The Headless God

Foreword.

This small study on the headless god forms an excerpt from the collections of material that my many years of preoccupation with the Greek Zauberpapyri magical papyri have yielded. It, along with others such as the one on the tail-biting snake, was already prepared long before the stimulating work by A. DELATTE, AKEPHALOS THEOS The Headless God, which collects valuable material, came to my attention after the end of the war; it gave me the occasion to develop my study as a parallel to his. Much as my conception and interpretation of the various traditions of the Headless One mostly deviates from those of DELATTE, I gladly acknowledge that I owe much to his trains of thought and results. Even where I have not advanced beyond preliminary results and hypotheses. It seemed regrettable throughout that DELATTE did not decide to base his contribution on a thorough re-examination of the papyrus texts themselves. This would have spared him from errors, such as those that had to result from the use of C. WESSELY'S sketch of the magic image in Pap. Mimaut (Louvre).

One may consider and excuse the digression on the Roman curse tablets of the Museo Kircheriano Kircher Museum as an excursion lying immediately along the path. Their Sethian origin, under which RICHARD WÜNSCH, their first editor and interpreter, who did great service for the study of ancient magic, baptized them, seemed to require a re-examination of certain decisive questions. The engagement with DELATTE'S headless god, which led to Seth-Typhon, brought about this late critical reassessment without coercion. It should, let it be explicitly noted, merely signify an objective determination of my own results and conjectures, and in no way a polemic against RICHARD WÜNSCH, whom I highly revered as a scholar and a man; his premature death—also one of the irreplaceable sacrifices of the war—I have felt heavily. For with him, the edition of the Zauberpapyri also lost an organizing and perpetually helpful force, which it will sorely miss.