that is believed to be able to appear to the living. In ghostlore, descriptions of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to re ...

, the

undead The undead are beings in mythology, legend, or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive. Most commonly the term refers to corporeal forms of formerly-alive humans, such as mummies, vampires, and zombies, who have been reanimated b ...

, and other spirits of the night, as well as the

Lares Lares ( , ; archaic , singular ''Lar'') were guardian deities in ancient Roman religion. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been hero-ancestors, guardians of the hearth, fields, boundaries, or fruitfulness, or an amalgam of these. Lare ...

and the

Manes In ancient Roman religion, the ''Manes'' (, , ) or ''Di Manes'' are chthonic deities sometimes thought to represent souls of deceased loved ones. They were associated with the '' Lares'', '' Lemures,'' '' Genii'', and ''Di Penates'' as deities ( ...

. Her name links her to the Manes,

Mana Genita In ancient Roman religion, Mana Genita or Geneta Mana is an obscure goddess mentioned only by Pliny, Plutarch, and Horace. Both Pliny and Plutarch tell that her rites were carried out by the sacrifice of a puppy or a bitch. Plutarch alone has lef ...

, and Manius.Roger D. Woodard, ''Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult'' (University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 116–117. Both the Greek and Latin ''Mania'' derive from

PIE A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts (pecan pie), brown sugar ( sugar pie), sweete ...

(Proto-Indo-European) *''men-'', "to think."

Cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical ef ...

s include

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...

grc, μένος, ménos, mind, thought, label=none, and

Avestan Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scrip ...

ae, 𐬎𐬫𐬥𐬌𐬀𐬨, mainyu, spirit, label=none. In Roman and Etruscan mythology, Mania (Manea) is the goddess of Spirits and Chaos. In

Greek mythology A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the origin and nature of the world, the lives and activities o ...

, she is the goddess of insanity and madness ( Maniae).

References

Death goddesses Etruscan goddesses Roman goddesses Undead Underworld goddesses {{deity-stub

See also

References