#frances larson

Such violent acts can inspire a surprising range of emotions. Feelings like grief, disgust and shame are to be expected, but these negative reactions are often mirrored by a sense of intimacy and wonder. Holding a severed head in your hands, even cutting off another person’s head, can be a thrill. Owning somebody else’s head can be a fascinating and deeply moving experience. It can be an expression of respect or an act of abuse, or both at once. People invariably treat severed heads as prized possessions, since they are hardly commonplace objects. Whether as a religious relic, a pseudo-scientific icon, an artist’s muse or a soldier’s memento mori, countless human heads have been transformed into vessels for reverence.

A popular belief in ‘sympathetic action’ meant that heads were often used to heal illnesses of the head, such as headaches and madness. In parts of France in the late eighteenth century, pills made from a hanged man’s head were thought to cure ‘the bite of a mad dog’. Drinking from skulls was also meant to restore health. In the 1560s some of the traitors’ heads from London Bridge were reused as medicinal cups for a group of men working at the Royal Mint who were suffering from arsenic poisoning, the symptoms of which include headaches and lightheadedness. The ailing men drank their medicine out of the cleaned skulls, but many of them died anyway.                 Paracelsus recommended the ‘moss’, or lichen, that grew on a dead man’s skull for seizures and ‘disorders of the head’, and to bind wounds, on the basis that the ‘vital spirit’ released at death would be transferred from the skull into the lichen that started to grow on its surface. The fact that these skull-grown lichens were quite rare only increased the value of the cure. Skull moss seems to have been a particularly popular remedy in England and Ireland, perhaps because in these countries dead criminals were often left on public display until their flesh started to rot away and things began to grow on their bones. In 1694 it was reported that London druggists sold suitably mossy skulls for 8 to 11 shillings each, depending on the size and the amount of growth on them.

Visitors say, 'Real shrunken heads! Wow! How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!' But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England? Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken heads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom. It is time to turn the spotlight round and point it back at people like you and me, and at our ancestors, who were responsible for bringing hundreds of these heads into museums and people's homes and who delighted in them as much as -- if not more than -- the people who created them in the first place. After all, it is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum.

Even when a head is severed entirely legally it is an act that has the power to horrify, and part of the horror is that a severed head is so captivating. The dead human face is a siren: dangerous but irresistible.

It should not be surprising that for most of our history the living have turned to the dead in search of a little magic, because dead bodies are intoxicating things.

Decapitation is a contradiction in terms because it is both brutal and effective. A beheading is a vicious and defiant act of savagery, and while there may be good biological reasons why people’s heads make an attractive prize, a beheading draws part of its power from our inability to turn away. Even in a democratic, urbanized society, there will always be people who want to watch the show. Similarly, severed heads themselves often bring people together, galvanizing them in intensely emotional situations, rather than – or as well as – repelling them. Decapitation is the ultimate tyranny; but it is also an act of creation, because, for all its cruelty, it produces an extraordinarily potent artefact that compels our attention whether we like it or not.                  Even the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim can bring surprises, because there is sometimes a strange intimacy to the interaction, occasionally laced with humour, as well as sheer brutality. Each different encounter with a severed head – whether it be in the context of warfare, crime, medicine or religion – can change our understanding of the act itself. People have developed countless ways to justify the fearsome appeal of the severed head. The power that it exerts over the living may well be universal. For all their gruesome nature, severed heads are also inspirational: they move people to study, to pray, to joke, to write and to draw, to turn away or to look a little closer, and to reflect on the limits of their humanity. The irresistible nature of the severed head may be easily exploited, but it is also dangerous to ignore.