November 9, 2023 • 53 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss headless beings in myth, legend and the bestiaries of antiquity. What is it about a headless being that captivates us so and why were such beings once thought to exist?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part two in our series on headless
gods and monsters. This is a topic that we had
talked about getting into for the Halloween season, but we
never got around to it, so here we are turning
things in late. So in part one, we talked about
(00:34):
the biological origins of the Biletian head and about what
factors probably drove our ancestors hundreds of millions of years
ago to start concentrating nerve cells and sense organs and
mouth parts all on one end of the body, and
of course this is the development that would eventually turn
into our faces and our brains. We also talked about
(00:57):
stories of gods with no heads and cultures around the world,
and today we're back to talk about some more headless ghosts,
monsters and dubious historical claims of people who naturally have
no heads or have heads located inside their torsos.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, as we discussed in the last episode, no matter
what direction you approach the topic from, it ends up
being clear that like this idea of something without a head,
it captivates us. It forces us to think and rethink
various ideas about like what a person is, what an
entity is, where a volition comes from, and so forth.
(01:36):
So yeah, getting here into the idea of roughly speaking,
the diabolical headless, there are any number of headless monsters
and ghosts and global traditions we're probably not going to cover.
We're definitely not going to cover all of them. We
may leave out by error some key examples. And so
if we do skip such a headless entity from folklore
(01:59):
mythology right in, we'd love to hear from you, you know,
especially if it's a situation where head and or body
continue to live on afterwards. I guess you could roughly
throw Medusa into that category, though we did a whole
series on Medusa back in the day, so refer back
to those if you want to hear about Medusa's head.
I think it's also, you know, I think fair that
(02:21):
we might presume that a lot of these different ideas
have to do with, at least in concerning some of
like the ghosts we're going to be talking about and
so forth, taboos against the burial of incomplete remains also
thoughts about beheading as a form of execution, So keeping
all that in mind, that we'd bring up the first
one here. And this is a pretty big one, especially
(02:44):
when we start thinking about things like the headless horsemen
from the legend of Sleepy Hollow. We have a creature
from the Scottish Highlands. The name means the headless trunk,
and I'm probably gonna butcher the pronunciation here, but colun
gun Chen. It's said to haunt the Isle of Sky
and it leaves women and children alone. But if it
(03:06):
happens upon a male traveler at night, especially anyone who's
out there on their own, well then it's going to
brutally attack. In Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James McKellop describes
it as a form of boken or hobgoblin. He writes
it it's often thought of as a tutelary or protector
spirit of the McDonald's of Morale in the Western Highlands.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Is there a commonly understood explanation of why this ghost
is headless or is it just kind of that's the
way it is.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I'm not aware of a particular origin story here, but
I could be missing something, by the way. He also
writes of the Irish death coach and points out that
the driver and or the horses are sometimes described as headless,
and indeed sometimes it was called the headless coach, and
it is sometimes driven by the headless phantom Dolahan.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Doulahan.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, so the Delahan is the headless horseman of Irish folklore,
and this one is I think often held up as
the clear inspiration for the headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
M Coloup describes it as indeed often riding a headless
horse or driving the coach that we already mentioned, and
sometimes that coach is made out of bones. There are
a number of grizzly details regarding the coach that sometimes
(04:18):
are left out of retellings. It actually does have a
ghoulish head that has been removed from its body, described
as a great chunk of moldy cheese with darting eyes.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Wow, that is evocative.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, so, I mean it makes it sound like, Okay,
the head is definitely dead, I guess, but again supernatural
being so I guess anything is fair game. The dula
hand is said to take this moldy cheese head off
for shock, and may throw it around like a ball,
so one can imagine, you know, sort of like bouncing
it off the shoulders or something, or dribbling it like
(04:55):
a basketball.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Oh, this reminds me of something I read that I
couldn't find a great worse for this. But allegedly, the
the ghost of the English archbishop William Laude, who is
believed to haunt Saint John's College in Oxfordshire, is said
to sometimes either kick his head around like a soccer
(05:16):
ball or bowl with his own head. But like I said,
I couldn't find a great looking source for that. But
that is a claim I've read attested.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I mean, the human imagination just can't help. But go
there right.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Now you might hearing this tale of the Dola h
and you might think, well, if this character comes riding around,
I've got to see this. This sounds impressive. Well, you
were advised not to. If he comes riding around, don't
peek out through a crack in the door the window,
because he has a whip. Sometimes it's said to be
crafted from a human spinal column, and he will crack
(05:52):
it at you and if he catches your eyes it'll
blind you.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Why am I calling to mind, like an evil version
of Santa Claus who catches the children peaking on, you know,
on Christmas.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
It's kind of like that, you know. I mean, there's
and I think we can all kind of relate to
that idea of the supernatural. Like it's one thing to
hear tales of the supernatural, but then do you dare
see it? Because once you've seen it, you've crossed over. Right,
You're no longer on this side of the stories, You're
on the other side.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And what does that mean for you?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
There are also tales that if he catches you looking
peeking out the door, he'll just ride up and throw
a basin of blood in your face. Oh yeah, and
but but still all that being said, like he still
just riding by, the worst thing that could happen is
that you'll hear those those hoof falls stop. You'll hear
(06:43):
that he has stopped outside your house, that he's lingering
outside your house, which of course spells death for those
inside or for someone inside, Like he is not just
passing through. He has arrived.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Now.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I wasn't able to find as many sources on this,
but it is said that there is a modern Japanese
urban legend variation of the dou Lahan. The Kubanashi Rider
or headless Rider doesn't ride a horse, rides a motorcycle.
The story is that his head was cut off by
a piano wire spanning a roadway, a detail that has
(07:15):
been connected to the nineteen seventy four Australian outlaw biker
film Stone, which was then released in Japan in nineteen
eighty one and would have inspired this urban legend. Apparently,
I have not seen this one. I don't know if
you're familiar with Stone.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
No, I'm not familiar with it, but it sounds like
a very Mad Max kind of detail.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, and in fact, it has Hugh keyes Burn in it,
the guy who played in Morton Joe in the most
recent Mad Max film and also played what was like
toe Cutter I think is his character in the original
Mad Max.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
The villain in the first one in the fourth one,
but different characters. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Now. McKillop also recounts a tale of a beheading game
involving the hero kucullin Now the Beheading Game. I think
we've talked about this before on the show. This is
a literary trope, perhaps best known for its place and
on Thurian legend concerning the Green Knight. Basically, the game
consists of this, you cut my head off, and then
(08:11):
I cut yours off. Sounds like an easy contest until
you realize that your opponent can get back up and
walk around without a head and will indeed be back
to cut yours off later on.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
This is central in the Arthurian story of Sir Cowen
and the Green Knight. Sir Gowain is the one who
answers the challenge. The Knights of the Roundtable are feasting,
I believe on Christmas Day or it's around Christmas, and
the Green Knight, this man who is very much identified
with nature and seems to be some kind of symbol
of like paganism, This Green Knight figure comes in and
(08:45):
he insults all of the knights, and he challenges them
to this game, this beheading game, and they're allowed to
be head him first. So Sir Gawain, the young up
and comer, is like, yeah, okay, I'll do it. Yeah,
and he cuts the Green Knight's head off, and the
Green Knight is fine, he picks his own head up.
He's like, okay, now I'll do that to you a
year from now today. So You've got to come find
me at the Green Chapel, And so there's like it's
(09:07):
a morality story about honor and all that that Sir
Gawain is like, well, am I going to go do it?
And he does. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
So there's a lot more to dissect there, but at
heart you do have a story of headless or at
least temporarily headless.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Being I actually, Rachel and I just this past month
watched for the first time that that recent Sir Gawain
movie that they put out, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight,
and I thought it was great.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Oh cool. I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard
great things. I've only ever watched the one in which
Sean Connery plays the Green Knight.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Oh no, I haven't seen that one.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, it's a pretty good Green Knight. Now, in looking
around for other examples of headless beings, there's one I
ran across that I wanted to bring up that it
extends from navago or dnnight traditions. Specifically, it's called the
(10:00):
phil Gath. It's a form of annie monster, sometimes translated,
especially back in the early twentieth century, as alien gods.
Though I feel like that maybe that terminology could be
confusing now I'm not sure, but some sort of like
gods from the outside, I guess. In her Monster books,
(10:21):
Carol Rose describes them as primal monsters, the offspring of
wicked women who brought fear and misery into the world,
the sons of Sun and Water, and I believe these
are the Navajo hero twins slayed these monsters, and according
to Rose, their offspring, however, lived on, the monster's offspring
lived on to keep cold, famine, old age, and poverty
(10:43):
alive in the world even if these, like more primal fears,
had been defeated by the heroes. I was also reading
that the monsters were slain by na Ye NEZGANI. This
is a mythical hero from Navajo lore that is a
monster slayer, and I believe is one of the Navajo
(11:05):
twins referenced earlier. Gerald E. Levy in his book in
the beginning The Navajo Genesis lists the translated names of
the monsters killed by the slayer as big Ye, Horned Monster,
Rock Monster, Eagle kicks off Rocks, and the Eye Killers.
I believe Horned Monster is fel Gath or deal ged,
(11:27):
but there's no mention of headlessness here. However, deel ged
dell Gath or Phelgeth is listed as a quote unquote
Harry headless antelope on the website Native Languagest Native hyphen
Languages dot org, which is a nonprofit dedicated to the
preservation and promotion of endangered American Indian languages. So that
(11:51):
leads me to believe, well, maybe this is some sort
of headless entity, at least in some tellings.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Harry headless antelope. Interesting.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, So just another example that this idea of some
sort of like headless entity, be it animal or human inform,
like gonna touch a nerve, like there is something unnatural
and dreadful about it that they were going to we
can't help but connect with monstrosity.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
So I was looking for a good book that compiled
stories about headless ghosts, and I found a chapter in
a book by the well known skeptic and paranormal investigator
Joe Nickel called The book is called The Science of Ghosts,
Searching for Spirits of the Dead, published by Prometheus Books
in twenty twelve, and there's a chapter in this book
(12:38):
called headless Ghosts. I have known so at the beginning
of this chapter, Nickel points out a few just kind
of interesting contradictions, some of which I don't know if
I've ever considered before. One is the idea that you know,
there are certain kinds of ghost realists, people who think
that ghosts are real, independent, extraternal phenomena, and that certain
(13:02):
of these ghost realists assert that a ghost is a
form of physical energy peculiar to humans or perhaps to animals,
that survives death and remains in the environment. And yet
for some reason, ghosts are almost always perceived not only
as manifestations of the human or animal body, but dressed
(13:24):
as they might have been during life. So like, if
this energy exists and persists, it also seems to manifest
inanimate objects, such as like clothing and uniforms and jewelry
other non living objects that ghosts would sometimes carry with them.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
That's a good point. Ghosts tend to wear clothes.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Along the same lines, some ideas about ghosts as real
external phenomena explain them as some kind of lingering mental
projection of the original person that persists after death, though
this has interesting tension with the number of stories there
are about headless ghosts, since mental fling phenomena are pretty
well established to depend mostly on the brain, it would
(14:04):
have to be a now dead brain projecting not itself
into the future, but some kind of three dimensional representation
of the part of the body that does not contain it,
which is kind of interesting. But anyway, so those little
observations aside, he goes on to document several types of
stories of headless ghosts. In the United States. There are
(14:26):
apparently a number of popular stories about soldiers from the
American Civil War, like being decapitated by cannon fire and
then wandering the battlefield forevermore as headless ghosts. He also
mentions the various headless ghosts associated with the Tower of
London in England, including several historical figures who were beheaded
on the orders of Henry the Eighth, only a subset
(14:48):
of which were his wives, the most famous of the
Tower ghosts being Anne Boleyn. But there are also just
some other enemies of Henry that end up there. But
one of the stories that Nicol courts that really stuck
with me involves criminals in medieval Germany. So there is
a place in the Rhine Valley called the Reichenstein Castle
(15:11):
where a legend says that a headless ghost sometimes wanders
in the chapel adjoining the castle, and he describes a
visit that he had to this castle to look into
the legend. The origin story goes back to the thirteenth century,
when this castle was the base of operations for a
band of what he calls robber knights. I think, you know,
(15:33):
fierce bandit horsemen. And then to quote from Nicol, and
this is in part he is quoting from Dennis William
Hawke's International Dictionary of Haunted Places. So when the quote
comes in, that's what it is. But Nichol writes, quote,
in twelve eighty two, they were captured, whereupon their leader,
Dietrich von Hohenfels, entreated Emperor Rudolph von Habsburg to spare
(15:56):
his nine sons. The emperor stated that Dietrich was to
be beheaded, but with his sons lined in a row,
everyone he could afterward run past would be spared. When
the executioner's sword fell quote, Dietrich's head rolled to the ground,
but his bloodied torso stood erect and lunged forward, stumbling
and swaying, until it passed every one of his sons. Finally,
(16:20):
the headless body fell to its knees, a fountain of
blood shooting high in the air where its head had been.
The sons were spared, and afterward on the execution site,
the repentant family erected the Saint Clement Chapel. According to
how Dietrich's headless ghost is sometimes seen inside the chapel.
Also quote Dietrich is buried on the property and his
(16:41):
red sandstone marker depicts a knight in armor with no head.
But Nicol points out that there are several issues with
this story. So first of all, this grave marker described
wherever it is, it is now lost, or was, at
least to the time he was writing this book. Though
there is an account of a visit to the site
by Victor Hugo, where Hugo claimed that the grave marker
(17:04):
was from the fourteenth century, not the thirteenth, and the
Dietrich's name was not on it. Also, the account does
not square with the history of the bandit Knights of
the Castle, where apparently the more reliable sequence of fact
seems to be that Dietrich actually escaped and his companions
the other robber knights, were in fact executed. They were
(17:25):
hanged from trees in the Rhine Valley, and the basic
outline of this folk tale about Dietrich seems to go
back in earlier form to a story about a fourteenth
century German pirate and privateer named Klaus Stortebecker, who was
captured and executed for his crimes in the year fourteen
oh one. Nicol writes, quote, kneeling before the executioner, he
(17:48):
proposed a deal. Quote all those companions should be reprieved
whom he could manage to walk by after being beheaded.
This way he saved the lives of eleven pirates before
the malicious executioner tripped him. That's a dirty trick. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Now, this talk of headless privateers and so forth. Of course,
this brings to mind a modern retelling of this sort
of story that I don't think we've mentioned so far,
and that of course is Warren Zvon's nineteen seventy eight
song roll in the Headless Thompson Gunner, which is an
excellent song, wonderfully weird lyrics, a great ballad of headless
(18:30):
being in revenge and so forth, but very much from
in this sort of vein, you know, instead of a pirate,
an international mercenary.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Right and so there are kind of like these story
forms that just keep reappearing in stories about different people
in different times and places in history. And Nicol ultimately
thinks that the story about d Trick that he came
across is probably grafted from this original story about Stordbecker.
But in either case, Nicol argued that the story is implausible,
(19:02):
like it probably did not actually happen based on what
we know about physiology, Like you know, a chicken might
be able to run around or walk around a bit
after decapitation, but he does not think that a human
would do the same.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, and it raises all sorts of questions about well,
how was he standing when the head was cut off?
Like how do you get ready for this attempted lurch
across the execution yard to save other pirates?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
That's a good question. I don't know the answer there,
But one more tangent I went on from Nichol's book.
Later in the book, there's a short section on ghost
dogs where Nicol brings up the English legend sometimes known
as black Shuck, a spectral hound with sort of localized
incarnations or tellings in different regions of England, such as Devon, Essex,
(19:49):
Suffolk and Norfolk. And this ghost dog is said to
have black hair and stand as large as a calf,
quote sporting glowing eyes even when he is described as headless.
And I loved that the image of a canine body
that has glowing eyes despite having no head. Now, can
(20:10):
you have eyes if you have no head? Well? I
think if you're a dog, the answer is probably no,
at least plausibly no, without some kind of sci fi
Frankenstein thing going on. But if you're another kind of animal,
the answer is absolutely yes. You can have eyes without
a head. As weird as it sounds, there are animals
exactly like that. Just one example I would like to
briefly talk about. Are scallops, Oh, scallops, scollops? Which way
(20:34):
do you say it? Robin scallops? Scollops?
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Oh yeah, a little further back in the Yeah, let's
say scollops. Folks, if you are near a computer or
are safely able to look at your phone right now,
just do yourself a favor and look up scollop eyes.
It's like something straight out of a monster movie. There
are real unedited photos of scollop eyes that look like
(20:59):
they can not be from nature, but they are, so
you will sometimes see the shell will be just slightly open,
you know, it's mostly closed, but there's a gap in between,
and the inside of the shell is lined with a
tissue that just has these these pale blue dots all
(21:19):
along it, which clearly do read as eyes for some reason,
they don't just look like dots. I mean, it looks
like they're looking at you. And then in between that
there are these tissues that kind of lock together with
these spiky hairs that looks like the world's widest monster
mouth with infinite teeth.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, they're they're they're terrifying. They also they're so bright
in some of these pictures too. They feel like it
should be a legend of Zelda in me.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
You know, Yes, that's really good. Yeah. Yeah. You can
imagine the treasure chest popping up when you defeat the Scallop. Hey,
and if it's in one of the new Zelda games,
surely you would end up getting to cook with with
the Scallop from it, right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I hear all about. I don't play the game myself.
My son does, and he tells me all about the
different meats you cook, and then of course there's not
just going to be one. There's going to be about
eight different versions of it, right, with different head features.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Yeah, and you can combine the body parts from the
different ones to make different kinds of meals. That cooking
mechanic is very pleasing. It's always a nice little surprise
when you mix something new and it does make a dish.
But anyway, scallops are interesting in that their visual anatomy
differs substantially from ours. Scallops can, of course, have hundreds
(22:36):
of eyes per organism. We only have two. And while
our eyes use curved transparent lenses to focus light onto
the retina, scallops focus light instead with tiny mirrors made
of crystals of guanine. And if guanine's ringing a bell
for you, yes, that is one of the four bases
(22:57):
found in DNA. That's the one that pairs with seine.
Strange fact I just learned while preparing for this episode.
Guanine gets its name from guano, as in like bat
dung or bird dung, because the compound was found in
great quantities in guano, but in its crystalline form guanine,
(23:17):
it forms the iridescent component in fish scales and other
kind of pearly reflective surfaces in parts of animal bodies,
sometimes in reptiles too, Like I believe chameleons, you know,
have guanine. But in the case of scallops, scallop eyes
focus light onto the light sensitive cells their equivalent of
(23:38):
retinas with reflective mirrors made of segmented guanine crystals. I
think they're actually square shaped crystal plates. And there's an
interesting comparison to be made to technology to human made telescopes,
because while the earliest telescopes like those used by Galileo,
used transparent glass lenses to focus life into the eyepiece
(24:01):
kind of like our eyes do, the most advanced telescopes
today actually tend to use curved mirrors instead of lenses
as the primary light gathering surface. Wow.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
But if there's one thing I want you to take
away from this, it's just go google scollop eyes.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yes, yes, these are amazing images, and it does feel
like they're looking right at it all Right at this
point in the episode, I want to turn back to
this idea that we discussed a little bit in the
(24:39):
last episode, this idea of headless creatures but with faces
on their chest. So we looked at some examples from
like Chinese mythology and Hindu mythology, where you had creatures
that have no head, but have but the face is
found away, you know, the nipples are pevy eyeballs, and
(25:01):
the belly is a great big mouth. The most famous
Western versions of these, though, the versions of these sort
of monstrous ideas, the ones that cast the longest shadow,
are generally referred to. They were referred to by various
names by particularly by authors in antiquity, but then going
(25:21):
on up through the Middle Ages and so forth. One
of the names is the blimys. Another is the cephali,
which just means headless. But many of the names that
they were, they were that were attributed to them were
actual peoples. That were the names of actual peoples that
were said to live in remote parts of the known world,
or i guess, more specifically, on the edges of what
(25:44):
was the known world for the individuals creating maps, writing
these various travelogs, and speculating about what sort of life
and what sort of peoples there were on the far
flung corners of the world.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
And while it's certainly possible that these stories could be
based on you know, misinterpreted or misreported observations, things like
that that we'll get into. You also really can't help
but notice that there would be a natural temptation when
describing people who live like in the farthest place place
away from you, that you can imagine that maybe they
(26:19):
are really different somehow, maybe like they don't even have heads.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah, Yeah, and that's that's basically the idea.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
And there were other monstrous races, to be sure, and
you can find various illustrations of these and various books
from the time periods in question. They include not only
people with faces on their chests and no head, but
also one legged people that hop around on one leg
and that sort of thing, the so called monstrous races.
But this idea goes way back, and you know, will
(26:49):
unwrap some of the ideas that have been put forth
as to why these concepts emerged and why they had
such stickiness in the human imagination. And I do think
the human imagination, as always should be, we should keep
that in mind as being one of the primary factors here,
like people thinking about again, like thinking about the edge
of the world, thinking about other planets. We're dealing with
(27:13):
sort of a gray area where we can just inject
pure imagination. But then on top of that there's the
normal telephone game of translations and accounts and some other
factors we'll get into. So the Greeks called them the Acephala,
or the headless ones. They were also known again as
the Blimys, which was the name given to an actual
people who seem to have lived in Lower Nubia during
(27:36):
the seventh century BCE through the eighth century CE. So
to be clear, the actual people that lived there had
heads and were not monsters. They were people. But this
is the idea that gets passed down through these various writings.
Herodotus indirectly mentions the Acephali in the fifth century BCE
(27:56):
work Histories, among other exact rated foreign peoples with inhuman descriptions,
he refers to quote the headless men that have their
eyes in their chests. During the first century CE, plenty
of the Elder wrote about them as well in the
Natural History, once more referring to them among other exaggerated
(28:19):
and or you know, strange accounts of supposed foreign peoples
and the far flung corners of the world, writing quote
in translation. Of course, the Blimier are said to have
no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts,
and you'll find various accounts like this repeated through the
Middle Ages and into the Age of Discovery. You can
(28:40):
look at works such as the travels of Sir John Mandivial,
the writings of Walter Raleigh, and so forth. They are
just more numerous. To mention here in this episode.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
To be clear, you're saying some of the other these
like medieval travel writings, described people with implausible anatomy that
were you know, this is not really how people's bodies were,
but for some reason in some place, these authors would say, yeah,
there are people here who they don't have a head,
or they have one leg or something.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, and I gather that. You know, there are a
mix of things going on here. On one level, it's like, well,
you know, plenty of the Elder wrote about it, so
we're going to repeat that. Of course, you know plenty,
as we discussed on the show, plenty has a lot
of interesting things to share, some of which have truth,
have an element of truth to them, or are you know,
(29:30):
accounts of what's happening in the real world. Others are
things that he heard and were passed down and don't
relay any historic truth, but do tell us something about
like the mindset of the time. Now before we get
back into the question of where these stories came from
and what they may have originally meant, you know, what
things could have led to these interpretations entails. It's also
(29:53):
I think it's also worthwhile to think about their staying
power and usefulness and conveying different meanings, some but not
all of which relate to like a general monsterization of
the other. And again, I think it's also one of
those things where it's imaginative and weird enough, and that
alone is a reason that people keep coming back to it,
and just sort of like some of the ideas we
(30:15):
discussed in the first episode, like we think about creatures
with heads and we take it for granted, and then
you're presented with a form that's lacking ahead, but it's
still alive, Like what does it mean? You can't help
but interpret and have these various symbolic interpretations of metaphoric
interpretations of what's going on there. So I was looking
around for some insight on this general topics pointed out
(30:37):
by Husband and Gilmore House in The wild Man, Medieval
myth and symbolism. You had cases like that of thirteenth
century Flemish writer Thomas de Contemporary, who compared such headless
men to lawyers who quote misled clients into unnecessary legal
processes and grew fat on inordinate fees. I love that
(31:01):
because I can't help but imagine one of these various
lawyer billboards you see everywhere on the highways. But instead
of having that, you know, smiling dude in a suit,
what if you had a belly faced man on them?
Speaker 3 (31:12):
What if Bob Odenkirk's face was on his chest exactly? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Husband and gilmore House also point out that the headless
man has also been presented as an image of humility.
This is apparently from the thirteenth or fourteenth century texts
Guest Romanorum. I consulted this text and I did find
the line I think they're referring to. Quote, humility is
signified by the absence of the head and the placing
(31:39):
of the face in the breast. The text also includes
this bit of wisdom, No creature is so monstrous, no
fable so incredible, but that the Monkish writers could give
it a moral form and extract from its crudities and
quidities some moral or religious lesson.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Ah, this comes back to something we've talked about on
the show before that a lot of times when you
get these older accounts, especially in say like a medieval
Christian context of anomalous beings, they were almost always in
the texts where they're documented, used to illustrate some kind
of moralistic teaching, and that should in some way color
(32:19):
your understanding of what purpose these stories were serving. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, this idea of taking a monstrous form using it
to relay a point or is this quote is kind
of alluding to It's like the monk cannot help, when
presented with a strange form, to come up with some
sort of theological argument for what it represents. Like one
example that I've brought up on the show before is
this creature that shows up in some medieval sources. Sorry
(32:48):
I don't remember the sources off hand, but I've referred
to in a monster fact before of Christ with a
long neck and bird's head. And the idea here I
remember reading is that it's like, be more like Christ,
be more like an individual with a long neck and
a bird's head, because then the words that rise up
(33:11):
from your heart, well they have longer to have more
distance to cover before they reach your lips, before you
can speak them, and therefore it is wise and christ
like to to approach the world this way and so forth,
you know. But then on the other end, it's just
an amusing looking illustration as well, because it's clearly supposed
to be Jesus, but he has a bird's.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Head, you know. Just raises questions where I realized that
my intuitions are about what somebody would or would not
consider sacrilegious or not always correct. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, there's so many examples of that, just depictions of Christ,
like the three faced Christ that you saw that was
sometimes used as a as a way to visually describe
some aspect of the Holy Trinity, but also was then
viewed as potentially heretical by others, and so forth. Anyway,
coming back to the idea of creatures with no heads
(34:06):
and faces on their tour, So I guess one of
the big questions that comes to mind looking at these
images is you know, where does this idea even come from?
Because it's one thing to realize that once the idea
is introduced, it has a stickiness to it. We can't
help but think about it. And come up with reasons
for why it could be or what it means. And
(34:27):
looking around there seem to be a number of theories,
some convincing, some far less convincing, And as always, it's
one of these cases where I feel like you could
cobble various ideas together and possibly get at some truth,
though I would be very hesitant to take even the
better theories and lean too heavily on them as like
(34:47):
an all inclusive theory, like this is the reason somebody
described people on a distant continent as having no head
and having a face on their chest. So the first
theory I wanted to bring up, and this is when
you've seen a number of sources, is the idea that
these would have been essentially accounts based on limited observation
(35:11):
of certain groups of people, certain tribes or what not
from a distance, such as from a ship off of
a foreign coast. And you know, I imagine this alone,
without the aid of spyglasses, could potentially be enough. But
then the idea is that this could have been compounded
by modes of dress, such as something worn on the
(35:31):
head or specifically the use of some sort of a hood.
From a distance, it was apparently argued by seventeenth century
German author Adam Ollurius and others that hooded figures might
conceivably be interpreted as headless. So if you had a
group of people that traditionally wore some sort of headgear,
a hood, or what have you, then from a distance
(35:53):
you might say, Hey, look at those people standing on
that shore. They appear to have no head. Write it down,
maybe draw a picture. We'll bring that back at the
end of the voyage.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Okay, I could imagine that. But along the same lines
as somebody seeing and misinterpreting clothing or adornment of the body,
you would also have to wonder about somebody seeing and
misinterpreting somebody with just a particular posture.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, and that's the one you read about as well.
In fact, John Bostock and H. T. Riley chime in
on this in their liner notes to their translation of
Plenty's Natural History. Something you might think of is good.
I think of it as like the warrior stance theory here,
And basically they point out quote from a statement in
the Ethiopica of Heliodorus Marcus suggests that the story as
(36:43):
to the blimier having no heads arose from the circumstance
that on the invasion of the Persians, they were in
the habit of falling on one knee and bowing the
head to the breast, by which means, without injury to themselves,
they afforded a passage to the horses of the enemy. Now,
I have to admit that is a sentence. I do
(37:04):
not fully understand exactly what they're describing there, but I
take it to mean that there's some sort of like
a uniform posture that certain individuals were said to take on,
as some sort of like a defensive posture, a warrior stance,
or what have you, that could be interpreted even from
(37:25):
a distance, as being people with no head.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I guess you could imagine a similar thing being that
somebody without experience of seeing warriors in a phalanx formation
might say, oh, wow, these people, you know, they have
a one hundred legs and a hundred spear arms and
they're one massive organism because you're unfamiliar with the way
that they're grouping their bodies and what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, now that leads to another I think important thing
here is the is again coming back to that telephone
game of accounts, and the idea of one source speaking
not speaking literally literally about something and then it being
interpreted as a literal description of something. So you can
imagine somebody saying, yes, it was like they were this
beast with one hundred feet and a shell all around them,
(38:12):
and then you know, at the end of the telephone
game of account, someone is saying they literally use large
insects in their back. And so you see some variations
on that with the dissection of the of the the headless.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Entity.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
For instance, seventeenth century Danish physician Thomas Bartholin argued that
it was a metaphor that ends up being taken literally
in that the people described were, for one reason or another,
thought to be headless in the non literal sense. So
perhaps they couldn't be reasoned with, or they otherwise conducted
(38:48):
themselves in a difficult to understand fashion, what have you,
and then it just gets translated into oh, yes, and
they had no heads.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
So what begins maybe is more like a metaphor ethnocentric
derogation of some other group of people, turns in is
misinterpreted as a literal statement about their bodies.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Right, So a lot of these interpretations are also like
essentially saying, Okay, clearly these are not creatures that exist,
but there has to be some middle ground. There has
to be something kind of like it. And you see
a number of these that I think you could classify
as sunken head theories, the idea that you wouldn't be
dealing with someone with a face on their chest, but
(39:30):
what if you had a group of people that had,
for one reason, one hypothetical reason or another, greatly shortened neck,
or even a seeming absence of a neck.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
So assuming that, I guess giving more credence to the
original claims as saying like, well, they really did see
some people who they were describing in a more reliable
fashion than whatever we were just talking about. But there's
some there's some explanation for it. I'm often skeptical of
(40:00):
explanent of explanats or attempts to explain historical claims like this,
but let's see what they say.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Well, a lot of it ends up coming down to
situations where you had individuals like eighteenth century Justuit naturalist
La Faton. There's also Johannes de Layte, a seventeenth century geographer,
and basically like a lot of their arguments come down
to the same thing saying, Okay, well here's this thing
in these travelogus, in these accounts, and look, here we
(40:29):
have evidence. We have accounts of people with some sort
of a sunken head situation. Like some of these seem
to be more along the lines of, well, here's some
individuals with really thick necks or they have, you know,
more highly developed muscles that Yeah, you could lean into
(40:49):
some description of them having a sunken head or less
of a neck, but I don't know, it seems kind
of a flimsy argument to make. I mean, likewise, you'll
see allusions to various congenital conditions where you know, a
person would be born with fused neck bones or a
(41:09):
short neck. Accounts of this from the ancient world are known.
I think there are even some controversial theories that King
Tut could have had some variation on one of these syndromes.
But there are a whole host of theories as to
what may or may not have been going on with
his personal health.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm intuitively a
little more skeptical of explanations like this for where these
claims came from.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, and then Likewise, you have other examples where people
are bringing up birth defects and various again congenital abnormalities
that you know are generally cases where the individual would
not survive. And you're not even talking about an individual
in the scenario. You're talking about the idea that there's
a whole group of people or beings out there that
all have the same appearance, that all have some sort
(42:00):
of a shortened neck or sunken head scenario going on. Now,
another source I was looking at here was nineteen twenty
four is The Coasts of Illusion, a study of travel
(42:20):
tales by author of Carl B. Firestone. He brings up
an argument made by eighteenth century French naturalists George Louis L. Buffon,
who says, what we could be looking at here are
reports of body modification, and Buffon apparently compared it to
certain known practices of neck and head elongation that you
(42:42):
see in some groups. So I guess this argument is
based a little bit in fact. But also I really
can't put a lot of faith in this argument. Like, yes,
there are cases where people have elongated the structure of
the head or done body moutives of the neck or shoulders.
I think more specifically the shoulders than the neck. But
(43:04):
it's a stretch to go from there to the idea
of people like pushing their head down into their body.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I
can imagine a lot more somebody doing a body modification
that could make it look like they had a face
in their torso than that could make it look like
they didn't have a head on their shoulders.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yeah. Oh, another example, This one kind of goes back
to what we were just talking about earlier with warriors
and warriors stances in the monstrous races in medieval art
and thought. Author John Block Friedman discusses the possibility that
shields with faces on them or some sort of facelike
motif on chestwear or armor might have also given this impression. So,
(43:50):
I mean, that's another case where again, it maybe one
instance of this being observed, and then it gets the
story gets told, it gets translated, it gets passed on,
and it becomes people with faces on their chest.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yeah. Again, that somehow seems to be the kind of
thing that feels more plausible to me that it could
be a misinterpretation seeing from a distance of or a
misinterpretation of the original report of certain appearances of like
shields or armor or clothing that could look like a
face on the body. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Now, another possible theory here is the you might think
of as the primate theory, and that's the idea that
what we're really looking at here are very distorted descriptions
of chimpanzees or bonobos rather than human beings. And interestingly enough,
this was actually cited in the nineteenth century by none
other than Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He speaks of
(44:50):
the quote savage exaggeration of ape sightings, saying specifically pointing
out the blemiers as being the kind of thing that, Okay, well,
this is just based on somebody exaggerating a sighting they
made of an ape, a bonobo, a chimpanzee or something
like that. And you can I've seen some examples too
where we people bring up people will bring up photographs
(45:12):
of chimps or bonobos and point to like the stance,
the sort of basic body morphology of the primating question
and say like, well, if you're looking at it from
the right angle, this could lead into an interpretation of
a creature without a head, or a creature even with
a face position somewhere in the torso, so.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
You could understand how you could see an ape and
imagine maybe as a certain posture, that its head was
lower than it was. It's hard to imagine how that
could be mistaken for like a people living in a
certain land. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
So, like I say, any one of these theories I
think is not strong enough to support the general principle here.
I feel like inevitably you're dealing with a whole lot
of different ideas, and just in general, like the stickiness
of the concept once it's been introduced, where people just
continue to repeat it even if logically they think, well,
(46:07):
this probably isn't possible. And of course, no matter which
idea you end up gravitating to, or if you'd reject
all of them, there's still something undeniable about all of
these stories, in that there is just an undeniable xenophobic
and racist nature of depicting the people of foreign lands
as monsters or something monster like is something less than
(46:29):
indifferent from human beings. Earlier, I referred in passing to
the age of discovery, but of course it wasn't just
an age of discovery. It was an age of conquest
and exploitation and the wages of which have never ceased,
and so this is very much a part of any
(46:51):
rational analysis of this scenario. I found a very good
source on this that was discussing this monstrous alterity in
early modern travels. This was published in two thousand and
eight from the journal le Esprite Creteur or the Creative Spirit,
and in it in this particular article, author Lynn Ramy
(47:11):
links these accounts of belly mouthed and one legged beings
two broader theological discussions about whether or not the occupants
of foreign lands were truly human with souls. Quote Eventually,
and inevitably, Augustine's ambiguous conclusion that the monstrous races either
were men and should be saved or were not men
became untenable. Augustine might well suggest that blimier and scopods
(47:37):
or one legged men are questionably human based on their
physical bodies, but the inhabitants of the Americas resembled very
much their conquerors. Apologists for Christian colonialists came to the
conclusion that they were in fact men without souls, born
from spontaneous generation but not descended from adam, equating some
ethnic groups with soulless animals lifted the onus of conversion
(47:58):
from the colonists and easily justified oppression and exploitation, unfortunately
proving to be a line of thought that unfortunately proved
extremely difficult to eradicate.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
Yeah, and I sense that there's a kind of uncomfortable
thing that's all throughout reading these accounts of people with
these impossible bodies, even going back to, you know, accounts
from the ancient world where it wasn't necessarily part of
an explicit attempt to justify colonial enterprise. Even in those cases,
(48:31):
you can just sense a kind of a lack of
a universal sense of humanity. You know, there's this kind
of feeling that like, well, whatever, those other people are
living very far away, you know, I don't know if
there are even really beings like we are. In fact,
here are even some strange claims about their bodies that
(48:52):
could not possibly be true, And so that just kind
of leads to this suggestion that like, well, I don't know,
people from from far away are not really people. So anyway,
I don't know. There's a quality that's always just made
me feel a little a little uneasy when reading these
these accounts of like men with faces and their torsos
and stuff like that that isn't really there for like
(49:15):
the gods and fantastical beings, but these ancient accounts about
alleged peoples of this kind. And I guess I didn't
always know exactly what it was that made me feel
that way, but I guess it is some kind of
implicit understanding of this, that it is a way of
questioning the full humanity of peoples elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yeah. Yeah, because if you populate the edges of your
known world with monsters, well then it's it's more appropriate
that you go out and exploit and conquer those lands. Right,
as alluded to in that quote. You don't have any
kind of spiritual obligation to those people because in your view,
they're not people and so forth. All right, well, did
(49:59):
we stick the land on a nice depressing finish these
episodes on headless creatures and fantasy and fiction and mythology
and legend and so forth.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
I guess. So that's a sad place to end, but
an important thing to understand. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, I have to admit the examples from the last
episode are definitely more fun where you just have a
situation where some sort of a divine being gets into
a fight with a god or an argument with a
god and just has their head stoved in or has
their head cut off by a god, but then their
body finds a way to manifest a face, manifest nipple
(50:39):
eyes and a big gaping mouth in the belly, or
even these ideas that we discussed in this episode of
like the Headless Avengers, you know, the roll in the
thops and Gunner's head is gone, but still he keeps going.
Headless Horsemen, they have no head anymore, and yet the
body continues. There's some sort of like level of volition
that is still that is still burning in these mythological,
(51:03):
folkloreic and fictional beings that can't be extinguished even by
removing the head. The thing that we all know is
the definite end of any mortal being.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Also, please look up scollops and they're two hundred Betty
Davis eyes.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
That's right, look up the scallops. All right, we're going
to gohea and close this episode out, but we'd love
to hear from everyone out there. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Lister Mail on Mondays,
short Form, Monster Factor, Artifact on Wednesdays, and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you use
(51:41):
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(52:01):
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If you would like to be in that discord server
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Speaker 3 (52:19):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio For
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Speaker 3 (53:00):
Its ratatata
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part two in our series on headless
gods and monsters. This is a topic that we had
talked about getting into for the Halloween season, but we
never got around to it, so here we are turning
things in late. So in part one, we talked about
(00:34):
the biological origins of the Biletian head and about what
factors probably drove our ancestors hundreds of millions of years
ago to start concentrating nerve cells and sense organs and
mouth parts all on one end of the body, and
of course this is the development that would eventually turn
into our faces and our brains. We also talked about
(00:57):
stories of gods with no heads and cultures around the world,
and today we're back to talk about some more headless ghosts,
monsters and dubious historical claims of people who naturally have
no heads or have heads located inside their torsos.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, as we discussed in the last episode, no matter
what direction you approach the topic from, it ends up
being clear that like this idea of something without a head,
it captivates us. It forces us to think and rethink
various ideas about like what a person is, what an
entity is, where a volition comes from, and so forth.
(01:36):
So yeah, getting here into the idea of roughly speaking,
the diabolical headless, there are any number of headless monsters
and ghosts and global traditions we're probably not going to cover.
We're definitely not going to cover all of them. We
may leave out by error some key examples. And so
if we do skip such a headless entity from folklore
(01:59):
mythology right in, we'd love to hear from you, you know,
especially if it's a situation where head and or body
continue to live on afterwards. I guess you could roughly
throw Medusa into that category, though we did a whole
series on Medusa back in the day, so refer back
to those if you want to hear about Medusa's head.
I think it's also, you know, I think fair that
(02:21):
we might presume that a lot of these different ideas
have to do with, at least in concerning some of
like the ghosts we're going to be talking about and
so forth, taboos against the burial of incomplete remains also
thoughts about beheading as a form of execution, So keeping
all that in mind, that we'd bring up the first
one here. And this is a pretty big one, especially
(02:44):
when we start thinking about things like the headless horsemen
from the legend of Sleepy Hollow. We have a creature
from the Scottish Highlands. The name means the headless trunk,
and I'm probably gonna butcher the pronunciation here, but colun
gun Chen. It's said to haunt the Isle of Sky
and it leaves women and children alone. But if it
(03:06):
happens upon a male traveler at night, especially anyone who's
out there on their own, well then it's going to
brutally attack. In Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James McKellop describes
it as a form of boken or hobgoblin. He writes
it it's often thought of as a tutelary or protector
spirit of the McDonald's of Morale in the Western Highlands.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Is there a commonly understood explanation of why this ghost
is headless or is it just kind of that's the
way it is.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I'm not aware of a particular origin story here, but
I could be missing something, by the way. He also
writes of the Irish death coach and points out that
the driver and or the horses are sometimes described as headless,
and indeed sometimes it was called the headless coach, and
it is sometimes driven by the headless phantom Dolahan.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Doulahan.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, so the Delahan is the headless horseman of Irish folklore,
and this one is I think often held up as
the clear inspiration for the headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
M Coloup describes it as indeed often riding a headless
horse or driving the coach that we already mentioned, and
sometimes that coach is made out of bones. There are
a number of grizzly details regarding the coach that sometimes
(04:18):
are left out of retellings. It actually does have a
ghoulish head that has been removed from its body, described
as a great chunk of moldy cheese with darting eyes.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Wow, that is evocative.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, so, I mean it makes it sound like, Okay,
the head is definitely dead, I guess, but again supernatural
being so I guess anything is fair game. The dula
hand is said to take this moldy cheese head off
for shock, and may throw it around like a ball,
so one can imagine, you know, sort of like bouncing
it off the shoulders or something, or dribbling it like
(04:55):
a basketball.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Oh, this reminds me of something I read that I
couldn't find a great worse for this. But allegedly, the
the ghost of the English archbishop William Laude, who is
believed to haunt Saint John's College in Oxfordshire, is said
to sometimes either kick his head around like a soccer
(05:16):
ball or bowl with his own head. But like I said,
I couldn't find a great looking source for that. But
that is a claim I've read attested.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I mean, the human imagination just can't help. But go
there right.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Now you might hearing this tale of the Dola h
and you might think, well, if this character comes riding around,
I've got to see this. This sounds impressive. Well, you
were advised not to. If he comes riding around, don't
peek out through a crack in the door the window,
because he has a whip. Sometimes it's said to be
crafted from a human spinal column, and he will crack
(05:52):
it at you and if he catches your eyes it'll
blind you.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Why am I calling to mind, like an evil version
of Santa Claus who catches the children peaking on, you know,
on Christmas.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
It's kind of like that, you know. I mean, there's
and I think we can all kind of relate to
that idea of the supernatural. Like it's one thing to
hear tales of the supernatural, but then do you dare
see it? Because once you've seen it, you've crossed over. Right,
You're no longer on this side of the stories, You're
on the other side.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And what does that mean for you?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
There are also tales that if he catches you looking
peeking out the door, he'll just ride up and throw
a basin of blood in your face. Oh yeah, and
but but still all that being said, like he still
just riding by, the worst thing that could happen is
that you'll hear those those hoof falls stop. You'll hear
(06:43):
that he has stopped outside your house, that he's lingering
outside your house, which of course spells death for those
inside or for someone inside, Like he is not just
passing through. He has arrived.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Now.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I wasn't able to find as many sources on this,
but it is said that there is a modern Japanese
urban legend variation of the dou Lahan. The Kubanashi Rider
or headless Rider doesn't ride a horse, rides a motorcycle.
The story is that his head was cut off by
a piano wire spanning a roadway, a detail that has
(07:15):
been connected to the nineteen seventy four Australian outlaw biker
film Stone, which was then released in Japan in nineteen
eighty one and would have inspired this urban legend. Apparently,
I have not seen this one. I don't know if
you're familiar with Stone.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
No, I'm not familiar with it, but it sounds like
a very Mad Max kind of detail.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, and in fact, it has Hugh keyes Burn in it,
the guy who played in Morton Joe in the most
recent Mad Max film and also played what was like
toe Cutter I think is his character in the original
Mad Max.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
The villain in the first one in the fourth one,
but different characters. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Now. McKillop also recounts a tale of a beheading game
involving the hero kucullin Now the Beheading Game. I think
we've talked about this before on the show. This is
a literary trope, perhaps best known for its place and
on Thurian legend concerning the Green Knight. Basically, the game
consists of this, you cut my head off, and then
(08:11):
I cut yours off. Sounds like an easy contest until
you realize that your opponent can get back up and
walk around without a head and will indeed be back
to cut yours off later on.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
This is central in the Arthurian story of Sir Cowen
and the Green Knight. Sir Gowain is the one who
answers the challenge. The Knights of the Roundtable are feasting,
I believe on Christmas Day or it's around Christmas, and
the Green Knight, this man who is very much identified
with nature and seems to be some kind of symbol
of like paganism, This Green Knight figure comes in and
(08:45):
he insults all of the knights, and he challenges them
to this game, this beheading game, and they're allowed to
be head him first. So Sir Gawain, the young up
and comer, is like, yeah, okay, I'll do it. Yeah,
and he cuts the Green Knight's head off, and the
Green Knight is fine, he picks his own head up.
He's like, okay, now I'll do that to you a
year from now today. So You've got to come find
me at the Green Chapel, And so there's like it's
(09:07):
a morality story about honor and all that that Sir
Gawain is like, well, am I going to go do it?
And he does. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
So there's a lot more to dissect there, but at
heart you do have a story of headless or at
least temporarily headless.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Being I actually, Rachel and I just this past month
watched for the first time that that recent Sir Gawain
movie that they put out, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight,
and I thought it was great.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Oh cool. I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard
great things. I've only ever watched the one in which
Sean Connery plays the Green Knight.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Oh no, I haven't seen that one.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, it's a pretty good Green Knight. Now, in looking
around for other examples of headless beings, there's one I
ran across that I wanted to bring up that it
extends from navago or dnnight traditions. Specifically, it's called the
(10:00):
phil Gath. It's a form of annie monster, sometimes translated,
especially back in the early twentieth century, as alien gods.
Though I feel like that maybe that terminology could be
confusing now I'm not sure, but some sort of like
gods from the outside, I guess. In her Monster books,
(10:21):
Carol Rose describes them as primal monsters, the offspring of
wicked women who brought fear and misery into the world,
the sons of Sun and Water, and I believe these
are the Navajo hero twins slayed these monsters, and according
to Rose, their offspring, however, lived on, the monster's offspring
lived on to keep cold, famine, old age, and poverty
(10:43):
alive in the world even if these, like more primal fears,
had been defeated by the heroes. I was also reading
that the monsters were slain by na Ye NEZGANI. This
is a mythical hero from Navajo lore that is a
monster slayer, and I believe is one of the Navajo
(11:05):
twins referenced earlier. Gerald E. Levy in his book in
the beginning The Navajo Genesis lists the translated names of
the monsters killed by the slayer as big Ye, Horned Monster,
Rock Monster, Eagle kicks off Rocks, and the Eye Killers.
I believe Horned Monster is fel Gath or deal ged,
(11:27):
but there's no mention of headlessness here. However, deel ged
dell Gath or Phelgeth is listed as a quote unquote
Harry headless antelope on the website Native Languagest Native hyphen
Languages dot org, which is a nonprofit dedicated to the
preservation and promotion of endangered American Indian languages. So that
(11:51):
leads me to believe, well, maybe this is some sort
of headless entity, at least in some tellings.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Harry headless antelope. Interesting.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, So just another example that this idea of some
sort of like headless entity, be it animal or human inform,
like gonna touch a nerve, like there is something unnatural
and dreadful about it that they were going to we
can't help but connect with monstrosity.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
So I was looking for a good book that compiled
stories about headless ghosts, and I found a chapter in
a book by the well known skeptic and paranormal investigator
Joe Nickel called The book is called The Science of Ghosts,
Searching for Spirits of the Dead, published by Prometheus Books
in twenty twelve, and there's a chapter in this book
(12:38):
called headless Ghosts. I have known so at the beginning
of this chapter, Nickel points out a few just kind
of interesting contradictions, some of which I don't know if
I've ever considered before. One is the idea that you know,
there are certain kinds of ghost realists, people who think
that ghosts are real, independent, extraternal phenomena, and that certain
(13:02):
of these ghost realists assert that a ghost is a
form of physical energy peculiar to humans or perhaps to animals,
that survives death and remains in the environment. And yet
for some reason, ghosts are almost always perceived not only
as manifestations of the human or animal body, but dressed
(13:24):
as they might have been during life. So like, if
this energy exists and persists, it also seems to manifest
inanimate objects, such as like clothing and uniforms and jewelry
other non living objects that ghosts would sometimes carry with them.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
That's a good point. Ghosts tend to wear clothes.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Along the same lines, some ideas about ghosts as real
external phenomena explain them as some kind of lingering mental
projection of the original person that persists after death, though
this has interesting tension with the number of stories there
are about headless ghosts, since mental fling phenomena are pretty
well established to depend mostly on the brain, it would
(14:04):
have to be a now dead brain projecting not itself
into the future, but some kind of three dimensional representation
of the part of the body that does not contain it,
which is kind of interesting. But anyway, so those little
observations aside, he goes on to document several types of
stories of headless ghosts. In the United States. There are
(14:26):
apparently a number of popular stories about soldiers from the
American Civil War, like being decapitated by cannon fire and
then wandering the battlefield forevermore as headless ghosts. He also
mentions the various headless ghosts associated with the Tower of
London in England, including several historical figures who were beheaded
on the orders of Henry the Eighth, only a subset
(14:48):
of which were his wives, the most famous of the
Tower ghosts being Anne Boleyn. But there are also just
some other enemies of Henry that end up there. But
one of the stories that Nicol courts that really stuck
with me involves criminals in medieval Germany. So there is
a place in the Rhine Valley called the Reichenstein Castle
(15:11):
where a legend says that a headless ghost sometimes wanders
in the chapel adjoining the castle, and he describes a
visit that he had to this castle to look into
the legend. The origin story goes back to the thirteenth century,
when this castle was the base of operations for a
band of what he calls robber knights. I think, you know,
(15:33):
fierce bandit horsemen. And then to quote from Nicol, and
this is in part he is quoting from Dennis William
Hawke's International Dictionary of Haunted Places. So when the quote
comes in, that's what it is. But Nichol writes, quote,
in twelve eighty two, they were captured, whereupon their leader,
Dietrich von Hohenfels, entreated Emperor Rudolph von Habsburg to spare
(15:56):
his nine sons. The emperor stated that Dietrich was to
be beheaded, but with his sons lined in a row,
everyone he could afterward run past would be spared. When
the executioner's sword fell quote, Dietrich's head rolled to the ground,
but his bloodied torso stood erect and lunged forward, stumbling
and swaying, until it passed every one of his sons. Finally,
(16:20):
the headless body fell to its knees, a fountain of
blood shooting high in the air where its head had been.
The sons were spared, and afterward on the execution site,
the repentant family erected the Saint Clement Chapel. According to
how Dietrich's headless ghost is sometimes seen inside the chapel.
Also quote Dietrich is buried on the property and his
(16:41):
red sandstone marker depicts a knight in armor with no head.
But Nicol points out that there are several issues with
this story. So first of all, this grave marker described
wherever it is, it is now lost, or was, at
least to the time he was writing this book. Though
there is an account of a visit to the site
by Victor Hugo, where Hugo claimed that the grave marker
(17:04):
was from the fourteenth century, not the thirteenth, and the
Dietrich's name was not on it. Also, the account does
not square with the history of the bandit Knights of
the Castle, where apparently the more reliable sequence of fact
seems to be that Dietrich actually escaped and his companions
the other robber knights, were in fact executed. They were
(17:25):
hanged from trees in the Rhine Valley, and the basic
outline of this folk tale about Dietrich seems to go
back in earlier form to a story about a fourteenth
century German pirate and privateer named Klaus Stortebecker, who was
captured and executed for his crimes in the year fourteen
oh one. Nicol writes, quote, kneeling before the executioner, he
(17:48):
proposed a deal. Quote all those companions should be reprieved
whom he could manage to walk by after being beheaded.
This way he saved the lives of eleven pirates before
the malicious executioner tripped him. That's a dirty trick. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Now, this talk of headless privateers and so forth. Of course,
this brings to mind a modern retelling of this sort
of story that I don't think we've mentioned so far,
and that of course is Warren Zvon's nineteen seventy eight
song roll in the Headless Thompson Gunner, which is an
excellent song, wonderfully weird lyrics, a great ballad of headless
(18:30):
being in revenge and so forth, but very much from
in this sort of vein, you know, instead of a pirate,
an international mercenary.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Right and so there are kind of like these story
forms that just keep reappearing in stories about different people
in different times and places in history. And Nicol ultimately
thinks that the story about d Trick that he came
across is probably grafted from this original story about Stordbecker.
But in either case, Nicol argued that the story is implausible,
(19:02):
like it probably did not actually happen based on what
we know about physiology, Like you know, a chicken might
be able to run around or walk around a bit
after decapitation, but he does not think that a human
would do the same.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, and it raises all sorts of questions about well,
how was he standing when the head was cut off?
Like how do you get ready for this attempted lurch
across the execution yard to save other pirates?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
That's a good question. I don't know the answer there,
But one more tangent I went on from Nichol's book.
Later in the book, there's a short section on ghost
dogs where Nicol brings up the English legend sometimes known
as black Shuck, a spectral hound with sort of localized
incarnations or tellings in different regions of England, such as Devon, Essex,
(19:49):
Suffolk and Norfolk. And this ghost dog is said to
have black hair and stand as large as a calf,
quote sporting glowing eyes even when he is described as headless.
And I loved that the image of a canine body
that has glowing eyes despite having no head. Now, can
(20:10):
you have eyes if you have no head? Well? I
think if you're a dog, the answer is probably no,
at least plausibly no, without some kind of sci fi
Frankenstein thing going on. But if you're another kind of animal,
the answer is absolutely yes. You can have eyes without
a head. As weird as it sounds, there are animals
exactly like that. Just one example I would like to
briefly talk about. Are scallops, Oh, scallops, scollops? Which way
(20:34):
do you say it? Robin scallops? Scollops?
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Oh yeah, a little further back in the Yeah, let's
say scollops. Folks, if you are near a computer or
are safely able to look at your phone right now,
just do yourself a favor and look up scollop eyes.
It's like something straight out of a monster movie. There
are real unedited photos of scollop eyes that look like
(20:59):
they can not be from nature, but they are, so
you will sometimes see the shell will be just slightly open,
you know, it's mostly closed, but there's a gap in between,
and the inside of the shell is lined with a
tissue that just has these these pale blue dots all
(21:19):
along it, which clearly do read as eyes for some reason,
they don't just look like dots. I mean, it looks
like they're looking at you. And then in between that
there are these tissues that kind of lock together with
these spiky hairs that looks like the world's widest monster
mouth with infinite teeth.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, they're they're they're terrifying. They also they're so bright
in some of these pictures too. They feel like it
should be a legend of Zelda in me.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
You know, Yes, that's really good. Yeah. Yeah. You can
imagine the treasure chest popping up when you defeat the Scallop. Hey,
and if it's in one of the new Zelda games,
surely you would end up getting to cook with with
the Scallop from it, right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I hear all about. I don't play the game myself.
My son does, and he tells me all about the
different meats you cook, and then of course there's not
just going to be one. There's going to be about
eight different versions of it, right, with different head features.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Yeah, and you can combine the body parts from the
different ones to make different kinds of meals. That cooking
mechanic is very pleasing. It's always a nice little surprise
when you mix something new and it does make a dish.
But anyway, scallops are interesting in that their visual anatomy
differs substantially from ours. Scallops can, of course, have hundreds
(22:36):
of eyes per organism. We only have two. And while
our eyes use curved transparent lenses to focus light onto
the retina, scallops focus light instead with tiny mirrors made
of crystals of guanine. And if guanine's ringing a bell
for you, yes, that is one of the four bases
(22:57):
found in DNA. That's the one that pairs with seine.
Strange fact I just learned while preparing for this episode.
Guanine gets its name from guano, as in like bat
dung or bird dung, because the compound was found in
great quantities in guano, but in its crystalline form guanine,
(23:17):
it forms the iridescent component in fish scales and other
kind of pearly reflective surfaces in parts of animal bodies,
sometimes in reptiles too, Like I believe chameleons, you know,
have guanine. But in the case of scallops, scallop eyes
focus light onto the light sensitive cells their equivalent of
(23:38):
retinas with reflective mirrors made of segmented guanine crystals. I
think they're actually square shaped crystal plates. And there's an
interesting comparison to be made to technology to human made telescopes,
because while the earliest telescopes like those used by Galileo,
used transparent glass lenses to focus life into the eyepiece
(24:01):
kind of like our eyes do, the most advanced telescopes
today actually tend to use curved mirrors instead of lenses
as the primary light gathering surface. Wow.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
But if there's one thing I want you to take
away from this, it's just go google scollop eyes.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yes, yes, these are amazing images, and it does feel
like they're looking right at it all Right at this
point in the episode, I want to turn back to
this idea that we discussed a little bit in the
(24:39):
last episode, this idea of headless creatures but with faces
on their chest. So we looked at some examples from
like Chinese mythology and Hindu mythology, where you had creatures
that have no head, but have but the face is
found away, you know, the nipples are pevy eyeballs, and
(25:01):
the belly is a great big mouth. The most famous
Western versions of these, though, the versions of these sort
of monstrous ideas, the ones that cast the longest shadow,
are generally referred to. They were referred to by various
names by particularly by authors in antiquity, but then going
(25:21):
on up through the Middle Ages and so forth. One
of the names is the blimys. Another is the cephali,
which just means headless. But many of the names that
they were, they were that were attributed to them were
actual peoples. That were the names of actual peoples that
were said to live in remote parts of the known world,
or i guess, more specifically, on the edges of what
(25:44):
was the known world for the individuals creating maps, writing
these various travelogs, and speculating about what sort of life
and what sort of peoples there were on the far
flung corners of the world.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
And while it's certainly possible that these stories could be
based on you know, misinterpreted or misreported observations, things like
that that we'll get into. You also really can't help
but notice that there would be a natural temptation when
describing people who live like in the farthest place place
away from you, that you can imagine that maybe they
(26:19):
are really different somehow, maybe like they don't even have heads.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah, Yeah, and that's that's basically the idea.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
And there were other monstrous races, to be sure, and
you can find various illustrations of these and various books
from the time periods in question. They include not only
people with faces on their chests and no head, but
also one legged people that hop around on one leg
and that sort of thing, the so called monstrous races.
But this idea goes way back, and you know, will
(26:49):
unwrap some of the ideas that have been put forth
as to why these concepts emerged and why they had
such stickiness in the human imagination. And I do think
the human imagination, as always should be, we should keep
that in mind as being one of the primary factors here,
like people thinking about again, like thinking about the edge
of the world, thinking about other planets. We're dealing with
(27:13):
sort of a gray area where we can just inject
pure imagination. But then on top of that there's the
normal telephone game of translations and accounts and some other
factors we'll get into. So the Greeks called them the Acephala,
or the headless ones. They were also known again as
the Blimys, which was the name given to an actual
people who seem to have lived in Lower Nubia during
(27:36):
the seventh century BCE through the eighth century CE. So
to be clear, the actual people that lived there had
heads and were not monsters. They were people. But this
is the idea that gets passed down through these various writings.
Herodotus indirectly mentions the Acephali in the fifth century BCE
(27:56):
work Histories, among other exact rated foreign peoples with inhuman descriptions,
he refers to quote the headless men that have their
eyes in their chests. During the first century CE, plenty
of the Elder wrote about them as well in the
Natural History, once more referring to them among other exaggerated
(28:19):
and or you know, strange accounts of supposed foreign peoples
and the far flung corners of the world, writing quote
in translation. Of course, the Blimier are said to have
no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts,
and you'll find various accounts like this repeated through the
Middle Ages and into the Age of Discovery. You can
(28:40):
look at works such as the travels of Sir John Mandivial,
the writings of Walter Raleigh, and so forth. They are
just more numerous. To mention here in this episode.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
To be clear, you're saying some of the other these
like medieval travel writings, described people with implausible anatomy that
were you know, this is not really how people's bodies were,
but for some reason in some place, these authors would say, yeah,
there are people here who they don't have a head,
or they have one leg or something.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, and I gather that. You know, there are a
mix of things going on here. On one level, it's like, well,
you know, plenty of the Elder wrote about it, so
we're going to repeat that. Of course, you know plenty,
as we discussed on the show, plenty has a lot
of interesting things to share, some of which have truth,
have an element of truth to them, or are you know,
(29:30):
accounts of what's happening in the real world. Others are
things that he heard and were passed down and don't
relay any historic truth, but do tell us something about
like the mindset of the time. Now before we get
back into the question of where these stories came from
and what they may have originally meant, you know, what
things could have led to these interpretations entails. It's also
(29:53):
I think it's also worthwhile to think about their staying
power and usefulness and conveying different meanings, some but not
all of which relate to like a general monsterization of
the other. And again, I think it's also one of
those things where it's imaginative and weird enough, and that
alone is a reason that people keep coming back to it,
and just sort of like some of the ideas we
(30:15):
discussed in the first episode, like we think about creatures
with heads and we take it for granted, and then
you're presented with a form that's lacking ahead, but it's
still alive, Like what does it mean? You can't help
but interpret and have these various symbolic interpretations of metaphoric
interpretations of what's going on there. So I was looking
around for some insight on this general topics pointed out
(30:37):
by Husband and Gilmore House in The wild Man, Medieval
myth and symbolism. You had cases like that of thirteenth
century Flemish writer Thomas de Contemporary, who compared such headless
men to lawyers who quote misled clients into unnecessary legal
processes and grew fat on inordinate fees. I love that
(31:01):
because I can't help but imagine one of these various
lawyer billboards you see everywhere on the highways. But instead
of having that, you know, smiling dude in a suit,
what if you had a belly faced man on them?
Speaker 3 (31:12):
What if Bob Odenkirk's face was on his chest exactly? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Husband and gilmore House also point out that the headless
man has also been presented as an image of humility.
This is apparently from the thirteenth or fourteenth century texts
Guest Romanorum. I consulted this text and I did find
the line I think they're referring to. Quote, humility is
signified by the absence of the head and the placing
(31:39):
of the face in the breast. The text also includes
this bit of wisdom, No creature is so monstrous, no
fable so incredible, but that the Monkish writers could give
it a moral form and extract from its crudities and
quidities some moral or religious lesson.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Ah, this comes back to something we've talked about on
the show before that a lot of times when you
get these older accounts, especially in say like a medieval
Christian context of anomalous beings, they were almost always in
the texts where they're documented, used to illustrate some kind
of moralistic teaching, and that should in some way color
(32:19):
your understanding of what purpose these stories were serving. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, this idea of taking a monstrous form using it
to relay a point or is this quote is kind
of alluding to It's like the monk cannot help, when
presented with a strange form, to come up with some
sort of theological argument for what it represents. Like one
example that I've brought up on the show before is
this creature that shows up in some medieval sources. Sorry
(32:48):
I don't remember the sources off hand, but I've referred
to in a monster fact before of Christ with a
long neck and bird's head. And the idea here I
remember reading is that it's like, be more like Christ,
be more like an individual with a long neck and
a bird's head, because then the words that rise up
(33:11):
from your heart, well they have longer to have more
distance to cover before they reach your lips, before you
can speak them, and therefore it is wise and christ
like to to approach the world this way and so forth,
you know. But then on the other end, it's just
an amusing looking illustration as well, because it's clearly supposed
to be Jesus, but he has a bird's.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Head, you know. Just raises questions where I realized that
my intuitions are about what somebody would or would not
consider sacrilegious or not always correct. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, there's so many examples of that, just depictions of Christ,
like the three faced Christ that you saw that was
sometimes used as a as a way to visually describe
some aspect of the Holy Trinity, but also was then
viewed as potentially heretical by others, and so forth. Anyway,
coming back to the idea of creatures with no heads
(34:06):
and faces on their tour, So I guess one of
the big questions that comes to mind looking at these
images is you know, where does this idea even come from?
Because it's one thing to realize that once the idea
is introduced, it has a stickiness to it. We can't
help but think about it. And come up with reasons
for why it could be or what it means. And
(34:27):
looking around there seem to be a number of theories,
some convincing, some far less convincing, And as always, it's
one of these cases where I feel like you could
cobble various ideas together and possibly get at some truth,
though I would be very hesitant to take even the
better theories and lean too heavily on them as like
(34:47):
an all inclusive theory, like this is the reason somebody
described people on a distant continent as having no head
and having a face on their chest. So the first
theory I wanted to bring up, and this is when
you've seen a number of sources, is the idea that
these would have been essentially accounts based on limited observation
(35:11):
of certain groups of people, certain tribes or what not
from a distance, such as from a ship off of
a foreign coast. And you know, I imagine this alone,
without the aid of spyglasses, could potentially be enough. But
then the idea is that this could have been compounded
by modes of dress, such as something worn on the
(35:31):
head or specifically the use of some sort of a hood.
From a distance, it was apparently argued by seventeenth century
German author Adam Ollurius and others that hooded figures might
conceivably be interpreted as headless. So if you had a
group of people that traditionally wore some sort of headgear,
a hood, or what have you, then from a distance
(35:53):
you might say, Hey, look at those people standing on
that shore. They appear to have no head. Write it down,
maybe draw a picture. We'll bring that back at the
end of the voyage.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Okay, I could imagine that. But along the same lines
as somebody seeing and misinterpreting clothing or adornment of the body,
you would also have to wonder about somebody seeing and
misinterpreting somebody with just a particular posture.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, and that's the one you read about as well.
In fact, John Bostock and H. T. Riley chime in
on this in their liner notes to their translation of
Plenty's Natural History. Something you might think of is good.
I think of it as like the warrior stance theory here,
And basically they point out quote from a statement in
the Ethiopica of Heliodorus Marcus suggests that the story as
(36:43):
to the blimier having no heads arose from the circumstance
that on the invasion of the Persians, they were in
the habit of falling on one knee and bowing the
head to the breast, by which means, without injury to themselves,
they afforded a passage to the horses of the enemy. Now,
I have to admit that is a sentence. I do
(37:04):
not fully understand exactly what they're describing there, but I
take it to mean that there's some sort of like
a uniform posture that certain individuals were said to take on,
as some sort of like a defensive posture, a warrior stance,
or what have you, that could be interpreted even from
(37:25):
a distance, as being people with no head.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I guess you could imagine a similar thing being that
somebody without experience of seeing warriors in a phalanx formation
might say, oh, wow, these people, you know, they have
a one hundred legs and a hundred spear arms and
they're one massive organism because you're unfamiliar with the way
that they're grouping their bodies and what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, now that leads to another I think important thing
here is the is again coming back to that telephone
game of accounts, and the idea of one source speaking
not speaking literally literally about something and then it being
interpreted as a literal description of something. So you can
imagine somebody saying, yes, it was like they were this
beast with one hundred feet and a shell all around them,
(38:12):
and then you know, at the end of the telephone
game of account, someone is saying they literally use large
insects in their back. And so you see some variations
on that with the dissection of the of the the headless.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Entity.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
For instance, seventeenth century Danish physician Thomas Bartholin argued that
it was a metaphor that ends up being taken literally
in that the people described were, for one reason or another,
thought to be headless in the non literal sense. So
perhaps they couldn't be reasoned with, or they otherwise conducted
(38:48):
themselves in a difficult to understand fashion, what have you,
and then it just gets translated into oh, yes, and
they had no heads.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
So what begins maybe is more like a metaphor ethnocentric
derogation of some other group of people, turns in is
misinterpreted as a literal statement about their bodies.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Right, So a lot of these interpretations are also like
essentially saying, Okay, clearly these are not creatures that exist,
but there has to be some middle ground. There has
to be something kind of like it. And you see
a number of these that I think you could classify
as sunken head theories, the idea that you wouldn't be
dealing with someone with a face on their chest, but
(39:30):
what if you had a group of people that had,
for one reason, one hypothetical reason or another, greatly shortened neck,
or even a seeming absence of a neck.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
So assuming that, I guess giving more credence to the
original claims as saying like, well, they really did see
some people who they were describing in a more reliable
fashion than whatever we were just talking about. But there's
some there's some explanation for it. I'm often skeptical of
(40:00):
explanent of explanats or attempts to explain historical claims like this,
but let's see what they say.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Well, a lot of it ends up coming down to
situations where you had individuals like eighteenth century Justuit naturalist
La Faton. There's also Johannes de Layte, a seventeenth century geographer,
and basically like a lot of their arguments come down
to the same thing saying, Okay, well here's this thing
in these travelogus, in these accounts, and look, here we
(40:29):
have evidence. We have accounts of people with some sort
of a sunken head situation. Like some of these seem
to be more along the lines of, well, here's some
individuals with really thick necks or they have, you know,
more highly developed muscles that Yeah, you could lean into
(40:49):
some description of them having a sunken head or less
of a neck, but I don't know, it seems kind
of a flimsy argument to make. I mean, likewise, you'll
see allusions to various congenital conditions where you know, a
person would be born with fused neck bones or a
(41:09):
short neck. Accounts of this from the ancient world are known.
I think there are even some controversial theories that King
Tut could have had some variation on one of these syndromes.
But there are a whole host of theories as to
what may or may not have been going on with
his personal health.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm intuitively a
little more skeptical of explanations like this for where these
claims came from.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, and then Likewise, you have other examples where people
are bringing up birth defects and various again congenital abnormalities
that you know are generally cases where the individual would
not survive. And you're not even talking about an individual
in the scenario. You're talking about the idea that there's
a whole group of people or beings out there that
all have the same appearance, that all have some sort
(42:00):
of a shortened neck or sunken head scenario going on. Now,
another source I was looking at here was nineteen twenty
four is The Coasts of Illusion, a study of travel
(42:20):
tales by author of Carl B. Firestone. He brings up
an argument made by eighteenth century French naturalists George Louis L. Buffon,
who says, what we could be looking at here are
reports of body modification, and Buffon apparently compared it to
certain known practices of neck and head elongation that you
(42:42):
see in some groups. So I guess this argument is
based a little bit in fact. But also I really
can't put a lot of faith in this argument. Like, yes,
there are cases where people have elongated the structure of
the head or done body moutives of the neck or shoulders.
I think more specifically the shoulders than the neck. But
(43:04):
it's a stretch to go from there to the idea
of people like pushing their head down into their body.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I
can imagine a lot more somebody doing a body modification
that could make it look like they had a face
in their torso than that could make it look like
they didn't have a head on their shoulders.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yeah. Oh, another example, This one kind of goes back
to what we were just talking about earlier with warriors
and warriors stances in the monstrous races in medieval art
and thought. Author John Block Friedman discusses the possibility that
shields with faces on them or some sort of facelike
motif on chestwear or armor might have also given this impression. So,
(43:50):
I mean, that's another case where again, it maybe one
instance of this being observed, and then it gets the
story gets told, it gets translated, it gets passed on,
and it becomes people with faces on their chest.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yeah. Again, that somehow seems to be the kind of
thing that feels more plausible to me that it could
be a misinterpretation seeing from a distance of or a
misinterpretation of the original report of certain appearances of like
shields or armor or clothing that could look like a
face on the body. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Now, another possible theory here is the you might think
of as the primate theory, and that's the idea that
what we're really looking at here are very distorted descriptions
of chimpanzees or bonobos rather than human beings. And interestingly enough,
this was actually cited in the nineteenth century by none
other than Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He speaks of
(44:50):
the quote savage exaggeration of ape sightings, saying specifically pointing
out the blemiers as being the kind of thing that, Okay, well,
this is just based on somebody exaggerating a sighting they
made of an ape, a bonobo, a chimpanzee or something
like that. And you can I've seen some examples too
where we people bring up people will bring up photographs
(45:12):
of chimps or bonobos and point to like the stance,
the sort of basic body morphology of the primating question
and say like, well, if you're looking at it from
the right angle, this could lead into an interpretation of
a creature without a head, or a creature even with
a face position somewhere in the torso, so.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
You could understand how you could see an ape and
imagine maybe as a certain posture, that its head was
lower than it was. It's hard to imagine how that
could be mistaken for like a people living in a
certain land. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
So, like I say, any one of these theories I
think is not strong enough to support the general principle here.
I feel like inevitably you're dealing with a whole lot
of different ideas, and just in general, like the stickiness
of the concept once it's been introduced, where people just
continue to repeat it even if logically they think, well,
(46:07):
this probably isn't possible. And of course, no matter which
idea you end up gravitating to, or if you'd reject
all of them, there's still something undeniable about all of
these stories, in that there is just an undeniable xenophobic
and racist nature of depicting the people of foreign lands
as monsters or something monster like is something less than
(46:29):
indifferent from human beings. Earlier, I referred in passing to
the age of discovery, but of course it wasn't just
an age of discovery. It was an age of conquest
and exploitation and the wages of which have never ceased,
and so this is very much a part of any
(46:51):
rational analysis of this scenario. I found a very good
source on this that was discussing this monstrous alterity in
early modern travels. This was published in two thousand and
eight from the journal le Esprite Creteur or the Creative Spirit,
and in it in this particular article, author Lynn Ramy
(47:11):
links these accounts of belly mouthed and one legged beings
two broader theological discussions about whether or not the occupants
of foreign lands were truly human with souls. Quote Eventually,
and inevitably, Augustine's ambiguous conclusion that the monstrous races either
were men and should be saved or were not men
became untenable. Augustine might well suggest that blimier and scopods
(47:37):
or one legged men are questionably human based on their
physical bodies, but the inhabitants of the Americas resembled very
much their conquerors. Apologists for Christian colonialists came to the
conclusion that they were in fact men without souls, born
from spontaneous generation but not descended from adam, equating some
ethnic groups with soulless animals lifted the onus of conversion
(47:58):
from the colonists and easily justified oppression and exploitation, unfortunately
proving to be a line of thought that unfortunately proved
extremely difficult to eradicate.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
Yeah, and I sense that there's a kind of uncomfortable
thing that's all throughout reading these accounts of people with
these impossible bodies, even going back to, you know, accounts
from the ancient world where it wasn't necessarily part of
an explicit attempt to justify colonial enterprise. Even in those cases,
(48:31):
you can just sense a kind of a lack of
a universal sense of humanity. You know, there's this kind
of feeling that like, well, whatever, those other people are
living very far away, you know, I don't know if
there are even really beings like we are. In fact,
here are even some strange claims about their bodies that
(48:52):
could not possibly be true, And so that just kind
of leads to this suggestion that like, well, I don't know,
people from from far away are not really people. So anyway,
I don't know. There's a quality that's always just made
me feel a little a little uneasy when reading these
these accounts of like men with faces and their torsos
and stuff like that that isn't really there for like
(49:15):
the gods and fantastical beings, but these ancient accounts about
alleged peoples of this kind. And I guess I didn't
always know exactly what it was that made me feel
that way, but I guess it is some kind of
implicit understanding of this, that it is a way of
questioning the full humanity of peoples elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yeah. Yeah, because if you populate the edges of your
known world with monsters, well then it's it's more appropriate
that you go out and exploit and conquer those lands. Right,
as alluded to in that quote. You don't have any
kind of spiritual obligation to those people because in your view,
they're not people and so forth. All right, well, did
(49:59):
we stick the land on a nice depressing finish these
episodes on headless creatures and fantasy and fiction and mythology
and legend and so forth.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
I guess. So that's a sad place to end, but
an important thing to understand. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, I have to admit the examples from the last
episode are definitely more fun where you just have a
situation where some sort of a divine being gets into
a fight with a god or an argument with a
god and just has their head stoved in or has
their head cut off by a god, but then their
body finds a way to manifest a face, manifest nipple
(50:39):
eyes and a big gaping mouth in the belly, or
even these ideas that we discussed in this episode of
like the Headless Avengers, you know, the roll in the
thops and Gunner's head is gone, but still he keeps going.
Headless Horsemen, they have no head anymore, and yet the
body continues. There's some sort of like level of volition
that is still that is still burning in these mythological,
(51:03):
folkloreic and fictional beings that can't be extinguished even by
removing the head. The thing that we all know is
the definite end of any mortal being.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Also, please look up scollops and they're two hundred Betty
Davis eyes.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
That's right, look up the scallops. All right, we're going
to gohea and close this episode out, but we'd love
to hear from everyone out there. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Lister Mail on Mondays,
short Form, Monster Factor, Artifact on Wednesdays, and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you use
(51:41):
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module there. Seek it out. It's a Facebook group. Ask
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(52:01):
a discord what discussion group a discord channel. I forget
what the terminology is, but we're on the server, yeah, server.
If you would like to be in that discord server
or whatever we're supposed to call it, just shoot us
an email and we will send you the link.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio For
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Speaker 3 (53:00):
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