The Headless Men, Part 2

things in late. So in part one, we talked about 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

passing through. He has arrived.

I have not seen this one. I don't know if you're familiar with Stone.

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.

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 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.

gods from the outside, I guess. In her Monster books, 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 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 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,

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 leads me to believe, well, maybe this is some sort of headless entity, at least in some tellings.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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

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.

But in either case, Nicol argued that the story is implausible, 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.

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 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 do you say it? Robin scallops? Scollops?

It's like something straight out of a monster movie. There are real unedited photos of scollop eyes that look like 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 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.

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 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, 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

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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?

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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 a distance, as being people with no head.

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, 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.

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 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.

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 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

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.

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 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

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 it's a stretch to go from there to the idea of people like pushing their head down into their body.

motif on chestwear or armor might have also given this impression. So, 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.

other than Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He speaks of 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 from the colonists and easily justified oppression and exploitation, unfortunately proving to be a line of thought that unfortunately proved extremely difficult to eradicate.

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 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 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.

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, 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.

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