The Headless God

the consummation of the marriage, a thought of symbolic killing of growth, should be met only with caution. The exhibition of the headless image of Molos could well have originally pointed to the punishment that threatened the defiler and violator of virginity on Crete, regardless of whether the equation of head and phallus actually existed at that time. And the Molos image need by no means have been, as Nilsson thinks, merely a doll prepared for the festival. The eidolon phantom/image of this headless one could have existed in a cult image from the oldest times, just as the statue of the Tanagran Triton also represented, in such an ancient celebration.

But there is no word that one of these headless ones wandered as a haunting demon and appeared uncanny to the living. They were heroized even in the old sense of the word; they do not yet belong to those heroes of a later time who ran about at night as wandering spirits. Thus, also, not Dionysus Kephalen of Methymna, not Orpheus of Antissa, Orion, etc., who according to the myth had lost their heads. Only their head served here and there for miraculous prophecy, like the Gorgoneion image of the Gorgon, which, according to medieval legend, appears in the sea on the Asia Minor coast and predicts calm or storm according to its way of movement; the wing-adorned head of the Gorgon makes the demonic impression of a chthonic deity or a dangerous sea spirit (O. Gruppe, Griech. Mythol. 1903, 837, 3; Index under Head)... but these are also not headless ghosts in the proper sense, just as little as those severed heads that possessed a tradition of prophetic power in Italy: W. Furtwängler, Antike Gemmen Antique Gems, 3, 1900, 251 f.

The fact of decapitation works out differently for cult and saga: it is not the headless one, but his head as a being in itself, that plays a role in the history of the figure, just as Mimir does not continue to live after his death as an acephalos headless one, but rather provides his prophetic head to the myth. Such figures were then also not represented as headless gods or demons; only their prophetic head came now and then to pictorial reproduction. The depiction of acephalous beings was only possible where the headless one was still thought of as effective in his mutilation, that is, without his head, and that was the case in magic and its literature; the differently natured examples of Molos and Triton are excluded.

Here those uncanny elements come into effect of which