In the days of Bishop Fisher, the other-worldly power residing in heads like his had to be controlled, whether by throwing them in the Thames, bottling them up for resale as medicines, or containing them, literally and metaphorically, in opulent shrines for religious worship. It was when they were successfully contained, and given a clearly defined place within a specific cultural context, that the severed heads in our communities proved most resilient. The heads of saints were integrated into the fabric of religious life. They were, literally, institutionalized, and protected by a belief system that put them beyond the reach of individual whims and fancies. A special place was set aside for them, rituals of prayer developed around them, and many, like the heads of Saint Oliver and Saint Catherine, became famous in their own right. Churches promoted their collections of human remains as sites of pilgrimage, their festival days became established parts of the Christian calendar, and stories of miracles grew up around them. Today, guidebooks and leaflets are published, and text panels explain their significance. All of this means that the presence of these mummified human heads in our twenty-first-century world is seldom seriously questioned by anyone, either within the Church or from outside it.
Apart from anything else, the longer a person’s head remains above ground, the less likely it is to be buried below ground. A criminal’s skull, grown old with moss, and a saint’s head encased in a reliquary bust become something more, and less, than a dead person’s head. As the passage of time dries them out and distorts them, they seem less like people and more like things. They become valuable artefacts in their own right, with an economic and spiritual currency of their own, which has little to do with the macabre history of how they were made.
There is no longer any pervasive cultural tradition to shape people’s interactions with saintly relics, and the passing of centuries has mellowed our response to them. They are so desiccated that they seem appropriately alien to many visitors, and hardly like a severed human head at all. Our reactions are muted by their physical degradation. Tourists who visit the church of San Domenico in Siena, if they mention Saint Catherine’s head at all, describe it afterwards online without emotion, as ‘quite quirky’, or ‘pretty awesome’, ‘moving’, or ‘just sort of creepy’. Ironically, the glass and gold shrines that were designed to heighten pilgrims’ response to saintly relics may also enhance the sense of emotional detachment that many secular tourists now feel when they visit these objects. The ornate display cases keep visitors at a safe distance, and the solemn atmosphere of the churches in which they reside, which are governed by certain codes of behaviour, can reinforce the divisions between those who belong and those who do not. Saints’ heads are liminal objects in more ways than one, and the fact that they are kept in limbo – in humidity-controlled glass display cases, between this world and the next – adds to their resilience.
In Sudbury, in the county of Suffolk, a man’s head is kept in a church as a relic, but he is not a saint. Simon Sudbury’s head may well have been kept by his supporters in the hope that he would one day be canonized, and although it never happened, his head has survived and today it can be found in a niche in the vestry of St Gregory’s Church. This is simply the head of a dead man, and tourists come to see it as a historical curiosity rather than a divine relic. Schoolchildren visit as part of their history lessons, because Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, was beheaded by an angry mob during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 for the part he played in instituting an unpopular poll tax on the people. Sudbury was neither a saint nor a criminal, and his head is a relic in that other, broader sense of the word, by bearing witness to an important moment in history. Because of that, it has come to embody a shift, rooted in the sixteenth century, but flourishing over the next two hundred years, which saw the term ‘relic’ gradually lose its aura of holiness.
Simon Sudbury was beheaded in 1381, during the heyday of the medieval trade in religious relics. According to local legend, Sudbury’s head was taken from its perch on London Bridge by supporters, who returned it to his home church of St Gregory in secret. Perhaps they thought their memento would one day prove to be the incorruptible flesh of a saint, but unlike Oliver Plunkett, Sudbury’s head has never formed part of an organized campaign for his canonization. Instead, it became part of local folklore, part of the church’s heritage, and part of the furniture. Then, after sitting in the church for more than six hundred years, Sudbury’s head offered up its secrets to science instead.
In 2011, a local Christian charity called Future Vision that works in schools around Sudbury asked forensic anthropologists at the University of Dundee to produce a facial reconstruction of Simon Sudbury from the remains of his head. The head was taken to a hospital in Bury St Edmunds, where it underwent a series of CT scans. Then computer modelling software was used to deflesh the skull in cyberspace. This virtual skull was converted into an exact 3D replica of Sudbury’s skull, which was used as the basis for the clay reconstruction of his head. As a result, three bronze resin casts of Sudbury’s head were made. One was given to Canterbury City Council, one to St Gregory’s Church, where it is displayed alongside his actual head, and one to Future Vision, who use it to teach local children about Simon’s life, the history of the parish church and the science of facial reconstruction.
Staff at the West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St. Edmunds, photographed for the Ipswich Star newspaper, positioning Simon of Sudbury’s head in the CT scanner, March 2011.
So Sudbury’s head is a true twenty-first-century relic. Complete with its own scientifically modelled ‘reliquary bust’, it draws people to an Anglican church, and is used by a Christian charity to teach children about anatomy and the science of forensic anthropology. It makes Oliver Plunkett’s head seem positively medieval in its scope. Sudbury’s head is proof that secular relics can generate as much activity, and bring people together with as much verve, as any sacred relic ever could. The project received considerable press attention when Sudbury’s face was revealed in September 2011. Journalists described the reconstruction itself in passing, as a contribution to local and national history; but the main story was simply the unveiling of Sudbury’s face. This scientific ‘reincarnation’ was a news item in itself. The responsibility for the miraculous transformation, from decaying organic matter to glorious immortality cast in precious metal, may have been in the hands of scientists rather than clerics, but the sense of wonder remained the same.
The heads of Oliver Plunkett and Simon Sudbury have survived long enough to become something new. They have become time travellers, visitors from another world; they are strangers to the past as much as they are strangers in the present. The passage of time has dried them out, darkened and disfigured them, confirming their status as archaeological artefacts that awaken our academic curiosity as much as our passions. Thanks to the protection of the Church, they have become a focus for public reverence, despite their distasteful physical condition. And because of their longevity, they command their own space and have accrued new identities post mortem. Slightly less than people and slightly more than objects, they have become valuable entities in their own right, with new powers and new politics. They command our attention as much as ever before, and in a secular age, it is hardly surprising if the quality of our contemplation has shifted from divine miracles to miracles of computer modelling.
There are numerous examples of preserved human bodies that do not belong to the Church but accrue mystical powers nonetheless. Communist governments, for example, know that the dead can draw greater crowds than they ever did in life. Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong are perhaps the most famous political mummies who still greet visitors today. Millions of people have queued to see them over the years. Lenin has been on display, with only one or two short interruptions, since his death in 1924. He has become something of a political embarrassment, because after all this time the idea of burying him is as controversial as the idea of keeping him on display. Thanks to the t
ireless work of a team of embalmers who make sure he is as incorruptible as is scientifically possible, he has become an oxymoron: a communist saint – so much so that in one recent parliamentary debate about his future, a Communist Party member warned against disturbing him lest it put a curse on the nation.
A revered political leader like Lenin would never be decapitated after death, but plenty of famous corpses have lost their heads so that their followers might keep their clean white skulls as mementoes. Severing someone’s head is an act of desecration, but contemplating their skull can be an act of worship. The composers Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert all lost their skulls to admirers. When Mozart’s body was buried in a pauper’s grave, alongside around fifteen other people, at St Mark’s Church in Vienna in 1791, the church sexton saw an opportunity to express his admiration for the genius: he slipped a metal wire around the composer’s neck before the internment. When the grave was reopened as a matter of routine in 1801, the sexton found the skeleton with the wire around its neck and stole its skull. Beethoven and Schubert were disinterred in 1863, thirty-five years after their deaths, by the Society for the Friends of Music, so that their graves could be renovated. Once the coffins were opened, however, the society’s members could not contain their desire to remove the skulls, and the great composers were carefully reburied without them.
The notion of the ‘genius skull’ had its heyday in the nineteenth century, when the science of the skull became the scourge of the talented, and those people who could afford it were bricked into their graves in the hope it would deter cranium collectors. Thomas Browne spoke for many when he wrote, in 1658, ‘To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations,’ but his strong feelings on the matter did nothing to prevent his own skull being dug up in 1840. It spent the next seventy-five years in Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum. The cranial bones of writers, musicians and political leaders were regularly dug up and put on display in private libraries or public museums – places of quiet contemplation not unlike churches in this respect. For decades, famous people’s skulls served as material evidence of intellectual superiority without offering any causal explanation for their talents. In fact, the genius’s head had a lot in common with the heads of Saint Oliver, Saint Catherine and Saint Just: they were secular relics that invited adoration and helped to put such places as Norwich on the map.
In the 1890s, the Hospital Museum in Norwich refused to give Browne’s skull back to the parish church for reinterment, asserting the importance of secular veneration over religious ordinance. The hospital board wrote that ‘the presence in a museum of such a relic, reverently preserved and protected, cannot be viewed as merely an object of idle curiosity; rather it will usefully serve to direct attention to, and remind visitors of, the works of the great scholar and physician.’ Browne’s skull could hardly enlighten – or attract – visitors to the hospital if it was reburied in the chancel of the church.
For many centuries, the Church was responsible for the most extensive public displays of human remains. These were not only saintly relics – often ordinary people’s bodies were disarticulated and arranged in charnel houses and ossuaries to save space in increasingly overcrowded cemeteries. In the course of the last three hundred years, however, scientific institutions have claimed their right to deal in dead bodies, and the Church has lost its ascendancy in that messy, and magical, business. The apothecary shops of the seventeenth century, which counted human skulls among their most valuable effects, were forerunners to the great scientific collections of later centuries. But although Church and State were no longer the only institutions to draw power from the drama of death, human skulls never lost their prestige. The skull has always been a collector’s item of distinction, regardless of whether its powers were sacred, civic or scientific.
When people’s bodies were divided up by the Church and rearranged in ossuaries, many theologians insisted that a person’s head marked the place of their burial, regardless of where the rest of their body ended up. In charnel houses, skulls were often separated out and labelled with the name of the deceased. They might be put in special wooden boxes, or even elaborately painted with names, dates and flower garlands. These practices continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in places like Hallstatt in Austria, where the charnel house is famous for its painted skulls. The walls of countless European ossuaries are lined from floor to ceiling with people’s bony heads.
The motivations may have changed, but many of these practices were adopted by the scientists who collected skulls in later centuries. In museum collections as in charnel houses, a skull stood in for an entire person; skulls were routinely labelled and written upon and kept in boxes or display cabinets; and the skulls of people who were considered particularly important were displayed separately from the rest. Notwithstanding differences in philosophy, principle and aesthetic, the status of the human skull as a collector’s item has endured for hundreds of years.
Skulls resist decay, for physical and philosophical reasons. They are compact, strong under pressure, aesthetically appealing, and, thanks to the distinctive features of the face, they signify the individual to whom they once belonged. Like Simon Sudbury’s ancient skull, they tempt us to play at reincarnation and imagine putting flesh back on the bones. Their durability allows them to throw off earlier attributes and forge new identities, and new social connections, which in turn means that the longer they survive the less likely they are to be discarded or reinterred. Their potency is in their unrivalled power to draw people together and galvanize them towards a common purpose. When we think of ‘potent heads’ – heads that were valued by pilgrims and apothecaries for their miraculous healing properties in centuries past – we see the great differences between the prevailing beliefs then and our own now, rather than the continuities. The human head and the skull are as powerful as ever, both as relics and as scientific specimens, and their ubiquity today is largely thanks to the Victorians, who, more than any other society before or since, fetishized human skulls and collected them in their thousands.
6
Bone Heads
The Austrian composer Joseph Haydn had been dead and buried for only a few days in 1809 when a gravedigger, desperate for extra cash, dug up his body in the night, cut off his head, wrapped it in some ragged cloths and handed it to his financer who was standing nearby. The nocturnal businessman was Joseph Rosenbaum, one of Haydn’s friends. As he carried Haydn’s head through the cemetery to his awaiting carriage, Rosenbaum could not contain his curiosity. He peeled back the rags to have a closer look at his friend’s face. It was June, the composer’s flesh was already decomposing and his brain had begun to putrefy: the stench was overwhelming. Rosenbaum vomited in disgust, but his physical revulsion could not temper his desire to take possession of Haydn’s skull. He knew that the distasteful truth of biological decay must be endured if he was going to get his prize: the pearly cranium of a musical genius. Rosenbaum’s carriage drove straight to the Vienna Hospital.
Rosenbaum made himself watch the first, messy stage in the transformation from human head to historic artefact, as the doctor he had paid cleaned away the skin and muscle from Haydn’s face and stripped out his brain case. ‘The sight made a life-long impression on me,’ Rosenbaum wrote later. ‘The dissection lasted for one hour; the brain, which was of large proportions, stank the most terribly of all. I endured it to the end.’ Haydn’s tissues were burnt in the hospital’s furnace. The preparation of his skull, which had to be soaked in limewater to remove the grease and whiten the bone, would take a few weeks, so Rosenbaum reluctantly left his friend’s head in the hands of the medics and returned home to ponder the design of the display case where he would keep Haydn’s skull when it was ready.
When the hospital staff returned Haydn’s skull to Rosenbaum, pristine and polished, he proudly placed it in his glass case. It was a tall, square c
ase, in dark wood, on a simple stepped plinth with a plain beaded lid. Inside, the skull was set under a glass dome. On top of the case there was an elegant wooden lyre, a symbol of musical genius. Was Rosenbaum’s lyre a reference to the Greek god Orpheus, whose music carried him safely into the underworld to save his wife Eurydice? Rosenbaum’s own dark and earthy mission had been driven by his passion for music and his admiration of Haydn as a composer. He, too, had retrieved his love from the rot of the netherworld. If the lyre did refer to Orpheus, there may have been other symbolic resonances at work as well. In one version of the myth, Orpheus lost his own head when his body was ripped apart and thrown into the sea by the women of Thrace and Macedonia. Later, Orpheus’s head was found floating in the river Meles, fresh and vigorous and still singing mournfully. The place where it was buried became a shrine and an oracle for pilgrims.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 16
