Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  People take human heads; people donate their own heads; people display heads and come to see them: when you start to look, severed heads are everywhere, here and now. The largest collections of all are the thousands of human skulls – and the occasional preserved, fleshed head – that furnish the racks of museum storage facilities all over the world. Here, in dark seclusion, rows of people’s heads rest in silent testimony to our own ancestors’ headhunting traditions. Large national collections, like the Natural History Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, keep thousands of human skulls, and most provincial museums, especially those with an archaeological or scientific remit, have a small collection. My own unlikely fascination with human heads began while I was working at the Pitt Rivers Museum, a spectacular collection of curiosities from all over the world tucked away among the various scientific departments of the University of Oxford.

  The Pitt Rivers Museum has something of a reputation. More often than not, when I told people where I worked, they would say, ‘Oh, you mean the place with the shrunken heads?’ This is because there are six South American shrunken human heads on display at the Museum, although they are hardly conspicuous amid the profusion of treasures packed into the display cases. Nevertheless, they have become iconic exhibits. A few years ago an American-born artist, Ted Dewan, offered to donate his own head to the Pitt Rivers Museum (after his death, of course). He was concerned that if the staff decided to send the shrunken heads back to South America, Oxford would be left with none. Dewan promised to leave enough money to cover the shrinking and maintenance of his head. The museum’s director politely declined his offer, and added that he hoped to continue to see Dewan frequenting the museum alive and well.

  At the time, I was researching the history of the museum, and specifically its links with the university’s anatomy department in the late nineteenth century – and this led me, instead, to the museum’s collection of three hundred human skulls. I soon learned that the Department of Human Anatomy at Oxford had also accumulated an impressive collection of human crania. One internal report, penned on the eve of the Second World War, noted the considerable storage requirements for this collection: ‘There are around 3,000 skulls, covering 158 square feet, and taking up 118 feet run of shelving, and boxes covering 144 square feet reaching 6 feet high. In total, 350 square feet, but for decent access etc would need to treble this to 1,000 square feet.’ As I paged through the university’s old leather-bound accession registers, where each new addition had been diligently inked in cursive, the sheer relentlessness of the acquisition process was arresting. Month after month, year after year, respectable men of science had sent other people’s skulls to the university: one or two here, one or two hundred there.

  The connections between these rows of skulls and the shrunken human heads with their eyes, ears and hair intact may not be immediately apparent, but I was working in a museum where objects are categorized rather unusually, thanks to the exacting demands of its founder, General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers. General Pitt Rivers, who is remembered as the father of British archaeology, was an obsessive collector of all things archaeological and anthropological. When he had agreed to donate his collection to the University of Oxford in 1883, he had done so on condition that the artefacts were arranged according to type, or typologically – a Victorian method of organizing anthropological collections that Pitt Rivers had made famous. We expect exhibits in a museum of anthropology to be arranged geographically, allowing us to peruse the cultures of Africa before moving on to Asia, the Pacific and so on. It is also normal to navigate chronologically, so that the British collections, say, might start with Neolithic and Bronze Age industries before working through to the Roman colonization, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans and on up to the present day. This conforms to, and reinforces, the principle that societies are discrete entities, defined, more or less, by their spatial and temporal boundaries.

  However, at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the collections are organized by reference to each object’s form and function. So, the baskets are all grouped together, as are the drums, and the guns; there is a case in the museum filled only with dancing masks, another of model boats and a third of tattooing implements. Each group includes examples from all over the world and from all ages, which is not to say that cultural distinctions are ignored, but rather that the starting point for comparing cultures is slightly different. At first this typological approach seems counterintuitive, particularly for someone like me who had been trained as an anthropologist to view every cultural group as an autonomous entity worthy of study in its own right; but, working at the Pitt Rivers, I came to appreciate the power of looking at things typologically.

  Ordering the world in this way, almost as though it were a set of technological problems to be solved, forces us to ask what makes us all human despite our infinite varieties. We are all, for example, tool-making creatures. One person may reach for a box of matches while another rubs two wooden sticks together for a few seconds to ignite a small twist of leaf tinder, but we have all found ways to warm, light and nourish our paths through life. Every group of humans has found cause to dig in the ground, hunt other animals, decorate their bodies, store their belongings, make music, share food.

  And now, it seemed to me, every culture had found a reason to put human heads on display. We were still doing it. The Pitt Rivers Museum, despite its best efforts, was famous for it. The place with the shrunken heads … It seemed ironic that members of staff at the museum were so quick to point out that South American peoples, like the Shuar or the Achuar, no longer practised headhunting, when some of the heads their ancestors had taken were still entertaining visitors to Oxford. Displaying heads was not as remote from the experience of twenty-first-century urban life as we might like to think. Severed heads could not be simply banished to the barbaric past, or the primitive ‘other’. On the contrary, the history of head-hunting was also right here, under my nose. All of which left me contemplating the uncomfortable but essential question: what can we learn about our common humanity from this, the ultimate image of inhumanity?

  I started writing a book about heads themselves – heads-as-things – from in among the tidy rows of skulls kept in museum collections, and with a curatorial eye to the ways in which they have been stored, viewed and put to use in our society, but behind many of these skulls is the story of a man (invariably they were men) who cut off a person’s head and set about cleaning away the flesh. The heads in museums have been ‘tidied up’, and tidying them up is a messy business. To the uninitiated, a shrunken head, a trophy skull or a head that has been dissected for scientific study is an astonishing, and frequently horrific, artefact that confirms the sheer audacity of the person who created it. Whether in life or after death, so much of the power of these ‘specimens’ stems from the act of decapitation itself that I found myself exploring the brutality that is required to behead a person, and the varied conditions under which that brutality is unleashed.

  Some of the chapters that follow are as much about decapitation as they are about the cultural power of the severed head in our society – particularly the chapter on trophy heads, which investigates heads taken by soldiers in battle, and the one on dissected heads, which opens the door on medical dissecting rooms. It goes without saying that the decapitation of a living person is an extremely rare occurrence today, but there are circumstances in our contemporary society in which ordinary people find themselves handling and dismembering human bodies in ways that are not generally acknowledged and that are often hidden from view. How much cruelty is required to cut off a person’s head depends on the head in question. To kill by decapitation is an atrocity. Judicial execution by beheading is considered unacceptable. Dismembering a recently fallen soldier on the battlefield while hunting for grisly souvenirs is illegal and dishonorable, as is stealing body parts for scientific research. But removing the head of a person who died hundreds of years ago or who gave their written consent to be disse
cted for medical research after their death is socially acceptable.

  Meanwhile, history tells us that it is within our capacity to commit, to accept, to watch and even to enjoy the spectacle of a beheading. The power of the beheading ritual in our society reverberates today in everyday idioms, gestures and jokes. You may be trying to keep your head or managing not to lose your head; biting someone’s head off verbally or knocking their block off physically; laughing your head off or keeping it screwed on; putting a price on somebody else’s head or putting your own head on the block for their sake; wanting someone’s head on a platter or else watching heads roll as a result of some mistake you made. These phrases bring our history into the present and transform the horror into humour, giving the power of the spectacle a new, linguistic, ubiquity.

  For centuries, state executions of every kind were popular entertainment for ‘all ranks and degrees’ of society, as Thackeray observed at Courvoisier’s hanging in 1840: ‘Pickpocket and peer, each is tickled by the sight alike, and has the hidden lust after blood which influences our race.’ Many men of science, well into the twentieth century, indulged in the messy business of harvesting human heads for the sake of their intellectual endeavours. Today, surgeons habitually open up people’s skulls to insert probes or cut away tumours, sometimes while talking to the patient whose head they are exploring. Conservators in medical museums care for the decapitated heads that float in preservative-filled pots in their institutions, occasionally refreshing the liquid or adjusting the storage conditions when necessary. What is deemed to be acceptable behaviour varies from time to time and from place to place.

  Even when a head is severed entirely legally it is an act that has the power to horrify, and part of the horror is that a severed head is so captivating. The dead human face is a siren: dangerous but irresistible. I have looked at the decapitated heads of babies in medical museums. They are children from another time, a hundred years ago, now suspended and distorted in preserving liquid for teaching purposes. I have read how they died – infanticide, abortion, disease or deformity – in a kind of numbed but knowing submission, to them and to my own dark desires, wondering whether I am pushing myself too far, whether I will have nightmares, but unable to resist their suffocated gaze. They are time travellers, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first; residents in the land of the living and the dead; at once animate and inanimate. And it is their faces – a face being the most expressive configuration of skin and muscles known to life – that leave me striving to connect despite myself, and that succeed in lodging them more insistently in the world of the living than any other ‘specimen’ in the museum. Of all the body parts lining the walls – the kidneys and livers, the hands and feet – it is the faces that draw visitors in to explore their own sense of shock.

  We cannot confront another person’s head without sharing an understanding: face to face, we are peering into ourselves. We are hard-wired to react to a person’s facial expression, spontaneously and unconsciously. We experience an automatic and rapid neurological response to seeing a sad, happy, angry or distressed face which causes us, unconsciously, to mimic its expression. When it is the face of a bodiless head, our physical reflex – that instinctive empathy – conflicts with the knowledge that this person must be dead. After all, what is missing is as important as what remains, and the person’s lost body is as compelling in its absence as the head is absent in its presence.

  From the skull of a fallen enemy, painted and used as a candlestick in the army barracks, to the head of a donor, embalmed, sawn in half between the eyes, wrapped in gauze and labelled on the shelf of a medical dissecting room, a severed head upsets our easy categories, because it is simultaneously a person and a thing. It is always both and neither. Each state reaffirms the other and negates it. It is here with us, and yet utterly alien. The severed head is compelling – and horrific – because it denies one of the most basic dichotomies we use to understand our world: that people and objects are defined in opposition to each other. It presents an apparently impossible duality.

  A severed head can be many things: a loved one, a trophy, scientific data, criminal evidence, an educational prop, a religious relic, an artistic muse, a practical joke. It can be an item of trade, a communication aid, a political pawn or a family heirloom; and it can be many of these things at once. Its definitions are unstable and they oscillate dramatically, which is one of the reasons human remains have the power to unsettle us. They impose themselves and challenge our assumptions, and none more so than the human head, whose eyes meet our own.

  A severed head, whether it is preserved whole or reduced to its skull, looks at us from another world, where we are all destined to go. It brings death to bear on life. In the classic motto, the skull announces, ‘As you are now, so once I was; and as I am now, so you will be,’ and its inert, ossified face, forever smiling but unable to laugh, reinforces the message. Yorick, the most famous skull on the stage, grins but he can no longer laugh: ‘chop-fallen’, he has had his individuality stripped away by death.

  As each skull thrown up from the ground appears the same to Hamlet – ‘how absolute’ – he can only muse on the possibilities: a politician, a courtier, a lawyer? Death levels all great men, and the Danish prince finds himself levelling with the gravedigger in this scene. Hamlet is brought down to earth by a discussion of decomposition rates and decay. There is no talk of heaven and hell here, just the physicality of rot and leathery skin and bad smells. Just as death seems insurmountably indiscriminate, Hamlet impulsively reanimates his friend Yorick: his lips, his ‘flashes of merriment’, here is a person long dead when the play begins, brought back to life in Hamlet’s hands. This skull lives, and Yorick is a gambling comic taking to the stage again for a brief moment supported by singing clowns and flying skulls.

  In Shakespeare’s graveyard, face to face with these all-but-interchangeable skulls, Hamlet confronts time and death just as everyone must. Death does not discriminate; and yet, Yorick is distinctive. Shakespeare transforms Yorick from a conventional memento mori into a person deceased, and the artefact is a comedian once more. Perhaps the flashes of merriment only serve to underline the inanimateness of the skull in Hamlet’s hand, but that is also the point. The object and the individual are mutually reinforcing. The memory of Yorick’s playfulness intensifies his inanimateness and vice versa, because a skull, in many ways, is the antithesis of a living person’s face.

  Skulls have been attracting scientists for centuries, because they are people in convenient, collectible form. The person objectified: they can be easily transported, stored, measured and analysed. And yet, like Shakespeare, we are left trying to flesh out people’s skulls, as though bringing them back from the dead. There is a skull like this within each of us, after all. We are compelled to try and reanimate what remains, because there is an intense incongruity between the way a severed head looks – like a person – and the way it behaves – like an object. A person’s life force seems to reside in their head more than in other parts of their body, which is perhaps no surprise given the astonishing physical properties of the human head.

  There are lots of good physiological reasons why people find heads fascinating, and powerful, and tempting to remove. The human head is a biological powerhouse and a visual delight. It accommodates four of our five senses: sight, smell, hearing and taste all take place in the head. It encases the brain, the core of our nervous system. It draws in the air we breathe and delivers the words we speak. As the evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman has written, ‘Almost every particle entering your body, either to nourish you or to provide information about the world, enters via your head, and almost every activity involves something going on in your head.’

  A huge number of different components are packed into our heads. The human head contains more than 20 bones, up to 32 teeth, a large brain, of course, and several sensory organs, as well as dozens of muscles, and numerous glands, nerves, veins, arteries and ligaments. They are all tig
htly configured and intensely integrated within a small space. And people’s heads look good too. The human head boasts one of the most expressive set of muscles known to life. It is adorned with various features that lend themselves to ornamentation: hair, ears, nose and lips. Thanks to an impressive concentration of nerve endings and an unrivalled ability for expressive movement, our heads connect our inner selves to the outer world more intensely than any other part of our body.

  This extraordinary engine room – distinctive, dynamic and densely packed – is set on high for all to see. Our bipedal posture means that we show off our relatively round, short and wide heads on top of slim, almost vertical necks. The necks of most other animals are broader, more squat and more muscular, because they have to hold the head out in front of the body, in a forward position. The human head, because it sits on top of the spinal column, requires less musculature at the back of the neck. There is so little muscle in our necks that you can quite easily feel the main blood vessels, the lymph nodes and the vertebrae through the skin. In short, it is much easier to decapitate a human than a deer, or a lion, or any of the other animals that are more usually associated with hunting trophies.

  Which is not to say that it is easy. Human necks may be, compared to other mammals, quite flimsy, but separating heads from bodies is still hard to do. Countless stories of botched beheadings on the scaffold attest to this, particularly in countries like Britain, where beheadings were relatively rare and executioners were inexperienced. The swift decapitation of a living person requires a powerful, accurate action, and a sharp, heavy blade. No wonder the severed head is the ultimate warrior’s trophy. Even when the assassin is experienced and his victim is bound, it can take many blows to cut off a person’s head. When the Comte de Lally knelt, still and blindfolded, for his execution in France in 1766, the executioner’s axe failed to sever his head. He toppled forward and had to be repositioned, and even then it took four or five blows to decapitate him. It famously took three strikes to sever the head of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587. The first hit the back of her head, while the second left a small sinew which had to be sawn through with the axe blade. It was hard even when the victim was dead. When Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was decapitated at Tyburn, it took the axeman eight blows to cut through the layers of cerecloth that wrapped his body and finish the job.