The Headless God

"menoi" of the curse tablets from Cyprus¹: they are invoked alongside the souls of those from mass graves, of suicides, the raped, the prematurely deceased, the unburied, and the aborted², and are compelled into the service of Black Magic. It is they who, after their death, can exert magical power: Aretaeus of Cappadocia mentions in the 2nd century AD the blood of the beheaded as a particularly healing potion for epileptics (de curat. morbor. 1, 4), a popular superstition that has survived into our own time: Andersen recounts in his biography that he witnessed an execution in Skelskör in 1823: here, parents let their epileptic children drink a cup of the blood of the beheaded...

Even the sinners of the Greeks who were punished by beheading only in the afterlife may have become headless haunt-spirits, just like those of the Germanic underworld, even if direct evidence is hard to find: Aeschylus already knows of the goddesses of justice who, in Hades, carry out the punishment of beheading or blinding upon the condemned according to their crimes³.

To the ancient civilized peoples, as to numerous primitive tribes, the death-demon appeared in the exact form of his corpse; wounds and mutilations to the body and limbs reveal the nature of his death. But this conception of the headless spirit likely belongs only to a later epoch. Yet it is not absent in the most recent times: according to a report by FR. W. H. MYERS⁴, the spirit of a man beheaded by the Chinese in battle visited his sister in Europe; she saw her brother headless at her bedside, and next to him stood the coffin of the dead man with his head. That feels like an uncanny survival of the oldest belief in demons⁵.

In the imagination of headless spirit-animals, the manner of death and burial also plays a role: often, a horse's head was stuck up as a sacrifice to the gods; under Pope Gregory the Great, the Lombards sacrificed a goat's head to the Devil. Horses, dogs,

1 Defixionum tabellae Curse tablets ed. AUG. AUDOLLENT, Paris 1904. No. 27, 17; cf. 22, 30 f.
2 Aud. 22, 50, writes here: "the ones exposed by Cronus." 'Who those gods are, brought forth by Saturn, escapes me.' I complete it: "the ones exposed by time." On the subject: SAM WIDE, ARW 12, 1909, 224—233, SAL. REINACH, ARW 9, 1906, 312 ff.
3 Eumenides 75 f. and see E. MAASS, Orpheus, 1895, 261 ff.
4 Human personality and its survival of bodily death, London 1903, 2, 424 f.
5 see W. OTTO, Die Manen The Manes/Ancestral Spirits, Berlin 1923, 92.