The Headless God

Lucian speaks in The Lover of Lies (Chap. 29): the possibility of the reappearance of the hanged, the beheaded, and the crucified is considered. But one can hardly apply Tertullian’s reproach (Apology 12) against the pagans here: "Your gods are headless!" or his statement (ad nat. 1, 10) that Varro speaks of "three hundred Jupiters without heads"... Might one think in such mockery not at all of headless figures of religion, but rather of old god-statues deprived of their heads by accident, which were left standing in the temples because of their antiquity in their mutilation, without repair by human hands? They do not count among the headless demons, as little as Varro's Stoic round god "without head and foreskin," one who has attained his roundness through the removal of extremities acroteriasmos; removal of parts like head or limbs, one with whom Claudius in Seneca, Apocoloc. 8, must not compare himself! And also the figure of the primal man of the Samothracian mysteries, which Hippolytus has handed down in his Refutation of all Heresies (Elench. 5, 8, 13 f.), obviously drops out for inclusion among the headless gods. The description of this "Archanthropos" primal man, called Korybas by Thracians and Phrygians and represented in the cult sanctuary as ithyphallic with erect phallus, with hands raised toward heaven, is not easily grasped: "He begins his descent from the height above—hence his name Korybas, height-strider—and from the featureless brain, to all the principles of the things below in a way incomprehensible to us. That is what the word means: His voice we heard, but his form we saw not (Gospel of John 5:37). His voice, namely that of the separated and marked one, is heard, but what kind of form it is, no one has seen." The wording of the expression "that of the beheaded and marked one" stems merely from a conjecture of the Göttingen editors (1859). Paul Wendland has included it in his edition, Griech. Schriftsteller Greek Writers 26, Hippolytus 3, 1916, 91. But the only manuscript for the second part of the Elenchos knows nothing of it¹.

People who were brought from life to death with the axe turn into headless ghosts, those "Pepelekis" the axed ones

1 apotetagmenou the separated one ms. (cod. Par. Suppl. grec 164), apotetamnou the beheaded one Duncker-Schneidewin; "the described one" Count Konr. Preysing, Des hl. Hippolytus... Widerlegung St. Hippolytus' Refutation, transl. Munich 1922, 100 (Bibl. d. Kirchenväter 40). After him the translation above. I owe the reference to this passage to Fr. Dölger.