The Headless God

The Headless God in Popular Belief.

The headless one—a horror to us, yet a familiar figure in the religious concepts of ancient civilized peoples as well as today's indigenous peoples across the entire earth. The northern and southern peoples of Europe feared the spirits of the headless, which haunt us even into our own time: does not Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry learn from his patroness, Mistress Margreth, how lively such ghostly manifestations were in her youth, "when she, especially in the countryside, had to walk by day and night through field and forest. There, headless men walked beside her for hours and moved closer the more fervently she prayed . . . and she described with moving words the agonizing state in which she found herself, when she could not refrain from addressing the uncanny companions at her side, even though she knew that this was highly dangerous." . . . To the Germanic peoples, the headless were ghosts of criminals who had suffered execution by the sword or who deserved it by law but escaped it in this life: they must wander headless, or carrying their severed head under their arm, until their redemption. The same applies to those who shift boundary stones: the plowshare tears the head from their body, whether they found this punishment in this life or only after death. All who lost their heads through the executioner's axe or the weapons of an opponent and murderer can become headless haunting spirits. All the characteristic examples that have hitherto been collected from the sagas and popular traditions of the northern countries of Europe for this case point to this¹.

1 Examples of headless spirits in human and animal form have been collected for the North with rich literary evidence by Fr. Pradel, Kopf-lose Menschen und Tiere in [deutscher] Mythe und Sage Headless Humans and Animals in [German] Myth and Saga; Mitteil. d. Schles. Gesellsch. f. Volkskunde Communications of the Silesian Society for Folklore 6 (12) 1904, 37—41. My information for Germany is primarily based on him. The question of the essence of the headless one was likely set in motion by H. F. Feilberg’s inquiry "Why do haunting spirits walk about headless?" in the monthly journal for folklore edited by