The Headless God

The south also knows the headless corpse-figures of decapitated evildoers. Plutarch tells¹ of a "strange" festival on Crete: there, an image of a headless man, Molos, was shown to the crowd. He had defiled a girl, and after the deed, he was found without a head. It is uncertain whether divine or human vengeance overtook him. And a headless Triton stood in the temple of Dionysus at Tanagra, as Pausanias (9, 20, 5) reports². As the reason for his acephaly headless state, a saga names the decapitation of the sea demon by a man of Tanagra: the Triton had stolen livestock, was captured by the inhabitants with wine, and was overpowered in a drunken sleep. Before this, however, Pausanias shares another, older version of the saga: it tells of an attack by the Triton on women who were taking their ritual bath in the sea. Their pleas summoned Dionysus: he fought the demon down. Nothing is explicitly mentioned about a decapitation here; but in both traditions, the matter concerns headless representations of two violators of women: that phallic concepts might play a role in the Molos story was suspected by S. Eitrem, Beiträge 2, 48, and the Triton saga would only support his view. Head and phallus in equivalence are not rare, and thus, men originally punished with the loss of the phallus could well have later been formed into headless figures. Pausanias and Plutarch, of course, know nothing of such a meaning for acephalous figures, and their sources were certainly far from reinterpreting the missing head. But the assumption of modern scholars, Mannhardt, Dümmler, M. P. Nilsson (Griech. Feste 1906, 440), that Molos was a vegetation spirit who had to die right after

Fr. S. Krauss, Am Urquell 4, 1893, 6—8; 5, 1894, 78, 197. Cf. for a detail recently A. Haas, Pommersche Sagen Pomeranian Sagas³, Leipzig 1921, 8; Fr. S. Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen Slavic Folk Research, Leipzig 1908, 114. S. Eitrem has dedicated a chapter of his Beiträge zur griechischen Religionsgeschichte Contributions to Greek Religious History II, Kristiania 1917, 34—48, to the religious and history-of-religion significance of the head as a special part of man after his death. Here also is an important collection of literature on the topic.
1 De defect. oracul. 14 (417 E.) Plutarch also no longer understood the meaning of the festival: he calls it atopos out of place/strange. H. Usener, Kleine Schriften Small Writings 4, 1913, p. 344. 30 calls the report "remarkable" without further explanation.
2 Cf. H. Usener, Dreiheit Trinity, Rhein. Museum N.F. 58, 1903, 187, 3. Dressler, in Roscher's Lexikon d. Mythol. 5, 1161 f., refers the headless Triton only to the second version of the saga (Pausan. 9, 20, 5), as if the first (Paus. 4) concerned a representation with a head. In fact, only the one headless Triton with two versions of the saga—an older one and a younger, rationalist one—should be in question.