The Headless God

— 11 —

goats without heads join the dance of Germanic ghost-animals; and the headless snake in the Greek starry sky finds its explanation in the myth of the struggle of Heracles with the dragon, whose head the hero cuts off, and for whom Zeus ensures immortality in the sphaera sphere/heavens through catasterism placing among the stars in this, his final earthly form¹. The headless dove, which appears like the akephalos headless ophis serpent in the sign of Capricorn, may be traced back to similar, unknown legendary foundations.

In fact, however, the original idea of the headless one is traced back to ancient burial customs. Often, the Germanic tribes did not bury the body intact, but only after the detachment of individual parts. In one place—the Moselle region, Northern France—the skull is missing; in another—Thuringia—everything is burned except the head. A noble follower of King Dagobert fell deathly ill; the king rushed over, and it was decided—though it did not come to pass—to cut off the sick man's head "according to heathen custom" and burn his body²... From such a custom³, which aimed to prevent the return of the dead into the realm of the living, the headless demon is born. Death itself, Hel, is headless according to Holstein legends. Also according to Byzantine ones: before a great plague in Constantinople, one saw the death-gods driving toward the future places of illness as "black men without heads in brazen ships"⁴. People doomed to destruction appear headless, or a headless spirit appears to them, and whoever casts a shadow with only their body must soon die: originally these were cases in which the person concerned lost their life through beheading.

In ancient Italy, too, there was a known custom of burning the body of someone who had died while traveling or at war on the spot, but saving a limb, sometimes the head, in order to bury this part at home⁵.

1 Ad. Jacoby points out this connection to me. Panyasis frg. X, Schol. Arat. Phaenom. 64.
2 Life of St. Arnulf, Mon. Germ. scr. Merow. 2, 432.
3 Ad. Jacoby points to R. R. Schmidt, Die diluviale Vorzeit Deutschlands The Diluvial Prehistory of Germany, Stuttgart 1912, and Kosmos 6, 83 ff.
4 Carl Meyer, Der Aberglaube des Mittelalters The Superstition of the Middle Ages, Basel 1884, 137. The case is likely taken from Assemanni, Bibliotheca orientalis 2, 85. (Note from Ad. Jacoby.)
5 Evidence in E. Rohde, Psyche (4th ed.) 23, 1, with reference to similar customs among the primitives of Guinea and South America.