Head cult.
In the light of comparative ethnography, we are beginning to better understand the customs of the Celtic populations, too often distorted by explanations that compared them to the customs of classical civilization instead of bringing them closer to those of wild or semi-civilized populations, the interpretation of certain sculptures and coins has brought to light the Celtic rite of severed heads.
But we have not yet assembled, in a systematic study, all the texts and monuments that can shed light on this custom. In the course of research on the religious character of the wars, with the weapons used and the conventions that regulate them, it seemed to me that the best way to recover the original value of this rite of the severed heads would be to group together all the documents concerning it around the few precise texts and well-known monuments that show its persistence in Gaul on the eve of the Roman conquest. Some light may be shed on all the rites and customs concerning war trophies, whose importance for the history of our origins needs no mention.
Let us begin by translating and commenting on the two capital texts of Diodorus and Strabo. We know that they summarize that of Posidonius of Apamea, who travelled to Gaul about ten years before the Roman conquest (c. 80-70 BC). Posidonius tells us: 'To fallen enemies they cut off the heads and tie them to the necks of their horses. As for the blood-stained remains, they hand them over to their squires and take them away as spoils with a triumphal march and singing a victory hymn; for the trophies they nail to their houses like we do in respect of certain animals killed in the hunt. For heads of the most illustrious enemies, they carefully embalm them (…) with cedar oil and keep them in a box. They show them to strangers, boasting that one of their ancestors, or their father or some other, did not want to sell it, no matter how much money was offered to him. Some even boast that they did not want to give up a head for its weight in gold, showing in this a pride of savages. For while it is noble not to put a price on the insignia of bravery, to make war on people of one's own race even when they are dead is an act of ferocious beast.”
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| Celtic head with helmet or cap, British Isles |
Doidorus: “Clothes are therefore properly considered as booty, but only the clothes. You can see the head and the weapons have a spell on them... particular. The heads are considered to be first-fruits.”
Diodorus did not use this word without reason:
for Greeks of his time the clothes are the booty that the soldiers share, the
first-fruits reserved for the gods, exactly at the top of the heap(s) formed with
the remains. The Gauls used to have precisely the habit to form a heap of all
the spoils.
Strabo added a barbaric and inhuman custom, which is found in most northern nations: “after the battle they hang the heads of the slain on the horses their necks, and bring them back with them for to fix the heads in spectacle to the big gate of their houses'. Posidonios said that he had often witnessed it.
As for the heads of the great characters, they showed them to foreigners kept in cedar oil and refused to sell them, even by their weight in gold. This fact should have been brought to light more clearly: cedar oil is the one that the Egyptians used for embalming, probably because Osiris was passing by for being buried in a cedar. The older scholars saw this as further evidence of the distant connections between Gauls and Egyptians. What is certain is that the cedar grew only in Syria and Cilicia, Cyprus and Crete, Africa, maybe also in Phrygie and Thrace. If it's not another resinous tree that Posidonios referred to (it is confused sometimes with the juniper), the reported fact is to be added to all those which show the extent of the commercial relations of the Gauls: The Persians also knew how to embalm the heads of their enemies, as Herodotus wrote. The Romans put an end to these practices of the Gauls.
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| Stone head, Yorkshire |
This last remark must have been added by Strabo, when, about the year 21 AD, he put the last hand at his work. It provides us with the extreme limit for the use of decollation of the enemy killed. The custom, as was seen among the Gauls in Caesar's time, dated back at least to the fourth century. In 295 BC, before the Battle of Sentinum, where Decius was unable to wrest the army Roman to the Gallic fury than by devoting himself to the infernal gods, an entire legion was surprised by the Gauls and annihilated to the last man. The consuls were not informed of this until they were in sight of the Gauls, “until Gaulish horsemen appeared with the heads of the slain hanging from their horses' chests and fixed on the points of their spears, whilst they chanted war-songs after their manner”. (Tite Live, X, 26, 11.). If the horsemen carried the heads cut on the chest of their mounts, they were probably tantassins who used to spear them at the tip of their spears. Some years later, the same custom among the invading Gauls no longer Italy, but Greece: the head of the defeated Macedonian king, Ptolemy Keraunos, is carried by the victors on the tip of a spear, the Gaesates brought back to their kings the head of Consul Atilius killed in action. A third variety of the rite we are dealing with is indicated by Tite Live about the surprise when, in 216 BC, Consul L. Postumius perishes with two legions under the blows of the Boïens: “The Boii, having cut off his head, carried it and the spoils they stript off his body, in triumph into the most sacred temple they had. Afterwards they cleansed the head according to their custom, and having covered the skull with chased gold, used it as a cup for libations in their solemn festivals, and a drinking cup for their high priests and other ministers of the temple.” (Liv. XXIII, 24) Kroum the Bulgarian, drank likewise from the skull of Nicephorel, who was embedded of a golden circle.
It was therefore a habit of the Gauls to consecrate in their temples with the severed head of the enemy leader: they garnished gold the skull and it was thus used by the priests and his acolytes for the solemn libations. It is obviously for this purpose that alluded to Florus, when, among the ferocious features of the Scornful Gauls, he reports they were propitiating the gods... by human blood and drank from skulls.
The use to drink from a skull was practiced in Gaul since
the Paleolithic period. It is attested in Syria around 570 (the Bishop of
Jerusalem Jacob drinking from the skull of the martyr Theodotus); it has been
reported that the habit was in use amongst Fijians, Andamans, Fuegians, Konds
from India, New Zealand... Mecklenburg, in Guinea; also found are many of
amulets made from skulls.
According to Posidonius, this custom was widespread among most peoples of the North. There is a body of text to support this claim. Among the Germans, in the most famous of their victories, that of the Teutoburg Forest, the rite had to be performed. Germanicus, in the year 21 AD, finds, amidst the ruins of the camp of Varus, the bleached bones of the dead, in the very place where they died, the weapon fragments, the limbs... horses, "heads attached to tree trunks and.., in the nearby woods, the altars on which the Germans ...had immolated the Tribunes and the First Centurions. "(Tacitus, Ann. I, 61) Perhaps it was the result of an earlier vow. Thus, according to Florus, IV, 12, before going to war against Drusus, the Cherusks, the Sueves and the Sicambres had, by burning alive twenty centurions, divided up the booty in advance: the Cherusks had chosen the horses, the Swedes the gold. and the money, the Sicambres the prisoners. Every people had to have their share. A clue that Arminius had devoted to the infernal gods the entire Roman army is that it doesn't seem that he kept prisoners: all of them seem to have been or hanged or buried alive.
Like the entire cursed army had fallen to them, the officers had been sacrificed on altars as prisoners: it were their heads that were nailed to the trees, a clue is in the care the Germans took in the head of Varus: They went so far as to exhume it, so that it would not fail to their triumph. According to Velleius, Varus' head was sent by Arminius to Marbod. This custom persisted in the Rhine regions among the Alamans: we see Gregory the Great writing in Brunehaut to prevent "sacrilegious holocausts of severed heads". - The Thuringians who are devastating the Lorraine under Thierry I, still hang the children from the trees. According to Lucain's well-known scholism, hanging from a tree would be precisely the torture preferred by the Gallic Mars: Hesus Mars. It is known that the king of Lombardy Alboin made a cup with the skull of the King of the Gepids whom he had killed; in the poem of the Niebelungen, the Burgonde Goudroun transforms the skulls of Atli's children into cups. (Etzel or Attila) and gives them to their father.
The custom of processions wearing severed heads in the Thracian cult of Dionysus derives from the Bacchic cults: after being the grimacing heads of the victims torn and ritually eaten, they became the grotesque heads of Satyrs or Silenes, either shaped into comedy masks, either carved on these marble discs who kept the name 'oscilla', moving heads.
At the opposite ends of the Celtic world, Iberia and Scythia, the severed head is also found. Herodotus says: ”concerning the Scythians, who, as neighbours, if not relatives of the Thracians and the Celts, have had so many similar uses. The warrior Scythe drinks the blood of the first enemy he throws down on the ground at the fight. No matter how many he kills, he cuts them off to the king: it is by this way that he is entitled to a part of the booty, part in which he loses any title if he cannot show a head he has cut off. To strip the skull from the scalp, he makes a gash all the way around above the ears and, grabbing it (by the hair), he pulls the skull out; then, with a rib of beef, he cleans the scalp of all flesh and, softening it by rubbing it in his hands, he now uses it as a napkin.
The Scythian prides himself on these scalps and hangs them from his bridle; the more a man can show such towels, the more he is estimated. Many people make coats out of them by sewing a quantity together. As for the skulls of their enemies, not of all of them, but the most feared, they subject them to the treatment after removing the portion below the orbits and cleaned the inside, when the warrior is poor he covers up the interior with leather; when it is rich, he covers the interior with gold; in both cases the skull serves as a cup. When strangers come to visit, they pass these skulls, and the host tells them how he conquered them on enemies at war with him: all this is considered evidence of value. Once a year, the governor of each province, in a specific place, comes to fill a glass of wine where only Scythians drink who have killed enemies. Those who have killed a lot of people get to drink two cups.“
There are other texts, like from Pliny: ‘of the anthropophagi living ten days away in the northern Borysthenes who drink from human skulls whose hair serves as a towel', and Herodotus himself: ‘of the Issedones, neighbours of the Arimaspes, in whom the parents of the dead man, after cutting up his corpse and having him eaten with mutton, carefully preserve its skull set in gold to be used at the annual banquet given in memory of the dead’; Strabo also says for the Scythians the use of eating the flesh of strangers and drinking from the flesh of the their skulls. The king of the Pechegans who killed Sviatoslav, the first great prince of the Slavs, used his skull set in gold as a cup. Various sarcophagi, representing the adventures of Iphigenia and Orestes in Tauride, show the heads of the immolated foreigners, hanging from the Artemis tree tauropole . The Illyrian soldiers of Septimius Severus cut off the head of Albinus, whom the Emperor made to exhibit at the forum at the end of a pole. Avan Arbels, the chief of the Peonians brought back to Alexander the head of Satropatheus, the leader of the Persian cavalry. Mongolian elements are known to have mingled with the Persian cavalry, early to the Scythian populations, so we can recall here that a king of the Huns, before killing the Yue-chi in a fight, made of a skull of a prince a cup which he used for great ceremonies. The Turcomans hang the scalps from their saddle.
Finally, it is necessary to recall here the role attributed to the head of the Gorgon: without doubt, the power to strike lightning on places whoever interviewed her comes from the fact that, with snakes stinging all around her, she's a personification of the thunderstorm roaring in the midst of the lightning that zebras the sky and hiss like fire serpents. But doesn't the custom of placing a gorgon in the middle of the shield go up also to a belief of the ancestors of the Greeks in apotropaic value of the severed head?
Let's move from the southeast to the southwest of the Celtic world. At Iberia, we don't know if the Celtiberians were cutting off , like their brothers in Gaul, the heads of the enemies killed; but, in the non-Celtic population, the custom seems to have existed. By all we know through Strabo is that the Lusitanians were cutting, to consecrate it to the god, the right hand of the prisoners that they weren't immolating to their Mars; the Romans used to cut off both hands at their prisoners, Gauls or Iberians. One might have wondered if in this use the origin derives of the hands painted on prehistoric caves of Spain like that of Altamira. Diodorus shows us, at the capture of Selinunte in 409 BC, the Iberian mercenaries of Carthage mutilating corpses to plant the heads on their spears and tie their hands in bundles to their belts.
As Diodorus associates in this episode the Libyans to the Iberians and that we know all the African affinities of the Iberians, perhaps this Iberian custom should be compared of those stacks of right hands and phalluses that are depicted at battle scenes at the end of the Egyptian bas-reliefs. It is probably only for the Pharaoh's soldier to let it be known how many enemies he's killed or even taken prisoner, since these are mutilations that reduce to impotence without necessarily achieving life.
In Egypt, the head has had a very different importance: it is enough to recall the predynastic rite of the beheading of the dead; the stone heads, indestructible, deposited in the tomb; the "bearer of the royal chief" who, in the procession of the first Pharaohs, appears to have worn a image of the head of the living king; the prohibition to eat the head of the animals sacrificed; the reliquary, finally, erected in all the cities where Osiris reigned, this famous dadou, an enormous fetish in wood carved to represent the backbone of the god supporting a monstrous head where his was thought to be locked up.
We'll see the distant action further than we did in Gaul on pillars often reduced to the Osirian head surrounded with the "reds", the strangers whose reddish blond hair pointed them out as the culprits of Seth-Typhon, the enemy brother of Osiris. The use of to cut off the heads of the enemies and bring them in masse to the king finds himself also in Assyria and one of the reliefs of the Assyrian-Hethetian palace of Sindjerli. - For the Jews, it is enough to to recall Judith cutting off the head of Holofemus and David cutting off the head of Goliath.
We have reviewed all the classical texts which can provide information on the custom of cutting off the heads of the dead enemies among the Celts and neighboring or related peoples. We have yet to examine the documents from the Gauls themselves: on the one hand, the Celtic literature of the medieval times, which has been able to preserve traditions relating to the head cult; on the other hand, the monuments erected by the Gauls or the Gallo-Romans that relate to this warrior rite.
In the little time I have traveled through the Celtic epic of Wales and Ireland, I easily found legends which signal the symbolic importance of the head: they are related to the two national heroes, the Welsh Bran and the Irishman Cuchulaînn.
After many adventures, Bran succeeds to save his sister; but he received an arrow in his foot, poisoned. So he ordered the survivors of his army to cut off his head and take it home with him. They would have to move him to Harlech "and his company would also be as pleasant as it had ever been before it was separated from his body." From Harlech, they had to take it to Gwales, present day Gresholm; there they would feast in the company of his head so much that they didn’t open some door looking out on Cornwall. Once that door is open, they would have to get out set off for London and there, in the White Hill, burying his head with his eyes turned towards France. As long as the head would remain in that position, Britain would have nothing to do dreading an invasion from overseas. It is then that begins, in the Mabinogi, the story known as l’ Urdawl Penn, the "Venerable Head", where we see his companions feast around the head that presides over them as if it was alive.
The great epic of Cuchulainn shows, in several passages, that the severed head was as powerful as in the Irish believe as in the Welsh. So, when Cuchulainn has cut off, with a single stroke of his sword, the heads of the sons of Blackwater, scouts of the enemy army, leaving their dead bodies and their corpses on their float, he only takes the bloody heads. - When, in spite of the religious prohibition, the enemy king speaks before his druid, 'his shield itself chops off his head'.
We must bring the memory of the great Irish idol that St. Patrick would have struck, already its name of Cenn Crûach, "the bloody head", is significant; it is bloody because humans were sacrificed to it, like in the Fomorians or Goborcbind (?), goat-headed demons; and, if the idol was called "the head", it was probably because it consisted only of a colossal head: since we are told that by the time Patrick hit it, the other idols around it plunged into the earth up to their necks and, adds the hagiographer, it's still in that state today. Isn't that an obvious reminder of the crouching god and horned of the Gauls, Cernunnos ? We know his head is always huge, oversized for the body, whether it's a triple or only with three faces; sometimes the head alone is shown; sometimes it is framed between two birds, advisors or messengers of the god'.
When we remember that Bran's head buried under a door in London was used in the Middle Ages for a talisman against any enemy from overseas, one may wonder if the "head of Saint Denys" kept at the gates of Paris didn't owe its reputation in part to a survival of the Gauls worshipping a god reduced to a head, a veneration that the Parisii may have shared, according to one of the altars of Our Lady with severed heads. It suffices to remark:
1. how strange is the popularity of this Greek saint if it
could not be superimposed on some indigenous cult:
2. that in fact holy Denis only achieved its reputation
thanks to the embassies of Pope Paul at
king Pépin the short and from Emperor Michael II the Stammerer to King Louis
the Pious;
3. in order to authorize the worship of the holy
cephalophores (saints who are generally depicted carrying their own head), only
one phrase from St. John Chrysostome is found that states that the martyrs can
confidently stand before the tribunal of God bearing in their hands their
severed heads, witnessing their torment for faith. This is not much to explain
the extension of the cult of St. Denis and the others holy cephalophores. Fr.
Cahier counts no less than eighty of them.
(Adolphe Reinach, Revue Celtique 34, 1913.)
