The Headless God

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suffering it in a duel. The 38th chapter deals more briefly with the dream: "Holding one's head in one's hands" and with the expansion of the case where one believes one is carrying one's own head in one's hands and a second one on one's neck (as headless saints, such as St. Dionysius, were sometimes depicted in the Middle Ages). For the history of the headless god, these dreams with their attempts at solution have no significance at all. Their citation by Artemidorus can only prove that the idea of humans without heads and, subsequently, also of headless spirits, was perfectly familiar to all strata of the population in antiquity.

It is not only as an ornamental epithet that magic literature has bestowed the epithet 'the Terrible' upon the akephalos headless demon. Terrible is also his activity, which a late Greek text full of bizarre magic, the Testament of Solomon1, attributes to him. He has all his limbs like a human, only his head is missing; his name is "Murder." For he consumes the heads of his victims to acquire a head for himself. And no matter how many he eats, he is never satisfied. He looks through his nipples, and his voice is that of the many mutes whose heads he has broken. Ten days after birth, he rides through the voice of the crying child as a breath or spirit. At night, at an inopportune time, the encounter with the Akephalos Headless One brings particular harm. His strength lies in his hands: he places them like neck-tongs around the necks of the people he murders, and he cuts off their heads in order to appropriate them for himself: "thus I consume it with the fire within me through the throat. I am the one who burns the limbs, to the feet I send hexes, I create wounds. And through the fiery lightning, I am rendered powerless."

The tradition of the headless "Murder" demon has survived into the 18th century. From this time, DELATTE (p. 238) cites an Athenian manuscript (Bibl. Nat. 825) that directs an exorcism against the Phonos Murderer. His characteristics and effects, summarized here briefly, seem to stem from the Testament of Solomon, if it is not a case in both instances of the deposit of the same popular belief.

1 The Testament of Solomon . . . by CHESTER CHARLT. MC. COWN, Leipzig 1922 (Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Studies on the New Testament ed. by H. WINDISCH, Issue 9), p. 35* Chap. IX. Translation by H. BORNEMANN, Das Testament des Salomo The Testament of Solomon, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie Journal for Historical Theology 1844, XIV 3, 9—56. According to FLECK's first edition, 1837.