Cranioklepty

by Colin Dickey

  Henschen took particular issue with the reconstruction of the jaw—Hultkrantz had admitted he’d done the job free-handed, an approach Henschen recognized as highly dubious. The battle over the Piltdown reconstructions was sufficient to show how easy it was to allow one’s own biases to enter into a job. “Obviously, such a joining together of strongly disintegrated bone fragments as these by free-hand,” one of Henschen’s team noted, “cannot be regarded as satisfactory. Merely a glance at the reconstructed mandible evokes doubts about the exact joining together of the fragments. Such an acute angle between the shanks of the mandible may belong to rareties, and there is little to see of the parable shape, described on p. 53 of his book.”244

  In addition, there was the problem of the portraits Hultkrantz had used. True, some painters had certainly used “licencia poetica,” in Hultkrantz’s words, and could not be relied on. But if there were discrepancies, it wasn’t clear why he had chosen some portraits and not others. Why not compare the skull to all the known portraits of Swedenborg and let the images speak for themselves? Henschen also noted that the bust Hultkrantz had produced revealed the facial structure not of an eighty-four-year-old man but of a young man in his prime. What did this prove? For all his rigor, Hultkrantz had failed to keep his own biases from filtering in.

  By the time the Sweden team was done, there was enough evidence to suggest that Hultkrantz had been wrong and that the Sweden skull didn’t match what was known of Swedenborg or the rest of his remains. But as Hultkrantz himself had written forty years before, it was easier to prove a negative than a positive, and the fact that the Sweden skull was wrong didn’t make the Swansea skull right.

  But the fact that the Sweden skull was wrong raised all sorts of questions since its provenance had seemed so clear. If it wasn’t Swedenborg’s, whose head was it, and who had tried to pass it off as the philosopher’s? Tulk, the owner of the phrenological cabinet, may have substituted another skull for Swedenborg’s. Even Wåhlin, who had been offered 500 pounds for it, may have been tempted. But there was nothing in the record to suggest that either of these men had had anything to do with the ruse.

  There was one thing Henschen couldn’t quite get out of his mind, something that didn’t add up. He kept going back to a series of letters in the Times beginning in April 1823 from Noble, Hawkins, and Wåhlin, each of whom had written to clarify the original account of Swedenborg’s head. They all agreed on the basic story: that the head had been stolen after the casket had been left open, and that it had not been stolen by a Swedenborgian. But other than that, they didn’t seem to be in agreement about anything. Noble claimed that the skull had been stolen in 1816, during the funeral of Baroness von Nolcken, by a phrenologist who was still living in London. Hawkins claimed it had been stolen at the end of 1817 by Granholm after the funeral of a fellow officer—Granholm, who was dead by 1819 and who had no attachment to phrenology but was instead trying to make a quick buck. Wåhlin, the third to write, sided with Noble: It was a phrenologist, still alive, who had taken the skull. Hultkrantz had dismissed these inconsistencies as just part of the confusing circumstances of the theft, and certainly, with such a shadowy process, there was likely never to be one conclusive version of events. But was that really all there was to the letters?

  HENSCHEN MEANWHILE RECEIVED the findings of Oakley’s team regarding the Swansea skull. They confirmed the canine tooth, whose presence was of “considerable value,” and seemed to suggest that the Swansea skull was genuine.

  As with the Sweden skull, portraits were used to verify the facial features. Chief among the problems with verifying the Swansea skull was the lack of profile portraits of Swedenborg. As a scaphocephalic skull, it was most identifiable from the side, and a profile would have made the comparisons much easier. The fact that there were none extant may have been because no one wanted an unflattering portrait, although this was just conjecture. But Rosemary Powers, who conducted the analysis of the skull in relationship to the portraits, did find a particularly striking match and concluded tentatively that “considering how freakish the ‘English’ skull is, one is tempted to regard this very striking correspondence as conclusive.”245

  Some problems did arise—Kenneth Oakley’s examinations suggested that the skull was probably not more than sixty years old. A blood analysis, which involved pulverizing a small section of the bone, was inconclusive. But other clues strongly favored the Swansea skull. Among Swedenborg’s remains had been an old pillow on which his head had once lain and which had long since disintegrated badly. But new forensic technologies were able to trace the imprint of the head on the pillow—the Sweden skull did not fit the profile at all, but the Swansea head, with its extremely odd shape, matched it perfectly.

  If this truly was Swedenborg’s skull, then where had it come from? When had it been stolen, and when had it been swapped for the Sweden skull? How had it ended up with Rutherford’s “veracious” old antiquarian? Puzzling over these questions, Henschen went back once again to the letters from Noble, Hawkins, and Wåhlin. He didn’t believe that their memories could have faded in just a few years to the point where they’d disagree over such basic facts.

  Noble and Wåhlin claimed the skull had been as stolen by a phrenologist, still living, in 1816.

  Hawkins claimed it had been stolen by Granholm, now dead, in 1817.

  Then Henschen saw. All three men were correct. The Times had not published two differing accounts of the same robbery. They were accounts of two entirely different robberies.

  Swedenborg’s head had been stolen twice.

  DESPITE THE MYRIAD claims over the years that the Sweden skull was not authentic, Henschen—like Hultkrantz before him—had had no trouble dismissing all of them as baseless, even that of Anna Frederika Ehrenborg, who had visited the tomb in 1853 and proclaimed that one needed “only very little knowledge of phrenology to see that the skull could not have belonged” to Swedenborg and that it “looked most like that of a woman, with fine harmonious organs.”

  Ehrenborg had likely hoped that her declaration would make more of an impact—she had in fact hoped to be joined by her friend John Didrik Holm. She had visited “Excellent Holm” earlier that day, and they had discussed her upcoming visit to Swedenborg’s tomb. “Holm obstinately declares that the skull which lies in the coffin is not the right one,” she later recorded, and when she pressed him on the matter, he answered “with sullen certainty”: “I know that it is not the right one.”246 He agreed to meet her there to prove that it was fake, but he didn’t appear, leaving her to make her best attempt alone. Holm alone was in a position to know that Ludwig Granholm had not stolen Swedenborg’s skull—because Holm had stolen it first.

  The story, as best Henschen could reconstruct it, was as follows. After Swedenborg’s grave had been disturbed in 1790, it was vulnerable to anyone who happened to wander down into the tombs to take a look. But it wasn’t until 1816 that John Didrik Holm, there for the funeral of Baroness von Nolcken, found the tomb ajar. A devout phrenologist, he imagined that he could study the skull and add to the store of knowledge surrounding the question of genius, so he quietly purloined the head. It was this theft that Noble and Wåhlin later learned about. But Holm had mentioned the theft to friends and been told to return the skull. He agreed to do so but at the last minute substituted a different skull for Swedenborg’s.

  It was this second skull, the ringer, that Ludvig Granholm found a year and a half later while there for the funeral of a friend. Granholm took it for financial gain but died before he could sell it, and that skull came back to Wåhlin. It was this version of events that Hawkins, who had known Granholm, later recorded. Wåhlin, meanwhile, conflated Granholm’s story with what he already knew about Holm’s theft, further obscuring the matter.

  After his death in 1856 Holm’s collection was broken up. There was no inventory and no way to confirm that Swedenborg’s head had been in his possession. But Henschen’s report attracted some publicity, and in 1958 Mrs. Stin
a Christby of Stockholm contacted Henschen. She was a descendant of Holm’s sister and told Henschen that Holm’s niece had visited him in the 1840s and that he had shown her Swedenborg’s skull, swearing her to secrecy. The family had never broken its silence regarding this visit until Christby told the story to Henschen.

  And so Henschen was able to conclude that the Swansea skull was, “with the greatest degree of probability . . . Swedenborg’s authentic cranium.”247 One hundred seventy years after Swedenborg’s death, 140 years after the thefts, and 50 years after the philosopher’s reburial in Sweden, Henschen had vindicated the bizarre and dubious tale of William Rutherford, the sometime mental patient who had once overheard a story and had produced a singularly shaped head: that of Emanuel Swedenborg.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE END OF THE END OF THE STORY

  In 1978 Sotheby’s announced an auction to consist of “Printed Books Relating to Masonry, Science, and Phrenology.” In addition to the “Constitutions of the Freemasons” and Einstein’s first scientific paper, the auction included a first-edition copy of Gall and Spurzheim’s Anatomie de Systeme Nerveaux, “an extensive collection of books on phrenology and the New Jerusalem Church,” and a human skull. It was the first time in the auction house’s history that it had sold a skull, and it had belonged to Emanuel Swedenborg.

  The skull had been put up for auction by the descendents of William A. Williams, but the sale was not without controversy. Members of the Swedenborg Society, particularly General Secretary Mrs. G. P. Dawson, launched an extensive letter-writing campaign. “Although I have no objection whatsoever,” she wrote to Sotheby’s, “to your client wishing to sell books relating to Swedenborg (and I wish him well in this as it is a large and impressive collection), I still feel that his skull is in a very different category and should not be included with them.”248 Sotheby’s reply was brief and to the point: “We are naturally sorry that our proposal to auction Swedenborg’s skull has upset you. It would certainly be appropriate if the skull could be returned to Uppsala and we hope that this may be possible as a result of the sale. However, we have a responsibility to our client who also asked us to sell a number of books relating to Swedenborg and we do not feel it would be in his best interest to remove the skull from auction.”249

  Letters were sent to the newspapers, to members of Parliament, and even to the archbishop of Canterbury. “If the sale is allowed to take place and such a precedent is set,” Dawson wrote, “the fear of grave robbing could once again return to haunt the loved ones of the famous.”250

  Dawson’s protests seemed a far cry from Reverend Noble’s feelings on the same subject 150 years earlier. Noble’s disdain toward any sentiment at all regarding human remains had given way to an outcry over the desecration of a great man’s bones. What might Swedenborg himself have thought? If the body truly didn’t matter, then perhaps he might have been uncomfortable with both Noble and Dawson. As a scientist, he had examined human remains for anatomical purposes and certainly had not seemed bothered by their scientific use. Beyond that, the mortal remains of a body were something to be neither worshipped nor vilified. They were simply remnants. Certainly for Swedenborg the remains of the famous were no different than anyone else’s. He might well have agreed with the archbishop’s secretary, who wrote in her reply to Dawson, “Emanuel Swedenborg has been dead for two hundred years and, after that lapse of time, it is difficult to see how his skull differs from any other human remains of archeological or historical interest at present on display in museums and elsewhere, many of which will have been the subject of sale for money.”251

  Despite Dawson’s efforts, the auction went as planned. The skull was bought for 1,650 pounds by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, with the express purpose of finally reuniting it with the rest of the philosopher-scientist’s remains.

  John Collins of Sotheby’s, in his final reply to Dawson, expressed hope “now that it has been sold for return to Sweden that you will feel more sanguine about the whole thing. We feel that this is a very happy result.”252

  As it turned out, the seller never requested payment.

  ATTEMPTS TO RETURN Haydn’s skull to Eisenstadt were resumed again in 1946. Negotiations took another eight years. It wasn’t until 1954 that Haydn’s remains were made complete. Beethoven’s skull fragments were kept by Tom Rosenthal until the 1980s, when increasing dementia overtook him. They were entrusted to Paul Kaufmann, who made their existence public; they are now at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University.

  Mozart’s head, having no real tomb to which to return, is still at the Mozarteum, though it is no longer on display because too many docents complained of its unnerving presence. Its origins forever in doubt, the skull was subjected to a DNA analysis in 2002 and compared to two extant samples of hair from the composer’s aunts. The skull did not match either sample, but the hair samples didn’t match each other either, so it’s not at all clear what conclusions can be drawn.

  Goya’s head remains unaccounted for. Over the last hundred years several heads have surfaced with claims that they belonged to the painter, but none has been verified. It’s unclear whether the true skull will ever surface from that dark necropolis of skulduggery and resurrectionists that swallowed it so long ago.

  Some skulls, it seems, will always hold their secrets.

  THE DESIRE FOR the skulls of the famous flourished at a particularly unique moment, when old attitudes toward the body’s remains were made new in the light of the Enlightenment and an arriving modern age. Just as quickly attitudes changed again; by the mid—nineteenth century stealing the skulls of the famous had already become passé.

  Well, almost. Rumors continue to persist that while at Yale, Prescott Bush (grandfather to George H. W. Bush and great-grandfather to George W. Bush) and some friends stole the head of Geronimo and perhaps that of Pancho Villa for the Skull and Bones Society. Of the two, the Geronimo story is more likely; Alexandra Robbins, who wrote a history of the secret society, states that there is indeed “a skull encased in a glass display when you walk in the door of the Tomb, and they call it Geronimo.”253 The supposed grave robbery was in fact described in the society’s internal history:

  The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat[riarch] Bush entered and started to dig. We dug in turn, each on relief taking a turn on the road as guards. . . . Finally Pat[riarch] Ellery James turned up a bridle, soon a saddle horn and rotten leathers followed, then wood and then, at the exact bottom of the small round hole, Pat James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself. . . . We quickly closed the grave, shut the door and sped home to Pat Mallon’s room, where we cleaned the Bones. Pat Mallon sat on the floor liberally applying carbolic acid. The Skull was fairly clean, having only some flesh inside and a little hair. I showered and hit the hay . . . a happy man.

  But is the skull really Geronimo’s? In 1986 the Apache representative Ned Anderson met with George Bush’s brother Jonathan, who offered to hand over the skull. But Bush stalled, and when a skull was finally offered more than a week later, it appeared to be that of a young boy. Suspecting a bait-and-switch, Anderson refused the skull—but did Skull and Bones really have the right one?254 The description of skulduggery is certainly colorful, but it mentions a tomb with an iron door, while Geronimo was buried in a regular grave. Numerous inside sources have suggested that Prescott Bush fabricated the story from whole cloth; certainly no independent evidence exists that Geronimo’s skull is still housed at Yale. On February 17, 2009, however, descendents of Geronimo formally filed suit against Skull and Bones for the repatriation of his remains, hoping that a federal law suit would help to clarify the matter once and for all.

  Prescott Bush notwithstanding, cranioklepty was first and foremost the work of phrenologists. William Williams had called phrenology the first new science since the Second Coming (which Swedenborg claimed had alr
eady taken place in 1758). And in many ways it was a new science for a new time—it boldly claimed to lay bare centuries-old mysteries through a cursory touch of the scalp, making visible what had long been hidden. It was a product of the Enlightenment, to be sure, but its popularity was owing in part to its ability to tap into a deep wellspring of anxiety and hope about who we are, why we act the way we do, and why we create art and imagination. In those days of rapid progress and advance, all things seemed possible, and phrenology’s claims to explain the human mind and the mystery of genius did not seem at all far-fetched then, as they seem today. As a science and as a social movement, phrenology has long since exhausted itself, but the curiosity and yearning that fed it remain fervently alive.

  If phrenology was a New Science for a new age, it also hearkened back to something very ancient, to the mystery of life contained within the bones, an unknowable secret dug up from deep sepulchers and overgrown cemeteries. Those who took it upon themselves to take the heads of famous men such as Haydn, Beethoven, Browne, and Swedenborg looked forward and backward at once—to a future when the meaning of “genius” might yet be revealed and to a past that stretched down a long path of mementi mori and saints’ relics to the silent truths locked deep in bone.

  As phrenology moved from a theory to a science to an art and finally to a sideshow, its practitioners were always careful not to predict genius from the shape of the skulls and instead to confirm only the already established genius in the heads before them. When examining the heads of men such as Haydn or even Browne, phrenologists assumed them to be geniuses. What these “scientists” were doing, in essence, was not proving the genius of the skull’s owner so much as the validity of their own clinical tenets. The phrenologist could never hope to read something in a genius’s head that wasn’t already known; it was instead phrenology itself that was under scrutiny. And this is really what the skull represents to science: a proving ground. A breadth of new sciences have been tested against the skull, which has been held up to phrenology, anatomy, craniometry, and anthropology, to name only a few disciplines. The skulls remain the same; it is the science that changes. And in two centuries of endless attempts to identify genius through some objective measure, it’s worth noting that the geniuses themselves were never questioned. It would seem possible that at least one true believer might at some point have argued that the skull shape of someone like Browne may in fact have contraindicated that he was the genius others believed him to be. The identification should have worked both ways. But no one ever made such a claim. When it came to a definition of genius, the ultimate measure could never really be the skull—the measure was always the writing, the music, the art itself.