The Headless God

head, and in front of him a sword is stuck. The Greek inscription reads Bachych; reverse side azaz, arath. One can hardly doubt that the head belongs to the decapitated figure. It surely sat on the neck of the headless one, and the sword was likely the means of decapitation. Delatte considers the head to be that of a "horse or rather a donkey." However, he believes himself justified in interpreting the head as that of a donkey because he sees in the figure of the headless one the representation of a Seth-Typhon, to whom the Egyptians indeed gave the head of an okapi, and later a donkey. He addresses the accompanying words as typical epithets of the sun god, with whom he believes Seth may be equated as a solar demon.

Who decapitated the figure? To answer, Delatte draws upon a second Athenian gem from the Rostowitz collection1. An animal-headed, clothed figure stands in an oval ring formed by a snake biting its own tail, with the Greek inscription "Jao Sabaoth Abrasax." Its left hand holds "a kind of purse" (pouch), the right draws a sword against its own throat; the head is that of a donkey. So says Delatte, who thinks he recognizes here again a solar deity, the same as above; the Ouroboros tail-biter snake provides him with assurance for the correctness of this interpretation. The demon indicates, according to Delatte, by his posture and movement, that he is threatened by the danger of decapitation. On the first gem, the act of decapitation is already completed. By whom? According to Delatte's interpretation, one would have to think of a type of suicide, which, of course, in this form—self-decapitation—would be hardly possible even for demonic or divine beings. For the peculiar means of the magicians criticized by Hippolytus (Refutation of All Heresies 4, 30) of letting lambs cut off their own heads—a procedure that only seemed to succeed "almost"—falls into the realm of magical trickery, if it ever practically succeeded in a test and did not merely run in the inventory of these boasting recipes; but it hardly belongs in that of religious faith and superstition2.

mana in Zliten (Tripoli), which shows the decapitation of an ostrich by a gladiator of the amphitheater: the animal's blood gushes in a powerful fountain from the neck. Image in René Cagnat, Mosaique de Tripolitaine, Journal des savants 22, 1924 p. 101, Fig. 4.
1 Delatte, Fig. 5 p. 209.
2 "One secretly smears the throat (of the lambs) with a corrosive poison and leaves a sword lying nearby. The animal wants to rub itself, rushes to the sword, rubs itself against it, and thus kills itself and almost cuts off its head" . . . St. Hippolytus' Refutation . . . trans. by Graf Konr. Preysing (Bibl. d. Kirchenväter, 40, Munich 1922) p. 67; cf. R. Ganschinietz, Hippolytos’ Capitel gegen die Magier, Texte und Unters. von A. Harnack-C. Schmidt 3, 9, 39 (Lpz. 1913) p. 45.