From the Vault: Brain and Head Theft, Part 2

discussion of stolen heads and stolen brains. That's right, If you didn't listen to part one, go back listen to part one, because that's where we initially get into it, and we talked about like some ancient ideas about what the brain did and uh. Then we get into some examples of of brains that have been preserved uh consensually, and then get a little bit into the theft. And we're gonna get more into the theft here in this episode, and then towards the end, we're gonna get into some

of the mythology and folklore of disembodied heads. That's right. So at the end of the last episode, we were talking about the theft of the skull of the Austrian classical composer Franz Joseph Haydn, which was stolen by phrenologists who clung to the mistaken belief that Haydn's musical genius would somehow be inscribed in the bone of his cranium.

But Hayden isn't the only figure like this. There there are other figures in history with some kind of reputation for genius of one kind or another, who have had their heads or their brains stolen in the hope that these remnants would somehow explain to science what made them so smart. And of course, in the case of phrenology, this was an utterly hopeless endeavor, just because phrenology is

total quack pseudoscience. It's end to end. But this has also happened even in ages of more legitimate neuroscience, and still maybe doesn't tell us as much as the people who stole these brains hoped that it would. So I want to talk about another famous stolen head that is not even for any pretense of neuroscience or any other type of research. I want to talk about the head of Jeremy Bentham. Uh, so you might know Jeremy Bentham best for I don't know what do people know him

best for these days? Maybe for the for the idea of the panopticon, which he was a promoter of. That would be where our listeners might have heard his name on this show before. Yeah, Jeremy Bentham was a highly influential eighteenth and nineteenth century philosopher and social reformer from England, and he's usually thought of as one of the founders of liberalism and one of the modern founders of the

utilitarian theory of ethics. So, in other words, right and wrong would be determined not by what the King says, or what the Bible says, or not by any deontological duty, but by what course of action would provide the greatest

happiness to the greatest number of people. And Bentham is kind of interesting because if you read through a collection of his opinions and arguments today, it is this strange mixture of things that for the time were extremely radical, progressive and by our modern ethics admirable, but also things that are bizarrely horrifying. So so, for example, you know, he was in favor of total political equality, for women and the decriminalization of homosexuality. But he also did not

like the idea of privacy. He thought that was a bad concept. And of course this is exemplified in the idea of the panopticon, in which prisoners have no privacy or and and do not know if the the gaze of the like the the lone observation tower, if they are looking at them in any given moment, you know. Right, So he would dig where we are now in some respects. Right, Oh my god, Jeremy Bentham. I would love to know

Jeremy Bentham's thoughts on the modern digital landscape. But anyway, that the relevant part of the Jeremy Bentham story today is that his head still exists today above ground in a grotesque, incompetently mummified form, and and it keeps getting stolen. I was reading a piece about this that was a transcript of a CBC radio piece which featured an interview with the Subadra Doss, who is a curator of collections

at University College London. The interviewer was named Carol Off and this CBC piece includes some excellent biographical tidbits right at the top about Bentham's weird and interesting personality apart from his politics and his public work. For example, it says that Bentham had a walking stick that he called Dapple, he had a teapot that he referred to as Dicky, and he had an elderly cat that was named the Reverend Sir John Langborne. Oh that's that's I don't know

if that's a good cat name. That's a bit too human. I think it's funny when a dog has a very human name. I don't I haven't made my mind up about cats yet, I think, I guess I assume that's funny. I find it cats work best when they have food names, you know, okay, yeah, like biscuit or mochy or pound cake or um yeah, really anything rabby oli. I mean, you can go go crazy with it, but generally speaking, yes, it's something kind of cute and foods. He works well

with cats. I find I'm glad that we've all learned that one day you plan to eat a cat. Well, I mean it would really if that were the case, and it's not, then we with the feeling would be mutual between me and the cats, So I think the cat would respect it. Oh yeah, if we were appreciating game. Is that what they say? Yeah, totally if we were small enough our cats what heat does yeah? Um, But anyway, I thought that was a pretty good window into his personality.

And uh. And so Bentham a cently had express wishes for what would be done to his remains in the event of his death, and they fall along some similar lines of sensibility. So Bentham died in eighteen thirty two, and when that happened, he wanted his dead body to be preserved in a way that would allow him to be wheeled out and presented to friends at parties in case anybody missed seeing him. Take rob, I want you to take what I just said and compare that to

the picture of his preserved head above. Well, you know, it certainly would be a conversation starter or stopper at any party. Uh. I mean it's pretty impressive looking. It is identifiable as a head, even his head. Uh, it kind of looks it has a very leathery consistency to it. Um. The skin is you had kind of darkened and kind of looks like a slim gem with these sling Yeah, there's hair on it, which I'm guessing as perhaps his

original hair. Real hair. Yep. The eyes clearly are not his original eyes appears to be a pair of glass eyeballs that have been inserted into it, which you give it this extra uncanny appearance because it looks like, you know, the living dead. It looks like the eyes of a of of a litch sing at you. But the look on his face is also not terrifying. It's more serene. It looks like he's patiently listening to you while you're sharing a tidbit. Oh, I don't know how serene it.

I mean, I guess I kind of see what you're saying. But he looks to me very like startled and appalled. He looks like a a butler who has accidentally opened a door to a room in which something obscene is taking place. Oh, I get more of a like he's patiently listening to you while you tell him something that he personally finds boring. But okay, he's a good listener. Nonetheless. Okay, so what was the deal with his head? Like? Why is his head off of his dead body but they're

both preserved. Why does it look like that? Uh? To quote from Doss in this interview, she says Bentham had made a special request that his head be preserved in the style of the Maori, the native New Zealanders. But his friend Dr southwood Smith, who was tasked with creating the auto icon, wasn't necessarily as practiced with that as he probably would have liked to have been. And Dast goes on, and so the result was a head that southwood Smith said was not suitable for display, which is

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

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

rotten looking beef jerky head. And then of course there's the horrible body with a wax head that has these gloves on it that look really just this is awful. Yeah, the picture you shared that shows the the wax headed figure with an actual skeleton inside of it, uh seated and then there it at its feet indeed is the original head. And um, yeah, this looks fairly terrifying but also symbolically potent. Maybe it's just because of the some of the examples that I was looking at from say

Hindu iconography that we'll get into later. Like there, I feel like this image is trying to tell me something about about death. Yeah, it seems almost in the style of the the Cephaloforce sing, you know, like the Saints like San Denis in Paris, the Saints who carry their own heads in their hands because of the legends where they were decapitated but then just picked up their heads

and walked around did some miracles or something. Yeah, except he's like saying, yeah, it's like, look, there's my head down there. It's rotten, but I'm I'm one look at this gorgeous wax head I'm boasting. So the story gets weirder because we've got to get to the actual theft. This was all according to Bentham's wishes, though the mummification or preservation of the head got screwed up. Southwood Smith did not do a good job with that, or at least not to his own liking. And I don't know,

the results don't look great. But then the theft comes in, because apparently Jeremy Bentham's actual preserved head has been repeatedly stolen or kidnapped as a result of student pranks like Doss points out that sometime in the nineteen nineties, Bentham's head was quote kidnapped by uc l's rival university, King's College in London. So I assume it was stolen by some kind of English version of Jim Magiluski from the Brain, you know, a prank boy. And in fact, it seems

the head was stolen multiple times in its history. I was reading a piece about this from Smith Journal that says, quote once it was returned upon the making of a charitable donation. On another occasion, it was recovered from a luggage locker in Aberdeen. A man as clever as Bentham should have been able to foresee the inevitable consequences of

spending eternity among students. Now, at some point the head was recovered from what happened in the nineties these mischievous students, and it was put back on display at least at one point for an exhibit called what does it Mean to be Human? Curating Heads at u c L. So this is a head that apparently keeps getting stolen. Don't know if it will ever be stolen again. I think they are taking extreme measures to prevent that, but who

knows what's going to happen. But we should still say that, at least in Bentham's case, this is consensual preservation in a museum, despite a few uh en cephalocleptics over the years. There are also lots of disturbing cases where someone's head or brain ends up in a museum against their own wishes, whether it's by the supposed forces of science and preservation

or some other forces that are doing the stealing. It has happened plenty of times that heads, skulls, brains get taken from somebody's body, whether they wanted that or not,

and end up in a museum. And and this brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about to follow up on some of the uh, some of the phrenology discussion from the last episode, because I feel like I want to be a bit self critical here, because I have to note that I feel a baseline sympathy for the classic Indiana Jones line about the Cross of Coronado in the Last Crusade when he says it belongs in a museum. You know, I I really enjoy museums, and I am instinctually drawn to the idea that it's

good to have artifacts preserved in play. Is like museums places where you know, artifacts from history should be the you know, the common heritage of all humankind to observe and learn from. And so it's good that you get to go see them in a museum in a place where they will be preserved as well as possible across time.

And this sounds good, but of course it can in reality be an extremely fraught concept and just one of the million complications We explore some of this in our Invention episode on the First Museum is the question of physical location. Like I think it is actually good that artifacts from ancient history or even more recent history could in some way be the common heritage of all human

kind to learn from. But they've got to physically be somewhere, And it turns out that is often in like wealthy European nations or in the United States, so like not everybody actually has the same access to these artifacts. You know, you've got to physically go to London or to Washington

or something to see them. Yeah, you have this this um this this severe imbalance where say school children in the United States can go to their local museum in a major city and see artifacts of ancient Egypt, but those same artifacts are not on display at the local museum for actual Egyptian children to see. They would have to look at a reproduction or a picture in a

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

lover of museums. Uh. And of course it's true even of inanimate artifacts that are produced by people who are long gone, but it's obviously even more fraught when you're talking about things like the remains of human beings, especially human beings who lived relatively recently. Uh. And so this brings me back to what we were talking about in the Haydn segment of part one. We were talking about the development of the pseudoscience of phrenology, which quick refresher.

This was a now completely debunked pseudoscience that was popular, especially in like the first half of the nineteenth century, popular throughout Europe, in the United States, and it was the belief that you could infer mental characteristics of people by measuring bumps and contours on their skulls. And this is one of the this was one of the motivations

for the stealing of the of Franz Joseph Haydn's skull. Now, there are some strains of phrenology that a person could see as extremely wrong and pseudo scientific, but not super harmful, or at least not more harmful than a belief in like palm reading or something. You know, I'm just feeling around on your head and doing a doing a little

personality test for you. Right, it's not accurate, there's no science to it, but it's ultimately I guess harmless, right right, I mean, I mean, I guess all pseudoscience in a way is potentially harmful, but it's not It's not as harmful as the other stuff we're about to talk to, because there are these other strains and incarnations of phrenology and other types of pseudoscience that are that are just

a straight up nightmare. Sometimes forms of racist pseudoscience aimed at like proving that people with different skin colors were a result of separate acts of divine creations, so they're not even really all the same kind of human. Also weird ideas of crackpot cranial criminology. Um, that didn't mean to be so illiterated there, but in in the nineteenth century especially, it was very common for proponents of phrenology

and other types of craniometry. So craniometry would be a any kind of a belief system based on the measurements of the skull, not necessarily like bumps, like phrenology. But there were other people who just tried to collect a bunch of skulls and measure them and draw in friendss. Uh. So, so there were these things going on, and they would cause people to gather these huge collections of human skulls,

supposedly to form the raw materials for their research. But I was reading about this in that same book I mentioned in the previous episode, the one by Francis Larson called Severed, which this whole chapter is really, uh, really

horrifying and fascinating. Uh. It would lead these people to gather these big collections of skulls that in practice, it seems to me these collections were often just as much as sort of personal museum exhibit or a morbid curio collection to impress guests and wealthy benefactors as they were even a failed attempt to actually gather data. And unfortunately, it seems like most of these skulls collected for supposed craniometric research in the eighteen hundreds were not donated consensually.

You can probably imagine where a lot of them came from. A lot of them were stolen from graveyards and battlefields. Some came from prisons and morgues, spittals, workhouses, burial grounds without the consultation of the owner or their family, and often without even knowing who the person had actually been. And as you might guess, the less wealth and power the person had, the more likely that their skull might be stolen after their death. Many came from cemeteries of

enslaved people in America. There are horrific details about the harvesting of skulls from Native American people's during the wars of expansion of the U. S Frontier into tribal lands, and many came from just from poor people, from workhouses and potter's fields. Larson as a whole chapter about this horrible episode in history and her book Severed Um. But a couple of these notorious skull collectors she mentions are the English doctor Joseph Barnard Davis and the American physician

Samuel George Morton. Both were mainly working in the early to mid nineteenth century, and she tells one anecdote about Barnard Davis that I wanted to read here, so she says quote as a physician, Barnard Davis showed few qualms when it came to head collecting. John Betto, a fellow doctor, remembered that he looked on heads simply as potential skulls. Betto recounted introducing Barnard Davis during his rounds at the hospital to one of his patients, a sailor from Dubrovnik

who had nearly drowned. It was being cared for at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Betto was treating the man for gang green on the lung. Barnard Davis's curiosity was immediately piqued. Now, he said to Betto, you know that man can't recover, Do take care to secure his head for me when he dies, for I have no cranium from that neighborhood. I guess he was talking about the neighborhood of Dubrovnik. And Uh. Then Larsen goes on. Luckily for the sailor,

Barnard Davis had been too enthusiastic in his diagnosis. The patient made a full recovery, and Tibetto's amused relief, he carried his head on his own shoulders back to hertzegovernor uh. And so she says, like this is the is the reality of what's often going on in skull collecting. It's like basically totally ignoring the humanity of human beings. And just being like, how am I going to get that skull?

It's like a like a cartoon where one cartoon character looks at the other and just sees like food as a cannibalistic frenzy takes every except yeah, the Looney Tunes where like they're in the lifeboat and like Donald Duck looks at somebody and just imagines their body is like a like a drumstick or something. Yeah, it also reminds me of that line and t s Eliott's Whispers of Immortality. Webster was much possessed by death and saw the skull

and eat the skin. Now, it's also worth pointing out that the findings of these early craniometrists have not really held up to scientific scrutiny. Larson talks about this as well, all of the problems with their supposed research. Uh, they a lot of them were trying to make generalizations about the mental qualities of large groups of people. Oh, you know, you can see because of this trend in the skulls of people from this part of the world that they

have these mental characteristics. And this was all based on these skull measurements. But their research was plagued by poor methodology, inconsistency and samples, inconsistency and measurements, fudging the data when it didn't fit, etcetera. Larcent as a whole discussion on this, it seems like once again we're we're dealing with something

that ultimately just amounted to bunk. Though I wanted also to discuss a couple of points that she makes which I thought were very useful and interpreting what was going on here. Historically, one interesting issue was if people are looking into, you know, these various questions, trying to understand the human mind, trying to understand culture, trying to understand mental processes, why the particular emphasis on skulls, like why the phrenology and craniometry craze as a very bone focused

thing to begin with. Well, she talks about how the physical characteristics of skulls just happened to lend themselves quite well to the practical applications and interests of the people who were in these fields. So she writes, quote one Victorian physician James eight Ken MiGs noted that skulls are easily prepared and preserved, maybe conveniently handled and surveyed. Considered in various points of view and compared to each other.

Skulls are favorable specimens because they're small, hard, and robust. They're more compact than whole skeletons, which means that they can be relatively easily transported, and they're more durable than the messy tissues they contain, surviving for centuries on a

museum shelf. They're surprisingly resistant to pressure, partly because of their shape, but also because the skull, unlike longbones, has no marrow, and skulls were thought to be the most characteristic part of the human body because there were so many ways in which one could be different from another. Full of nooks and crannies and holes and lumps, they

were a statistician's dream. So this seems like one of those cases of people who thought they were doing science tific research but may well have been letting their theories be overdetermined by attraction to the specific practical and esthetic aspects of objects that they just wanted to study. Maybe because it was kind of attractive to have a collection of these in your house that you could show off

to people. Maybe because they were easy to move around from place to place and store, and much more so, of course than actual brains themselves, which would quickly wrought and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, skulls are really cool. I mean there's no denying it. Um that their neat. Uh. You know, it's fun to draw skulls. It's fun to look at pictures and photos and illustrations of skulls, skull iconography, and just pretty much every culture

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

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

we have about impermanence. Yeah, now, when it comes to brains specifically, I also want to talk about one tragic case in history of of brains being preserved for supposed scientific uses or by museums without the consent of the person and so. And of course this is something to consider in contrast to something like Bentham or or like you know, where somebody intentionally grants their head to a museum or something. Uh. This is the story of a man known to his story as ish Now, as told

by Larson is. She was a Native American man who was captured while foraging near a slaughter house in northern California in the year nineteen eleven. He was about fifty years old. He did not speak English, and he apparently at least had no living friends or relatives, And so he was taken to anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who identified him as a member of the Yahi people, many of whom had been victims of genocide by the

white settlers in northern California. And uh, she was not even really the man's name is she was an identifier given to him by the anthropologist which apparently meant man in the Yana language, that's the overarching language to which the Yahi people belonged. But the man known as She never revealed his real name, do apparently to it to accustom within his culture of not revealing your name to someone unless you are introduced by a member of your

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

he passed away in nineteen sixteen. And then when I want to pick up, quoting from Larsen here, quote she had expressly asked that his body not be subject to a post mortem. One curator wrote in the days before is She's death quote science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends. He added, Besides, I cannot believe that any scientific value is materially involved. The prime interest in his case would be of a morbid romantic nature. But his letter arrived too late. Staff at

the museum, who declared themselves. Is She's friends made quote a compromise between science and sentiment and performed an autopsy against his wishes. They removed his brain and sent it to the Smithsonian. Those who undertook the autopsy comforted themselves that it had been minimally invasive and certainly not as disrespectful as a dissection. His brain, after all, was preserved rather than destroyed. The rest of Ish's body, which was

kept whole, was cremated in a California cemetery. Thus the autopsy was seen as a compromise, despite the fact that it went against the dead man's wishes. And Larsen goes on to say that is She's body was divided after death, just as his identity had been in life. He was both a man and a scientific specimen. Like so many others. He had supposedly been quote the last of his tribe and was apparently without living relatives, and was considered to

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

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

is so important and scientific research today. Plus, I feel like, you know, certainly from our perspective, the case was not very strong for we must preserve this brain, we must study this brain. I know, as as one of the people who worked with you. She said, you know that it's probably more a case of motivation by mere morbid curiosity with also i'm sure, quite racist undertones. Yeah, it's not it's not like they were trying to solve a crime.

It's not like they were trying to understand the ravages of a particular disease, etcetera. Yeah, it seemed based almost entirely in just morbid interest. Fortunately, there is a better conclusion to this story. So I was reading a San Francisco Chronicle article by Kevin Fagan from the year two thousand that was about the reunification of of E's remains.

So Fagan here writes, quote, sometime today, a jet is scheduled to land in California carrying a band of Ishi's descendants, and with them will be the long lost final piece of their ancestor, Ishi's brain. Leaders of the Reading Rancheria and Pitt River tribes, which trace their bloodlines to iss She's extinct Yahe nation through the Yana tribe, promised to

never reveal where they buried him. They're not saying when they will do it either, just that they're landing in California today and that they want to be left alone

to shepherd their departed elder spirit away in peace. So obviously it's good to hear that that happened, But it only follows you know what had already happened and could not be undone, And it makes you, I mean again, it brings me back to this question about like, um, how do you how do you manage the sort of scientific and preservation impulse that it belongs in a museum impulse against questions where maybe it's not as clear, like it's clear that this should not that that's brain should

not have been removed because he was alive. You got to hear him say no, I don't want this. Um. I guess the tougher question is in cases of like what what about the remains of people who have been dead for a longer time and you know, could not be consulted on the question of whether they would be interested in being the subject of scientific research or not.

And I genuinely don't know the answer there. Yeah, I do like how the story ended with the brain being returned into tribal privacy, you know, like and I feel like that detail you know of itself, that that lines up with a lot of different you know, things for seeing regarding not only like actual artifacts, but also just like traditions and information. Um. I did a I did an article last year for Housetuff Works about the skin Walker.

They wanted an article about the Navajo tradition of the skin walker, and like that was one of the things I really was driven home for me in researching that is like that there there are certain you know, aspects of of of living tradition that you know, it's it's it's disrespectful to to to you know, to act on this desire to collect it all and to and to keep it all and to codify it and to put

it on a shelf. Uh that some things, you know, still belong to the people who created them, and you know they can share them if they want to, you know.

Uh So yeah, I can't help but be reminded of that with this the story of of this this piece of this individual finally being returned uh to his people, and in doing so it kind of passes out of of the broad order like media view, right that you're not going to be like taking TV cameras to his grave site or that kind of thing, because that would just be a continuation of the same sort of energy

that he seemed very outspoken against. Well, now that we've talked a good bit about the foibles and horrors of relatively recent skull head and brain theft, Uh, what do you say we go back into some some more deeper history and mythology. Yeah, yeah, because again you know, the skull,

the head, Uh. You know, these are certainly longstanding icons, so they've been focal points for myth making and dreaming and anxiety, you know, throughout all the human existence, and it's it's it's only relatively recently we've been able to focus more on the brain as an icon. You know. Um, you know, like if you ever encounter a ghost movie that has like a brain based ghost, it's a little off off putting, right, because it doesn't seem like the

ghost should be associated with the brain. The brain seems more of a science fiction quality as opposed to something that is more supernatural in nature. Uh So, yeah, I guess to begin with, we should point out that folks have been taken heads for longer than they have had any any certainly any understanding of the brains rattling around

inside them. Uh And we don't even have to get into all the gory details because you know, the sort of things we're talking about, you know, heads hewn off in battles, heads mounted on poles and pikes, lobbed with a catapult, skulls lined up on the on shelves in catacombs, that sort of thing. And we're also never in some cases, we're not sure, you know, when we're dealing with something

where it's okay, is this head a trophy. Is this some sort or of this some some sort of like sacred funerary tradition or something in between a lot of times we have to sort of piece together what it actually meant. So one example, I was looking at from the ancient world and this is this is not so much myth here, this is actual, like you know, actual

um archaeological evidence. Uh. I was reading ritual use of trophy heads in ancient um Nasca society and this was by Donald A. Prue, published in Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient

Peru in two thousand and one. So the taking of heads for ritual use has a long history in the Central Andes from the pre Ceramic period prior to about eighteen hundred BC and continuing through Inca times and with the Nasca, the craftspeople uh you know, responsible for the Nasca lines, these were created between five hundred BC and five d C. With the Nasca, uh, they also engaged in the taking of heads, and we see it represented

in their rich textile art, depicting warriors, shamans, mythical beings in some cases with human heads, often on their cloaks or in their hands. And according to Prue, over one hundred examples remain of the Nasca mummified heads, which were the which were first removed from the body, apparently with an obsidian knife, and then a hole would have been punched through the base of the skull using a club or some sort of a tool, and then the brain

and the eyes were moved through that opening. But then another hole, smaller hole was punched or drilled through the forehead and this was uh apparently in order to allow a carrying rope to be secured. The lips were pinned with thorns and cloth was stuffed into the skull, and so you have a preserved skull at this point. So you said these were believed to be for ritual use. It was the thought that they would be like displayed somewhere, or that they would be like carried in a ceremony.

This is where it all gets really interesting, and this is where that where a lot of authors have and a lot of scientists have have really chimed in with different views. But you know, it looks it's easy to look at something like this and think of it just as trophy taking, right, like the just the trophy taking

of a war like people. And indeed war was an important part of their culture, but the reality seems to have been ultimately far more complicated substitute head jars where something times were found to be buried with the bodies, and the actual heads were not merely symbols of victory, but they were used in shamatic rituals, perhaps entailing hallucinogenics as a means of communing with the spirit realm and according to pro quote, propagating and controlling the forces of nature,

especially so far as natural resources are concerned. Now, apparently some have argued that these were not trophy heads but the heads of honored ancestors, but pro dis disputes this. He he defines them instead as quote trophies of warfare

collected for ritual purposes. So that that's that's interesting because it seems to I think to a lot of modern minds, it seems to be it seems sounds like a mashup of two different ideas, like you're taking the head of your your enemy off of their dead body, but isn't but you're probably doing that as like a trophy or

a sign of disrespect. You know. We often think of that, um I think of the key and peel skit, where one like uh, barbarian beheads and other and then goes through all these various sort of comedic acts with the head to see what How the rest of the tribe responds, I know, that's what does he do? He uh, he like puts little shoes under it and makes it walk. Yeah, and like that's that's a big hit. But he also like does things like pretend to give birth to the

head and like that just doesn't don't want to like it. Yeah, But it's the kind of thing where like when we think about head taking, we think of stuff like that. We think of like something barbaric and trophy oriented. But in this case it seems like it wasn't bad or it wasn't purely that it was. It was also this idea of what you need this head, This head is necessary for various religious purposes, a way of a means

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

want to remove now. This also reminds me of the mummified heads of the Kocoum dynasty of the Maya, which were kept and preserved because they were said to contain the voices of their ancestors, again a means of communicating

with spirits and or the dead. This is interesting to compare to remember what we talked about in the first episode about the plastered heads of Chattelhyuk in southern Turkey, which you know from this Stone Age settlement, there were often heads of ancestors that were kept in some kind of preserved form, apparently within the home. Yeah, and during the mid first millennium BC there were there were various accounts of the use of human heads in acts of

of of communion, necromancy, divination across the Mediterranean. We see it mentioned in the accounts of Herodotus. In Aristotle, um uh Cleomnis of the first of Sparta is said to have consulted with the head of his friend our quantities on all major decisions ahead, which he kept preserved in honey, honey, Yeah,

that's good, and so you know. Of course, when we deal with accounts like this, we're we're beginning to at least beginning to transfer into the realm of myth and lore and legend, where we we become less sure about what is actually going on, because then there is this broader realm of just stories about disembodied heads that still have life in them, that can speak, that can fly, that can terrorize, that can give you know, important advice

to the living, etcetera. I think one of the coolest of these that uh, that folks may have heard of is is the myth of of Memir uh in Norse mythology. Uh So, this Memir was one of the Jiltons in Norse mythology, one of the frost giants, and he was the ardian of the well of inspiration and wisdom at the roots of the world tree, and Odin would come to to drink from the well, and member would make

him leave an eye and payment. And then Memor was held hostage in in battle by the Vanier during the the Aser Vanier War, and they beheaded him, but Odin, since he liked the guy, you know, retrieved his head and kept it alive with magic herbs so that the head could continue to give counsel to the King of

the gods. And so you'll see uh, some wonderful illustrations of this, both old and then recent, where there's like this of some cases, is like a zombie head that Odin is is holding that he is, uh, that is his advisor. Yeah, you've attached one here where Odin is is leaning his head over on the severed head like

he's almost kind of snuggling with it. Of course Odin is missing one eye as usual, and uh, and there's just fire coming out of the thing's mouth or I don't know, it looks like he's got like a star in at the back of his throat. Yes. Um. In terms of heads that give advice like this, there's also an Arabian Nights story of of King Yunnan and the Duban and Duban the sage and the stage in question. At least in some variations of this tale, continues to

speak after it has been removed from its body. Now I'm gonna get into some other examples. Uh here, Uh, you know of of of disembodied heads of decapitation in mythology that are that are pretty interesting. One that I

found really fascinating is the self decapitating nude goddess of Hinduism. Uh. That is that is known as China Masta, and that just means she's she whose head is severed, and she's typically depicted red fleshed and holding a scimitar in one hand and her own head in the other as blood fountains from the stump of her neck, which and in some cases is then consumed by her thirsty skeletal tendance. And then she is usually stand depicted standing on top

of a copulating human couple. Uh. So it's it's an instantly um captivating image. She's one of the tin goddesses of the esoteric tradition of Tantra, and she's a slayer of demons. So she's a highly uh symbolic deity. There's the sense of the transcendence of the body free of the mind, you know, the body, the mind has clearly literally been removed from the physical form. She's a symbol

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

they'll they'll, they'll take it. Uh. So they're at least a couple of speaking as associated with tellings and retellings of the Mahabarata, the Hindu epic heads placed on polls after being sacrificed or having their body sacrifice in order to watch the battle. And I was reading a little bit about this from author and mythologist dev Dute uh pan Nick, who has a whole page about these tales at his mythology website uh devdut dot com. It's d e V d u t t dot com. Uh. He

writes that these tales are often about perspective. Quote. The talking head is thus a symbol for a less confined, more global perspective on things. All of us see the world from our individual point of view, limited by our prejudices, our expectations, and our experiences. The talking head sees it from an alternative angle and when he voices his opinions, we see the world quite differently. When he speaks, we realize the Pandavas and the Kavas are are tiny elements

of God's greater canvas. The Mahabarata is not just about one kingdom. It is about cosmic order. Now that's not to say there aren't just monster heads too in Hindu iconography. Uh, there's a really cool example, uh named Kurta Muka, or the head of Glory as it's often referred to. And this is a monstrous flying head in Hindu mythology that seems to be similar in many ways to the Gorgonian head of the Greek tradition that we discussed in our

Medusa episodes. So, according to Carol Rose, the folklore is when Shiva was told that he was unworthy of marrying Parvati. In his rage, his experiences such rage that a monstrous lion springs from his head and then it attacks Shiva, and he commands that, no, we're not doing that, uh, eat yourself instead, And so this monster consumes its own body, leaving only its entrails, which then turned to pearls, and

so that leaves only the head. So Shiva then commands uh Kurta Muka to serve as the guardian of entrance. And so you see this head, this head of glory uh in um, you know, above the door or around the door of in in many different examples of Hindu architecture from India and from other countries. You know, this is interesting because you brought it up and I somehow did not think about it. But from Greek mythology, you know,

we did the episode last year about about Medusa. That's of course the case of a stolen head in mythology, or the head is severed like he takes it and uses it as a tool. Yeah, it becomes a weapon, not so much a means of communicating with anything, but but this this weapon, this symbol, and and here we see another tradition. Now I've not read anything that that links the two in any respect. You know, let's just say that like one inspired the other anything of that nature.

But clearly they're getting it similar ideas. The idea of this um, this terrifying head uh and or face that stares out from a work as a as a way of warning those who would who would trespass. Now I should know that looking around though sometimes it appears to have arms, so I don't know if that it gains arms later or arms just end up popping back up in the iconography. But there you go. Another entity we've talked about before in the show is Rahu in hin Hinduism,

the eclipse entity. Uh you know this is the you know once was a proud oshera demi god of immense power and hunger and seeking immortality. It drinks the divine nectar, but before this drop can pass his throat, he's swallowing it mid swallow. Vishnu decapitates him for his transgression and yeah, and this ends up translating into this um this eclipse mythology where the head of Rajo attempts to consume the sun or does consume the sun, but then it passes

out of the next stump. I think we talked about this in one of the first episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I ever did the one on the eclipse. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Another example is uh Braun the Blessed in Welsh mythology. The giant king who mortally wounded in battle had his followers cut off his head so that it could be returned to Britain. One day and for a long time this head was said to speak before it grew silent, and the story goes that the silent

head was finally taken to White Hill. Uh. This is where the Tower of London, they say would one day be built, and they buried it there facing France to ward off the enemy. And this supposedly ties into the UH. The The Celtic cult of of the head also reflected in the Tale of the Green Knight. Uh. We're in in the Green Night. The Green Knight comes into Arthur's court and challenges someone to cut off his head. But then when they do, he just picks it up and he's like, no, I'm fine now I get to cut

off your head, but I'll do it a year from now. Yeah. The the decapitation battle is another motif or contest. You see that, uh in a lot of legends from this part of the world, and it's interesting, you know. Um. Terry Jones of Monty Python, of course, was very steeped in UH in this sort of lore, and he was one of the author one of the writers for the screenplay for Labyrinth, and Labyrinth features those wonderful fiery red creatures that attempt to engage in a decapitation contest with

our our heroine Sarah. Do you remember them where they're like where they get mad at her because you're only You're not supposed to take someone else's head. No one's supposed to take your own head off this this reminds me of of the head swapping scene and teams in the universe. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean this sort of thing, head swapping, decapitated heads living on You see it just everywhere. Um for instance, here, here's some other examples.

In Maya mythology, you have head Appo who was tripped by the lords of the underworld, and his decapitated head was that hung as a trophy from a giant tree. But then this head later spits into a woman's hand and in doing so, impregnates her with the Maya hero twins, who would go on to have various adventures. We've already touched on in the previous episode. We've touched on Orpheus is Singing Head and Greek mythology. Oh yeah, and the possible symbolic connection to the box made for Hyde and

Skull with the liar Yeah uh. In the Trial of the Knights, Templars One of the charges was that they worshiped an entity called Bahammet that was sometimes described as a severed head. And then oh, you have some wonderful monsters as well. Um, there's the Kara Sioux in the Southeast day. It's the Southeast Asian spirit that takes the form of a beautiful woman's head with her organs dangling below her neck so it floats it close and it seems to essentially be another variation of the willow the

Whisp tradition. Uh that is held around the world and that we devoted a big episode two in the past. So she cannot what she like, glows and leads people off the path. I believe, so yes, um, and there's that. There's actually a Indonesian horror movie titled Mystics in Bali that looks pretty interesting because it features the Kara su I included a screenshot here for you, Joe and for a movie trailer for you to check out later. Oh yeah, I gotta I gotta see that. That looks great now.

The melee version of this is the the Panteonic, which functions like a vampire, only it prays exclusively on babies and infants. Then there's also the Japanese uh nuki kubi, which is a type of yokai and Japanese traditions. It's humanoid in form, but it can separate its head from its body and this can float free to work mischief. It's just one of one of various examples of disembodied heads that you'll find in Japanese lore, and then in um uh the native peoples of the Americas, you find

some other interesting traditions as well. Uh. The flying head of the Iroquois and the one dot mythology. This is a great flying head sometimes with bat wings on each side of its head, with long hair and terrible eyes. Carol Rose writes about these in her book on Monsters. Uh. She said that this was an entire class of monsters in the folklore of the Iroquois, huge ugly heads with eyes of fire, dripping fangs, and huge wings instead of ears.

They fly through storm winds with wild hair, uh, you know, helping to keep them afloat and kind of floating around them. They prey on villagers and animals alike, and their teeth they're like it sounds like they were kind of like like a cage if their if their teeth or their

jaws close over you. There's no escape. But there's a tail apparently of an old woman who is roasting some chestnuts over the fire, and then she brings a fiery coal back from the fire with her to keep her warm, and then here comes the flying head and it it gobbles her up, chestnuts and all, but then it has to spit her out because of the fiery coal, and then that coal burns the monster up from the inside out. Oh.

I love when the story is a trick like that. Yeah, especially when it's like an old lady who gets gets the wind over the monster. That's always nice, not not your traditional young, dashing male slayer. Yeah. So so that's just an example of some of the myths and legends

and folklore tales you'll find just throughout the world. I know there's some wonderful ones that I didn't touch on, and certainly i'd love to hear from anyone out there if you have a really good one, if you have a favorite, uh, we would love to to hear it and then potentially share it back with everybody else in a listener mail episode. But I think just this selection gives you a certain taste of what out what's out there?

You know, these various imaginative contemplations on like what happens if the head lives and the body dies, what happens if the body decapitates itself. Like, there's just it's just such rich grounds for contemplation regarding identity and mortality and just so much. It seems like a lot of times disembodied heads are angry. Yeah, well, you know a lot of times I guess they do have something to be

angry about. But but then sometimes their jovial um. You know, there's some of those examples from the from tellings of the Mahabarata I was reading, like they're laughing, like their laughing, there's one I think their laughterre distracts Archina during the battle, um, you know, and there's a sense of like being free

from the body. Um. I'm also reminded of the heads that show up in Miyazaki Spirited Away, the three heads that kind of roll around and bumble, and they don't have much personality to them, and I don't really know what they're doing and what they're there for, but they don't seem distressed. They say, maybe perpetually alarmed, but uh, that's about it. That's good stuff. All right. Well, we're gonna go ahead and uh close this episode out, but yeah,

we'd love to hear from everybody out there. Any any other examples of flying heads and self decapitating spirits, other examples of brain and head preservation. Have you been taken by a particular specimen of brain or head at a museum? We would love to hear from you all about it. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts, uh and wherever that happens to be. We just asked that you rate, review,

and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind, pot Com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio with the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.