Brain and Head Theft, Part 2

First they came for their heads. Then they came for their brains. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe discuss the weird and fascinating history of head and brain preservation, veneration and theft.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part two of our discussion of stolen
heads and stolen brains. That's right. If you didn't listen

(00:24):
to part one, go back listen to part one, because
that's where we initially get into it, and we talked
about like some ancient ideas about what the brain did
and uh, then we get into some examples of of
brains that have been preserved, uh, consensually, and then get
a little bit into the theft. And we're gonna get
more into the theft here in this episode, and then

(00:46):
towards the end we're gonna get into some of the
mythology and folklore of disembodied heads. That's right. So at
the end of the last episode, we were talking about
the theft of the skull of the Austrian classical composer
Franz Joseph Haydn, which was stolen by phrenologists who clung
to the mistaken belief that Haydn's musical genius would somehow

(01:08):
be inscribed in the bone of his cranium. But Hayden
isn't the only figure like this. There there are other
figures in history with some kind of reputation for genius
of one kind or another, who have had their heads
or their brains stolen in the hope that these remnants
would somehow explain to science what made them so smart.

(01:29):
And of course, in the case of phrenology, this was
an utterly hopeless endeavor, just because phrenology is total quack
pseudoscience end to end. But this has also happened even
in ages of more legitimate neuroscience, and still maybe doesn't
tell us as much as the people who stole these
brains hoped that it would. So I want to talk

(01:49):
about another famous stolen head that is not even for
any pretense of neuroscience or any other type of research.
I want to talk about the head of Jeremy Bentham.
H So you know Jeremy Bentham best for I don't
know what do people know him best for these days?
Maybe for the for the idea of the Panopticon, which
he was a promoter of. That would be where our
listeners might have heard his name on this show before. Yeah,

(02:12):
Jeremy Bentham was a highly influential eighteenth and nineteenth century
philosopher and social reformer from England, and he's usually thought
of as one of the founders of liberalism and one
of the modern founders of the utilitarian theory of ethics. So,
in other words, right and wrong would be determined not
by what the king says, or what the Bible says,

(02:34):
or not by any deontological duty, but by what course
of action would provide the greatest happiness to the greatest
number of people. And Bentham is kind of interesting because
if you read through a collection of his opinions and
arguments today, it is this strange mixture of things that
for the time were extremely radical, progressive and by our

(02:56):
modern ethics admirable, but also things that are bizarrely horrifying.
So so, for example, you know, he was in favor
of total political equality for women and the decriminalization of homosexuality.
But he also did not like the idea of privacy.
He thought that was a bad concept, and of course
this is exemplified in the idea of the panopticon, in

(03:19):
which prisoners have no privacy or and and do not
know if if the gaze of the like the the
lone observation tower if they are looking at them in
any given moment, you know, right, So he would dig
where we are now in some respects. Oh my god,
Jeremy Bentham. I would love to know Jeremy Bentham's thoughts

(03:42):
on the modern digital landscape. But anyway, that the relevant
part of the Jeremy Bentham story today is that his
head still exists today above ground in a grotesque, incompetently
mummified form, and and it keeps getting stolen. I was
reading a piece about this that was a transcript of

(04:04):
a CBC radio piece which featured an interview with the
Subadra Dos, who was a curator of collections at University
College London. The interviewer was named Carol Off and this
CBC piece includes some excellent biographical tidbits right at the
top about Bentham's weird and interesting personality apart from his

(04:24):
politics and his public work. For example, it says that
Bentham had a walking stick that he called Dapple, he
had a teapot that he referred to as Dicky, and
he had an elderly cat that was named the Reverend
Sir John Langborne. Oh that's that's I don't know if
that's a good cat name. That's too human. I think

(04:45):
it's funny when a dog has a very human name.
And I haven't made my mind up about cats yet.
I think, I guess I assume that's funny. I find
it cats work best when they have food names, you know, Oh, okay, yeah,
biscuit or mochi or pound cake or um yeah, really
anything rabby oli. I mean, you can go go crazy

(05:05):
with it, but generally speaking, yes, something kind of cute
and foods. He works well with cats. I find I'm
glad that we've all learned that one day you plan
to eat a cat. Well, I mean it would really
if that were the case, and it's not, then we
would the feeling would be mutual between me and the cats.
So I think the cat would respect it. Oh yeah,
if we were appreciating game, is that what they say? Yeah, totally,

(05:27):
if we were small enough our cats what heat does? Yeah? Um.
But anyway, I thought that was a pretty good window
into his personality. And uh. And so Bentham apparently had
express wishes for what would be done to his remains
in the event of his death, and they fall along
some similar lines of sensibility. So Bentham died in eighteen
thirty two, and when that happened, he wanted his dead

(05:50):
body to be preserved in a way that would allow
him to be wheeled out and presented to friends at
parties in case anybody missed seeing him. Take I want
you to take what I just said and compare that
to the picture of his preserved head above. Well, you know,
it certainly would be a conversation starter or stopper at

(06:11):
any party. Uh. I mean, it's pretty impressive looking. It
is identifiable as a head, even his head. Uh, it
kind of looks it has a very leathery consistency to it. Um.
The skin is kind of darkened and kind of looks
like a slim gem. There's hair on it, which I'm

(06:35):
guessing is perhaps his original hair, real hair. The eyes
clearly are not his original eyes. Appears to be a
pair of glass eyeballs that have been inserted into it,
which you give it this extra uncanny appearance because it
looks like, you know, the living dead. It looks like
the eyes of a of a litch staring at you.

(06:55):
But the look on his face is also not terrifying.
It's more serene. It looks like he's pay anciently listening
to you while you're sharing a tidnet. Oh, I don't
know how, Serene, And I mean, I guess I kind
of see what you're saying. But he looks to me
very like startled and appalled. He looks like a a
butler who has accidentally opened a door to a room
in which something obscene is taking place. Oh, I get

(07:18):
more of a like he's patiently listening to you while
you tell him something that he personally finds boring by Okay,
he's a good listener, nonetheless, Okay, So what was the
deal with his head? Like? Why is his head off
of his dead body but they're both preserved. Why does
it look like that? To quote from Doss in this interview,
she says Bentham had made a special request that his

(07:39):
head be preserved in the style of the Maori, the
native New Zealanders, But his friend Dr southwood Smith, who
was tasked with creating the auto icon, wasn't necessarily as
practiced with that as he probably would have liked to
have been. And Dost goes on, and so the result
was ahead that southwood Smith said was not suitable for display,

(08:01):
which is why he had a wax model commissioned. That's
the one on display with the auto icon, which is
the skeleton in Bentham Zone clothes. So so, according to Das,
the head was desiccated here with sulfuric acid and sometimes
his hair still falls out. But the situation is that
there are two separate necro icons of this utilitarian philosopher

(08:24):
that are both made out of his real body. There's
his body containing his bones and his clothes, topped with
a fake wax head and that's on display at University
College London, and Rob I've got an image for you
to look at down below here, and then you also
have his severed head poorly preserved that we just described,
sometimes kept separately, sometimes shown at the feet of the

(08:46):
auto icon of the rest of the body because it's
just this disgusting, rotten looking beef jerky head. And then
of course there's the horrible body with a wax head
that has these gloves on it that look really just
this is awful. Yeah, the picture you shared that shows
the the wax headed figure with an actual skeleton inside

(09:08):
of it, uh seated and then there it at its
feet indeed is the original head and um, yeah, this
looks fairly terrifying but also symbolically potent. Maybe it's just
because of the some of the examples that I was
looking at from say Hindu iconography that we'll get into later.
Like there, I feel like this image is trying to

(09:29):
tell me something about about death. Yeah, it seems almost
in the style of the the cephalophor sat you know,
like the Saints like San Denis in Paris, the Saints
who carry their own heads in their hands because of
the legends where they were decapitated but then just picked
up their heads and walked around, did some miracles or something. Yeah,
except he's like saying, yeah, it's like, look, there's my

(09:51):
head down there. It's rotten, but I'm I'm one. Look
at this gorgeous wax head. I'm boasting. So the story
gets weird because we got to get to the actual theft.
This was all according to two Bentham's wishes, though the
mummification or preservation of the head got screwed up. Southwood
Smith did not do a good job with that, or
at least not to his own liking, and I don't know,

(10:13):
the results don't look great. But then the theft comes
in because apparently Jeremy Bentham's actual preserved head has been
repeatedly stolen or kidnapped as a result of student pranks
like Doss points out that sometime in the nineteen nineties,
Bentham's head was quote kidnapped by uc l's rival University
King's College in London. So I assume it was stolen

(10:36):
by some kind of English version of Jim Magilowski from
the Brain, you know, a prank boy. And in fact
it seems the head was stolen multiple times in its history.
I was reading a piece about this from Smith Journal
that says, quote once it was returned upon the making
of a charitable donation. On another occasion it was recovered
from a luggage locker in Aberdeen. A man as clever

(10:59):
as Bentham should have been able to foresee the inevitable
consequences of spending eternity among students. Now, at some point
the head was recovered from what happened in the nineties
these mischievous students, and it was put back on display
at least at one point for an exhibit called what
does it Mean to be Human? Curating Heads at u
c L. So this is a head that apparently keeps

(11:22):
getting stolen. Don't know if it will ever be stolen again.
I think they are taking extreme measures to prevent that,
but who knows what's going to happen. But we should
still say that, at least in Bentham's case, this is
consensual preservation in a museum. Despite a few uh encephaloclepts
over the years, there are also lots of disturbing cases

(11:44):
where someone's head or brain ends up in a museum
against their own wishes, whether it's by the supposed forces
of science and preservation or some other forces that are
doing the stealing. It has happened plenty of times that heads,
skulls and get taken from somebody's body, whether they wanted
that or not, and end up in a museum. And

(12:06):
and this brings me to the next thing I wanted
to talk about, to follow up on some of the
UH some of the phrenology discussion from the last episode,
because I feel like I want to be a bit
self critical here, because I have to note that I
feel a baseline sympathy for the classic Indiana Jones line
about the Cross of Coronado in the Last Crusade when
he says it belongs in a museum. You know, I

(12:29):
I really enjoy museums, and I am instinctually drawn to
the idea that it's good to have artifacts preserved in
places like museums, places where you know, artifacts from history
should be the you know, the the common heritage of
all humankind to observe and learn from. And so it's
good that you get to go see them in a
museum in a place where they will be preserved as

(12:50):
well as possible across time. And this sounds good, but
of course it can in reality be an extremely fraught
concept and just one of the million complications. We expl
or some of this in our Invention episode on the
First Museum is the question of physical location. Like, I
think it is actually good that artifacts from ancient history
or even more recent history could in some way be

(13:11):
the common heritage of all humankind to learn from. But
they've got to physically be somewhere, and it turns out
that is often in like wealthy European nations or in
the United States, so like not everybody actually has the
same access to these artifacts. You know, you've got to
physically go to London or to Washington or something to
see them. Yeah, you have this this um, this this

(13:32):
severe imbalance where say school children in the United States
can go to their local museum in a major city
and see artifacts of ancient Egypt. But those same artifacts
are not on display at the local museum for actual
Egyptian children to see if they would have to look
at a reproduction or a picture in a book or

(13:53):
on the internet. Right. And of course, another big problem
here is just the question of, like, how do you
source these are the facts when you're you're bringing them
into museum collections, A lot of times it's hard to
make a convincing argument that that what's happening in the
collection of these artifacts is not just stealing, is just
stealing from dead people. And so I think that there

(14:14):
are real dilemmas here. I say this as as a
lover of museums, uh. And of course it's true even
of inanimate artifacts that are produced by people who are
long gone, But it's obviously even more fraught when you're
talking about things like the remains of human beings, especially
human beings who lived relatively recently, thank thank uh. And

(14:38):
so this brings me back to what we were talking
about in the heidn segment of part one. We were
talking about the development of the pseudoscience of phrenology, which
quick refresher. This was a a now completely debunked pseudoscience
that was popular, especially in like the first half of
the nineteenth century, popular throughout Europe in the United States,
and it was the belief that you could infer mental

(15:01):
characteristics of people by measuring bumps and contours on their skulls.
And this is one of the this was one of
the motivations for the stealing of the of Franz Joseph
Hydn's skull. Now, there are some strains of phrenology that
a person could see as extremely wrong and pseudo scientific,

(15:22):
but not super harmful, or at least not more harmful
than a belief in like palm reading or something. You know,
I'm just feeling around on your head and doing a
doing a little personality test for you. Right, It's not accurate,
there's no science to it, but it's it's ultimately, I guess, harmless, right, right,
I mean, I mean, I guess all pseudoscience in a

(15:42):
way is potentially harmful, but it's not It's not as
harmful as the other stuff we're about to talk to.
Because there are these other strains and incarnations of phrenology
and other types of pseudoscience that are that are just
a straight up nightmare. Sometimes forms of racist pseudoscience aimed
at like proving that people with different skin colors were

(16:04):
a result of separate acts of divine creation, so they're
not even really all the same kind of human. Also
weird ideas of crackpot cranial criminology. Um that didn't mean
to be so illiterated there, but in the nineteenth century especially,
it was very common for proponents of phrenology and other
types of craniometry. So craniometry would be a any kind

(16:26):
of a belief system based on the measurements of the skull,
not necessarily like bumps like phrenology. But there were other
people who just tried to collect a bunch of skulls
and measure them and draw inferences. Uh So, so there
were these things going on, and they would cause people
to gather these huge collections of human skulls, supposedly to
form the raw materials for their research. But I was

(16:49):
reading about this in that same book I mentioned in
the previous episode, the one by Francis Larson called Severed,
which this whole chapter is really, uh really horrifying and
fascinating uh, it would lead these people to gather these
big collections of skulls that in practice, it seems to
me these collections were often just as much as sort
of personal museum exhibit or a morbid curio collection to

(17:12):
impress guests and wealthy benefactors as they were even a
failed attempt to actually gather data. And unfortunately, it seems
like most of these skulls collected for supposed craniometric research
in the eighteen hundreds were not donated consensually. You can
probably imagine where a lot of them came from. A
lot of them were stolen from graveyards and battlefields. Some

(17:34):
came from prisons and morgues, hospitals, workhouses, burial grounds, without
the consultation of the owner or their family, and often
without even knowing who the person had actually been. And
as you might guess, the less wealth and power the
person had, the more likely that their skull might be
stolen after their death. Many came from cemeteries of enslaved

(17:57):
people in America. There are horrific details of the harvesting
of skulls from Native American people's during the wars of
expansion of the U. S Frontier into tribal lands, and
many came from just from poor people, from workhouses and
potter's fields. Larson as a whole chapter about this horrible
episode in history and her book severed Um. But a

(18:18):
couple of these notorious skull collectors she mentions are the
English doctor Joseph Barnard Davis and the American physician Samuel
George Morton. Both were mainly working in the early to
mid nineteenth century, and she tells one anecdote about Barnard
Davis that I wanted to read here, so she says
quote as a physician, Barnard Davis showed few qualms when

(18:41):
it came to head collecting. John Betto, a fellow doctor,
remembered that he looked on heads simply as potential skulls.
Beddo recounted introducing Barnard Davis during his rounds at the
hospital to one of his patients, a sailor from Dubrovnik
who had nearly drowned. It was being cared for at
the brisk A Royal Infirmary. Betto was treating the man

(19:02):
for gang green on the lung. Barnard Davis's curiosity was
immediately piqued. Now, he said to Betto, you know that
man can't recover, do take care to secure his head
for me when he dies? For I have no cranium
from that neighborhood. I guess he was talking about the
neighborhood of Dubrovnik. And Uh. Then Larsen goes on. Luckily

(19:22):
for the sailor Bernard Davis had been too enthusiastic in
his diagnosis. The patient made a full recovery, and Tibetto's
amused relief he carried his head on his own shoulders
back to Herzegovina. Uh. And so she says, like, this
is this is the reality of what's often going on
in skull collecting. It's like basically totally ignoring the humanity

(19:44):
of human beings and just being like, how am I
going to get that skull? It's like a like a
cartoon where one cartoon character looks at the other and
just sees like food as a cannibalistic frenzy takes every
except yeah, the Loony Tunes where like they're in the
lifeboat and like Donald Doc looks at somebody and just
imagines their body is like a like a drumstick or something. Yeah.

(20:05):
It also reminds me of that line and T. S.
Eliot's Whispers of Immortality. Webster was much possessed by death
and saw the skull and eat the skin. Now, it's
also worth pointing out that the findings of these early
craniometrists have not really held up to scientific scrutiny. Larson
talks about this as well, all of the problems with
their supposed research. Uh, they a lot of them were

(20:26):
trying to make generalizations about the mental qualities of large
groups of people. Oh, you know, you can see because
of this trend in the skulls of people from this
part of the world that they have these mental characteristics.
And this was all based on the skull measurements. But
their research was plagued by poor methodology, inconsistency and samples

(20:48):
inconsistency and measurements, fudging the data when it didn't fit, etcetera.
Larson as a whole discussion on this, it seems like
once again we're dealing with something that ultimately just amounted
to bunk. Though I it also to discuss a couple
of points that she makes, which I thought were very
useful and interpreting what was going on here. Historically. One
interesting issue was if people are looking into, you know,

(21:11):
these various questions, trying to understand the human mind, trying
to understand culture, trying to understand mental processes. Why the
particular emphasis on skulls, like why the phrenology and craniometry
craze as a very bone focused thing to begin with. Well,
she talks about how the physical characteristics of skulls just

(21:33):
happened to lend themselves quite well to the practical applications
and interests of the people who were in these fields.
So she writes quote one Victorian physician, James Aitken MiGs
noted that skulls are easily prepared and preserved, maybe conveniently
handled and surveyed, Considered in various points of view, and

(21:54):
compared to each other. Skulls are favorable specimens because they're small,
hard and robut dust. They're more compact than whole skeletons,
which means that they can be relatively easily transported, and
they're more durable than the messy tissues they contain, surviving
for centuries on a museum shelf. They're surprisingly resistant to pressure,
partly because of their shape, but also because the skull,

(22:17):
unlike longbones, has no marrow and skulls were thought to
be the most characteristic part of the human body because
there were so many ways in which one could be
different from another, full of nooks and crannies and holes
and lumps. They were a statistician's dream. So this seems
like one of those cases of people who thought they
were doing scientific research but may well have been letting

(22:39):
their theories be overdetermined by attraction to the specific practical
and esthetic aspects of objects that they just wanted to study.
Maybe because it was kind of attractive to have a
collection of these in your house that you could show
off to people. Maybe because they were easy to move
around from place to place and store, and much more so,

(23:00):
of course than actual brains themselves, which would quickly wrought
and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, skulls
are really cool. I mean there's no denying it, um
that their neat. Uh. You know, it's fun to draw skulls,
it's fun to look at pictures and photos and illustrations
of skulls, skull iconography, and just pretty much every culture

(23:21):
on earth is instantly captivating. Uh. And then yeah, you
can see where someone might be like, all right, let's
I'm gonna lean into this. Skulls are my thing. I
want to study the skull. What what kind of information
can I glean from the skull? Yeah, you almost get
the sense that this was, um, it was a very
cart before the horse. It was kind of like, uh,
skull collecting first science second, and it turned out that

(23:44):
the science was not even good science. Yeah, I mean
it just inevitably it brings us back to the you know,
the end of the scene from Hamlet where he's holding
the skull and contemplating mortality and impermanence and so forth.
You know, I mean, it's just that that's what the
skull is. It is such a a potent symbol of
these just all these different ideas and concerns and anxieties

(24:07):
we have about impermanence. Yeah. Now, when it comes to
brains specifically, I also want to talk about one tragic
case in history of of brains being preserved for supposed
scientific uses or by museums without the consent of the
person and so. And of course this is something to
consider in contrast to something like Bentham or like you know,

(24:30):
where somebody intentionally grants their head to a museum or something. Uh,
this is the story of a man known to history
as is She now, as told by Larson is She
was a Native American man who was captured while foraging
near a slaughter house in northern California in the year
nineteen eleven. He was about fifty years old. He did

(24:54):
not speak English, and he apparently at least had no
living friends or relatives, and so he was say into
anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who identified him
as a member of the Yahi people, many of whom
had been victims of genocide by the white settlers in
northern California. And Uhhi was not even really the man's name.

(25:15):
Is She was an identifier given to him by the anthropologist,
which apparently meant man in the Yana language, that's the
overarching language to which the Yahi people belonged. But the
man known as She never revealed his real name, do
apparently to to accustom within his culture of not revealing
your name to someone unless you are introduced by a

(25:37):
member of your own people. So after he after he
was captured, he was taken to the University of California
Museum of Anthropology, where he lived for some time. He
worked as a janitor, and anthropologists did some research with him.
They made recordings of him speaking and singing in his language. Uh.
They they studied his language, studied him in other ways,

(25:58):
and he passed away nineteen sixteen. And then when I
want to pick up, quoting from Larsen here quote is
She had expressly asked that his body not be subject
to a post mortem. One curator wrote in the days
before is She's death, quote science can go to hell.
We propose to stand by our friends. He added, Besides,

(26:19):
I cannot believe that any scientific value is materially involved.
The prime interest in his case would be of a
morbid romantic nature. But his letter arrived too late. Staff
at the museum, who declared themselves is She's friends made
quote a compromise between science and sentiment, and performed an
autopsy against his wishes. They removed his brain and sent

(26:42):
it to the Smithsonian. Those who undertook the autopsy comforted
themselves that it had been minimally invasive and certainly not
as disrespectful as a dissection. His brain, after all, was
preserved rather than destroyed. The rest of Ishi's body, which
was kept whole, was cremated in a California, sim Terry.
Thus the autopsy was seen as a compromise, despite the

(27:03):
fact that it went against the dead man's wishes, and
Larson goes on to say that she's body was divided
after death, just as his identity had been in life.
He was both a man and a scientific specimen. Like
so many others. He had supposedly been quote the last
of his tribe, and was apparently without living relatives, and
was considered to quote valuable to lose in death. And

(27:27):
I feel like this story is such an important reminder
that even if what you're doing is real science and
not for anology or something, you can't ever let yourself
start thinking about human beings as information first. I mean,
the situation she's describing here is that there were scientists
who were saying, like, oh, but it's just it would
just be too valuable, uh, to to study his brain.

(27:49):
There's too much we can learn from it. But I mean,
he didn't want this to happen. And so you've got
to remember to think of people as people first, and
only once they say Okay, I am willing to have
my my body somehow translated into information for science, that
you can proceed down that road. It's the basis of
the concept of informed consent, which is so important and

(28:10):
scientific research today. Plus, I feel like, you know, certainly
from our perspective, the case was not very strong, for
we must preserve this brain, we must study this brain.
I know, as as one of the people who worked
with you. She said, you know that it's probably more
a case of motivation by mere morbid curiosity, with also

(28:32):
I'm sure quite racist undertones. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's
not like they were trying to solve a crime. It's
not like they were trying to understand the ravages of
a particular disease, etcetera. Yeah, it seemed based almost entirely
in just morbid interest. Fortunately, there is a better conclusion
to this story. So I was reading a San Francisco
Chronicle article by Kevin Fagan from the year two thousand

(28:55):
that was about the reunification of of She's remains. So
Fagin here writes quote, sometime today, a jet is scheduled
to land in California carrying a band of Ish's descendants,
and with them will be the long lost final piece
of their ancestor, Ish's brain. Leaders of the reading Rancheria
and Pitt River tribes, which trace their bloodlines to is

(29:18):
She's extinct Yahe nation through the Yana tribe promised to
never reveal where they buried him. They're not saying when
they will do it either, just that they're landing in
California today and that they want to be left alone
to shepherd their departed elder spirit away in peace. So
obviously it's good to hear that that happened, but it
only follows, you know, what had already happened and could
not be undone, and it makes you, I mean again,

(29:40):
it brings me back to this question about like, um,
how do you how do you manage the sort of
scientific and preservation impulse that belongs in a museum impulse
against questions where maybe it's not as clear, like it's
clear that this should not that that's brain should not
have been removed because he was alive. You got to
hear him say no, I don't want this. Um. I

(30:01):
guess the tougher question is in cases of like what
what about the remains of people who have been dead
for a longer time and you know, could not be
consulted on the question of whether they would be interested
in being the subject of scientific research or not. And
I genuinely don't know the answer there. Yeah, I do
like how the story ended with the brain being returned

(30:23):
into tribal privacy, you know, like and I feel like
that detail you know of itself, that that lines up
with a lot of different you know, things for seeing
regarding not only like actual artifacts, but also just like
traditions and information. Um. I did a I did an
article last year for House to Works about the skin Walker.

(30:46):
They wanted an article about the Navajo tradition of the
skin walker, and like that was one of the things
I really was driven home from me in researching that
is like that there there are certain you know, aspects
of of living tradition that you know, it's it's it's
disrespectful to to to you know, to act on this

(31:08):
desire to collect it all and to and to keep
it all and to codify it and to put it
on a shelf. That some things you know, still belong
to the people who created them, and you know they
can share them if they want to, you know. Uh So, Yeah,
I can't help but be reminded of that with this
the story of of this this piece of this individual

(31:29):
finally being returned to his people, and in doing so
it kind of passes out of of the broader like
media view, right that you're not going to be like
taking TV cameras to his grave site or yeah, that
kind of thing, because that would just be a continuation
of the same sort of energy that he seemed very
outspoken against. Well, now that we've talked a good bit

(31:58):
about the foibles and horrors of relatively recent skull head
and brain theft, uh, what do you say we go
back into some some more deeper history and mythology. Yeah, yeah,
because again, you know, the skull, the head, Uh, you know,
these are certainly long standing icons. So they've been focal
points for myth making and dreaming and anxiety, you know,

(32:22):
throughout all the human existence. And it's it's it's only
relatively recently we've been able to focus more on the
brain as an icon. You know. Um, you know, like
if you ever encounter a ghost movie that has like
a brain based ghost, it's a little off off putting,
right because it doesn't seem like the ghost should be
associated with the brain. The brain seems more of a

(32:42):
science fiction quality as opposed to something that is more
supernatural in nature. So yeah, I guess to begin with,
we should point out that folks have been taken heads
for longer than they have had any any certainly any
understanding of the brains rattling around inside them. Uh. And
we don't even have to get into all the gory details,
because you know the sort of things we're talking about,
you know, heads hewn off in battles, heads mounted on

(33:03):
poles and pikes, lobbed with a catapult, skulls lined up
on the on shelves in catacombs, that sort of thing.
And we're also never in some cases we're not sure,
you know, when we're dealing with something where it's okay,
is this head a trophy? Is this some sort or
of this some some sort of like sacred funerary tradition
or something in between a lot of times we have
to sort of piece together what it actually meant. So

(33:26):
one example, I was looking at from the ancient world,
and this is this is not so much myth here,
this is actual, like you know, actual um archaeological evidence. Uh.
I was reading ritual use of trophy heads in Ancient
Nascar society and this was by Donald A. Prue, published
in Ritual Sacrifice in ancient Peru in two thousand and one.

(33:48):
So the taking of heads for ritual use has a
long history in the Central Andes, from the pre Ceramic
period prior to about eighteen hundred BC and continuing through
Inca times and with the Nasca, the craftspeople Uh you know,
responsible for the Nasca lines. These were created between five
BC and five With the Nasca Uh they also engaged

(34:11):
in the taking of heads, and we see it represented
in their rich textile art, depicting warriors, shamans, mythical beings
in some cases with human heads, often on their cloaks
or in their hands, and according to Prue, over one
hundred examples remain of the Nasca mummified heads which were
the which were first removed from the body, apparently with

(34:32):
an obsidian knife, and then a hole would have been
punched through the base of the skull using a club
or some sort of a tool, and then the brain
and the eyes were removed through that opening. But then
another hole, smaller hole was punched or drilled through the forehead,
and this was apparently in order to allow a carrying

(34:53):
rope to be secured. The lips were pinned with thorns
and cloth was stuffed into the skull, and so you
have a preserved skull at this point. So you said
that these were believed to be for ritual use. Was
the thought that they would be like displayed somewhere, or
that they would be like carried in a ceremony. This
is where it all gets really interesting, And this is
where that where a lot of authors of and a

(35:16):
lot of scientists have have really chimed in with different views.
But it looks it's easy to look at something like
this and think of it just as trophy taking, right
like the just the trophy taking of a war like people,
and indeed war was an important part of their culture.
But the reality seems to have been ultimately far more complicated.
Substitute head jars where sometimes we're found to be buried

(35:38):
with the bodies and the actual heads were not merely
symbols of victory, but they were used in shamatic rituals,
perhaps entailing hallucinogenics as a means of communing with the
spirit realm and according to pro quote, propagating and controlling
the forces of nature, especially so far as natural resources

(35:58):
are concerned. Now, apparently some have argued that these were
not trophy heads, but the heads of honored ancestors. But
pro dis disputes this. He he defines them instead as quote,
trophies of warfare collected for ritual purposes. So that that's
that's interesting because it seems to I think to a
lot of modern minds, it seems to be it seems
sounds like a mashup of two twoferent ideas, like you're

(36:21):
taking the head of your your enemy off of their
dead body, but isn't. But you're probably doing that as
like a trophy or a sign of disrespect. You know,
we often think of that. Um, I think of the
key and peel skit where one like Barbarian the heads
another and then goes through all these various sort of
comedic acts with the head to see what how the

(36:42):
rest of the tribe responds. I know that what does
he do? He? Uh, he like puts little shoes under
it and makes it walk, Yeah, and like that's that's
a big hit. But he also like does things like
pretend to give birth to the head, and like that
just doesn't they don't like it. That's funny, Yeah, But
it's the kind of thing where like when we think

(37:03):
about head taking, we think of stuff like that. We
think of like something barbaric and trophy oriented. But in
this case it seems like it wasn't bad or it
wasn't purely that it was. It was also this idea
of what you need this head. This head is necessary
for various religious purposes, a way of a means of

(37:24):
communing with the spirit realm um. Now, as for the brain,
it seems like the brain was was discarded. That would
have been again, that would have been part of like
that first act of of punching through the back of
the skull to remove the eyes and the brain. Uh.
Probably going back to the reality we talked about before
where the brain uh rots rather rather quickly, and that's
going to be one of the first things you're gonna

(37:44):
want to remove. Now. This also reminds me of the
mummified heads of the Kocoum dynasty of the Maya, which
were kept and preserved because they were said to contain
the voices of their ancestors, again a means of communicating
with spirits and or the dead. This is interesting to
compare to remember what we talked about in the first

(38:04):
episode about the plastered heads of Chattelhyuk in in southern Turkey,
which you know from this Stone Age settlement, there were
often heads of ancestors that were kept in some kind
of preserved form, apparently within the home. Yeah, and during
the mid first millennium BC, there were there were various
accounts of the use of human heads in acts of

(38:25):
of of communion, necromancy, divination across the Mediterranean. We see
it mentioned in the accounts of rodotas in Aristotle, um
uh Cleo Manis of the first of Sparta is said
to have consulted with the head of his friend our
quantities on all major decisions ahead, which he kept preserved
in honey, whoa in honey, Yeah, that's good. And so

(38:50):
you know, of course, when we deal with accounts like this,
we're we're beginning to at least beginning to transfer into
the realm of myth and lore and legend, where we
we become less sure about what is actually going on,
because then there is this broader realm of just stories
about disembodied heads that still have life in them, that

(39:12):
can speak, that can fly, that can terrorize, that can
give you know, important advice to the living, etcetera. I
think one of the coolest of these that uh, that
folks may have heard of is is the myth of
of Memir uh in Norse mythology. Uh So this Memir

(39:32):
was one of the Jiltons in Norse mythology, one of
the frost giants, and he was the guardian of the
well of inspiration and wisdom at the roots of the
world tree. And Odin would come to to drink from
the well and Memory would make him leave an eye
and payment. And then member was held hostage in in
battle by the Vanier during the the Aser Vanier War,

(39:54):
and they beheaded him, but Odin, since he liked the guy,
you know, retrieved his head and kept alive with magic
herbs so that the head could continue to give counsel
to the King of the gods. And so you'll see uh,
some wonderful illustrations of this, both old and then recent,
where there's like this some of some cases is like
a zombie head that Odin is is holding that he is,

(40:18):
uh that that is his advisor. Yeah, you've attached one
here where Odin is is leaning his head over on
the severed head like he's almost kind of snuggling with it.
Of course, Odin is missing one eye as usual, and uh,
and there's just fire coming out of the thing's mouth
or I don't know, it looks like he's got like
a star inside the back of his throat. Yes. Um.

(40:40):
In terms of heads that give advice like this, there's
also an Arabian Nights story of of King Yu Nan
and the Duban and Duban the sage and the stage
in question. At least in some variations of this tale,
continues to speak after it has been removed from its body.
Now I'm gonna get into some other examples. Uh here,

(41:01):
Uh you know of of disembodied heads of decapitation in
mythology that are that are pretty interesting. One that I
found really fascinating is the self decapitating nude goddess of Hinduism. Uh.
That is that is known as China Masta, and that
just means she's she whose head is severed, and she's

(41:23):
typically depicted red fleshed and holding a scimitar in one
hand and her own head in the other as blood
fountains from the stump of her neck, which and in
some cases is then consumed by her thirsty skeletal attendants.
And then she is usually stand depicted standing on top
of a copulating human couple. Uh So, it's it's an

(41:45):
instantly um captivating image. She's one of the ten goddesses
of the esoteric tradition of Tantra, and she's a slayer
of demons. So she's a highly uh symbolic deity. There's
the sense of the transcendence of the body free of
the mind. You know, the body, the mind has clearly
literally been removed from the physical form. She's a symbol
of sacrifice and ferocity. Yeah, this image, rey is amazing. Yeah,

(42:10):
it probably goes without saying, but this in particular, though,
this goes for a lot of Hindu iconography. This is
an image that's caught the interest of various Westerners, so
you'll sometimes see it depicted by Western artists or adopted
by death metal bands, etcetera. Right, man, the death metal bands,
they just they just snatch up everything. Cool. Yeah, Yeah,
if it's you know, it hits a certain vibe for them,

(42:32):
they'll they'll they'll take it. Uh So, they're at least
a couple of speaking heads associated with tellings and retellings
of the Mahabarata, the Hindu epic heads placed on poles
after being sacrificed or having their body sacrifice in order
to watch the battle. And I was reading a little
bit about this from author and mythologist dev Dute Panna Nick,

(42:54):
who has a whole page about these tales at his
mythology website dev Dute dot com. It's d V d
U t T dot com. Uh. He writes that these
tales are often about perspective. Quote. The talking head is
thus a symbol for a less confined, more global perspective
on things. All of us see the world from our
individual point of view, limited by our prejudices, our expectations,

(43:17):
and our experiences. The talking head sees it from an
alternative angle, and when he voices his opinions, we see
the world quite differently. When he speaks, we realize the
Pandavas and the caravas are are tiny elements of God's
greater canvas. The Mahabarata is not just about one kingdom.
It is about cosmic order. Now that's not to say

(43:39):
there aren't just monster heads too in Hindu iconography. Uh.
There's a really cool example, uh named Kurta Muka, or
the head of Glory as it's often referred to. And
this is a monstrous flying head in Hindu mythology that
seems to be similar in many ways to the Gorgonian
head of the Greek tradition that we discus in our

(44:00):
Medusa episodes. So, according to Carol Rose, the folklore is
when Shiva was told that he was unworthy of marrying Parvati.
In his rage, his experiences such rage that a monstrous
lion springs from his head and then it attacks Shiva,
and he commands that, no, we're not doing that, uh

(44:21):
eat yourself instead, and so this monster consumes its own body,
leaving only its in trails, which then turned to pearls,
and so that leaves only the head. So Shiva then
commands uh Kota Muka to serve as the guardian of entrances.
And so you see this head, this head of glory
uh in um, you know, above the door or around

(44:43):
the door of in in many different examples of of
Hindu architecture from India and from other countries. You know,
this is interesting because you brought it up and I
somehow did not think about it. But from Greek mythology.
You know, we did the episode last year about about Medusa.
That's of course the case of a stolen head in mythology,

(45:05):
or the head is severed and like he takes it
and uses it as a tool. Yeah, it becomes a weapon,
not so much a means of communicating with anything, but
but this this weapon, this symbol, and and here we
see another tradition. Now I've not read anything that that
links the two in any respect. You know, let's just
say that like one inspired the other anything of that nature.

(45:26):
But clearly they're getting it similar ideas. The idea of
this um, this terrifying head, uh, and or face that
stares out from a work as a as a way
of warning those who would who would trespass. Now I
should know that that looking around though sometimes it appears
to have arms, So I don't know if it it
gains arms later or arms just end up popping back

(45:49):
up in the iconography. But there you go. Another entity
we've talked about before in the show is Rahu in Hinduism,
the eclipse entity. Uh. You know, this is the you
know once was a proud oshera demi god of immense
power and hunger and seeking immortality. It drinks the divine nectar,
but before this drop can pass his throat, he's swallowing

(46:10):
it mid swallow, Vishnu decapitates him for his transgression and yeah,
and this ends up translating into this um this eclipse
mythology where the head of Rajo attempts to consume the
sun or does consume the sun, but then it passes
out of the next dump. I think we talked about
this in one of the first episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. I ever did the one on the eclipse? Yeah, yeah,

(46:33):
I think so. Another example is uh Braun the Blessed.
In Welsh mythology, the giant king who mortally wounded in battle,
had his followers cut off his head so that it
could be returned to Britain one day. And for a
long time this head was said to speak before it
grew silent, and the story goes that the silent head
was finally taken to White Hill. Uh. This is where

(46:54):
the Tower of London, they say would one day be built,
and they buried it there facing France to word off
the enemy. And this supposedly ties into the uh the
The Celtic cult of of the head also reflected in
the Tale of the Green Knight. Uh. We're in In
the Green Night, the Green Knight comes into Arthur's court
and challenges someone to cut off his head. But then

(47:16):
when they do, he just picks it up and he's like, no,
I'm fine. Now I get to cut off your head,
but I'll do it a year from now. Yeah. The
the decapitation battle is another motif or contest. You see that,
uh in a lot of legends from this part of
the world, and it's interesting, you know. Um. Terry Jones
of Money Python, of course, was very steeped in uh
in this sort of lore, and he was one of

(47:38):
the author one of the writers for the screenplay for Labyrinth,
and Labyrinth features those wonderful fiery red creatures that attempt
to engage in a decapitation contest with our our heroine, Sarah.
Do you remember them where they're like? Where did they
get mad at her? Because you're only you're not supposed
to take someone else's head, only supposed to take your

(48:00):
own head. Off of this, this reminds me of of
the head swapping scene and teams in the universe. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean this sort of thing, head swapping, decapitated heads
living on You see it just everywhere. Um. For instance. Here,
here's some other examples in in Maya mythology, you have
head app Woo who was tripped by the lords of

(48:21):
the underworld and his decapitated head was didn't hung as
a trophy from a giant tree. But then this head
later spits into a woman's hand and in doing so
impregnates her with the Maya hero twins, who would go
on to have various adventures. We've already touched on in
the previous episode. We've touched on Orpheus is singing head
and Greek mythology. Oh yeah, and the possible symbolic connection

(48:44):
to the box made for Hyde and Skull with the
liar Yeah. Uh. In the trial of the Knights Templars,
one of the charges was that they worshiped an entity
called Bahammet that was sometimes described as a severed head.
And then oh, you have some wonderful monsters as well. Um,
there's the Kara Sioux in the Southeast day. It's a
Southeast Asian spirit that takes the form of a beautiful

(49:07):
woman's head with her organs dangling below her neck so
it floats it close and it seems to essentially be
another variation of the willow the whisp tradition. Uh. That
is held around the world and that we devoted a
big episode two in the past, so she can't what
she like glows and leads people off the path. I believe,
so yes. Um. And there's there's actually Indonesian horror movie

(49:31):
titled Mystics in Bali that looks pretty interesting because it
features the kara su I included a screenshot here for you, Joe,
and for a movie trailer for you to check out later.
Oh yeah, I gotta, I gotta see that. That looks
great now. The melee version of this is the pontionic,
which functions like a vampire, only it prays exclusively on
babies and infants. Then there's also the Japanese uh Nuki kubi,

(49:55):
which is a type of yokai and Japanese traditions. It's
humanoid in form, but it can separate its head from
its body and this can float free to work mischief.
It's just one of one of various examples of disembodied
heads that you'll find in Japanese lore. And then in
um Uh, the Native people's of the Americas, you find
some other interesting traditions as well. Uh the flying head

(50:17):
of the Iroquois and the one doctor mythology, this is
a great flying head, sometimes with bat wings on each
side of its head, with long hair and terrible eyes.
Carol Rose writes about these in her book on Monsters. Uh.
She said that this was an entire class of monsters
in the folklore of the Iroquois, huge ugly heads with

(50:38):
eyes of fire, dripping fangs, and huge wings instead of ears.
They fly through storm winds with wild hair, uh, you know,
helping to keep them afloat and kind of floating around them.
They prey on villagers and animals alike. And their teeth
they're like it sounds like they were kind of like
like a cage. If their if their teeth or their
jaws close over you, there's no escape ape. But there's

(51:01):
a tail apparently of an old woman who is roasting
some chestnuts over the fire, and then she brings a
fiery coal back from the fire with her to keep
her warm. And then here comes the flying head and
it it gobbles her up chestnuts and all, but then
it has to spit her out because of the fiery coal,
and then that coal burns the monster up from the

(51:23):
inside out. Oh. I love when the story is a
trick like that. Yeah, especially when it's like an old
lady who gets gets the wind over the monster. That's
always nice, not not your traditional young, dashing male slayer. Yeah. So,
so that's just an example of some of the myths
and legends and folklore tales you'll find just throughout the world.

(51:45):
I know there's some wonderful ones that I didn't touch on,
and certainly I'd love to hear from anyone out there
if you have a really good one, if you have
a favorite, uh, we would love to to hear it
and then potentially share it back with everybody else in
a listener Maile episode. But I think just this selection
gives you a certain taste of what out what's out there,
you know, these various imaginative contemplations on like what happens

(52:07):
if the head lives and the body dies, what happens
if the body decapitates itself, Like there's just it's just
such rich grounds for contemplation regarding identity and mortality and
just so much. It seems like a lot of times
disembodied heads are angry. Yeah, well, you know a lot
of times, I guess they do have something to be
angry about. But but then sometimes their jovial. Um. You know,

(52:30):
there's some of those examples from the from tellings of
the Mahabarata. I was reading like they're laughing, like their
laugh there's one where I think their laughs there distracts
are Anna during the battle, um, you know, and there's
a sense of like being free from the body. UM.
I'm also reminded of the heads that show up in
Miyazaki Spirited Away, the three heads that kind of roll

(52:52):
around and bumble, and they don't have much personality to them,
and I don't really know what they're doing and what
they're there for, but they don't seem to stressed. They say,
maybe perpetually alarmed. But uh, that's about it. That's good stuff.
All right. Well, we're gonna go ahead and close this
episode out, but yeah, we'd love to hear from everybody
out there. Any any other examples of flying heads and

(53:15):
self decapitating spirits, other examples of brain and head preservation.
Have you been taken by a particular specimen of brain
or head at a museum. We would love to hear
from you all about it. In the meantime, if you
want to check out other episodes of stuff to blow
your mind, you can find us wherever you get your
podcasts uh and wherever that happens to be. We just
asked that you rate, review, and subscribe Huge things as

(53:38):
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
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(54:00):
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