The Headless God

— 13 —

Thus, the idea of the beheaded and headless god is well known to the Egyptian from the myth of his religion. Moreover, in Egypt, as well as almost everywhere among primitive and civilized peoples of the earth, one knew the figures of decapitated men, of defeated enemies whose heads the king had laid at his feet, and of criminals who paid for their offenses through beheading².

In popular belief, they easily become headless demons and, like all those killed violently, possess special magical powers. The beheaded provide terrible ghost-figures, arguably even more terrifying in their grotesque truncation than many of their companions, who wear the most absurd grimaces and unite within themselves accumulated horrors of all figments of the imagination.

The gruesome figure of the beheaded man pursued humans even into their dreams, and so Artemidorus has also dedicated two chapters to it in his dream book. In the 35th section of the Oneirocritica Interpretation of Dreams, he treats dreams "of being beheaded" in detail. The interpretation depends essentially on the status and profession of the dreaming person; it remains the same, however, whether one dreams of having suffered beheading through judicial sentence, by robbers, or

bility that this papyrus head is mentioned in a curse tablet from Rome. At Aud. 188 line 10 stands the "slander" against the cursed one:

"He is the one who burned the papyrona of Osiris."

Is. Lévy suspects in the Papyron a container made of papyrus similar to the chest from Ostia. The papyrus boat of Isis hardly comes into question for Osiris; perhaps one may think of the papyrus head of the god?

² For Rome, cf. Daremberg-Saglio et al., Supplicium (4, 2, 1569) with beheading scene.
For Egypt, the illustrations in Budge, Osiris I Chap. 6.
The images of the tomb of Ramses IX teem with representations of decapitated opponents and those awaiting beheading: Mémoires de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire XV, 1907. Notable also the severed head at the upper arch of the nine hieroglyphs for "Shos" turned to the right in G. Maspero, Les Hypogées royaux de Thèbes The Royal Hypogea of Thebes (Biblioth. Égyptol. 2, 1893, Studies of Mythology and Archaeology of Egypt) p. 111 Fig. 14. Two knives or swords are still stuck above and below the scaffold, similar to those that serve for the execution of Typhon in Budge, Os. I 48. According to the Westcar Papyrus, there was a magician, Dedi, who knew how to reattach severed animal heads (goose, duck). He did not dare, however, to restore human heads; cf. H. Gressmann op. cit. 252; cf. Altorientalische Texte und Bilder Ancient Oriental Texts and Images, Tübingen I 1909, 290 f. Thus, even the great magician among the gods, Thoth, can only give Isis a cow's head for the head struck off by Horus.
For the custom of beheading and scalping among Gauls, Irish, Romans, and others, Adolphe Reinach deals with it, with rich material, Les têtes coupées The Severed Heads, Revue celtique 34, 1913, pp. 38—60, 253—286.