You don’t have to watch the ISIS videos to see severed heads. The murders of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, and dozens of Syrian soldiers dredge up images from a long history of beheading. The practice is rare and horrifying, but it crosses barriers we imagine separate East from West, civilized from savage, modern from primitive, past from present, computer screens from Middle Eastern deserts.
Or so Frances Larson would have us understand. Larson didn’t start Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found with ISIS in mind, but it gives her book an eerie and unhappy currency.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
By Frances Larson (Liveright)
Larson, an honorary research fellow at Durham University, began thinking about heads without bodies while she was working at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. She’d been staring at 10 shrunken heads dangling in a neat glass case. Those heads are a hit with museum visitors, especially schoolchildren who still have a feel for their cool magic. The trouble is, only three of the heads are “authentic” products of ritual raiding among the Shuar and other peoples of the Amazon. The other seven came from South America, too, but were apparently cooked up to trade to European collectors for money and guns. Those traders trotted home the shrunken heads of two howler monkeys, two sloths, and three luckless individuals caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It’s hard to tell if the real headhunters in this story are the tribesmen or the European traders working a market in exotic collectibles. With our noses pressed to a museum case, do we see the arts of a “savage people” or do we see a history of the colonial encounters that made the modern world? Or do we just see traces of ourselves, shriveled remains of the eyes, ears, noses, lips, and tongues that once took in a world just as we do?
Larson has a collector’s taste for gathering up materials on a particular subject. Severed takes us on a disturbing journey through the history of head taking. She leads us from the English Civil War to the Pacific Theater of the Second World War and introduces us to a cast of bodiless heads—traitors, saints, Holofernes, John the Baptist, and Oliver Cromwell; thousands of skulls in museums in Europe and the United States; heads posted on city gates, set in silver reliquaries; heads honored, humiliated, mummified, painted, photographed, and stored, suspended in liquid nitrogen, in a vault in Arizona. A head is a “biological powerhouse and a visual delight,” Larson writes. And a head without a body makes us sit up and pay attention.
Larson wants us to remember a simple visceral fact: Before a head could be collected, someone had to cut it off a body. Knives, blades, a dripping guillotine, all sorts of decapitation tools haunt her book. It takes some intellectual acrobatics to connect terror, art, and reverence, but for Larson they all draw power from head taking, from an act that forces us to walk the line between life and death, between the grotesque and the beautiful, to juggle disgust, shame, intimacy, and wonder.
The guillotine, the high point in the technology of decapitation, holds a central place in Larson’s story. Thanks to the guillotine, she writes, “decapitation became progressively quieter, neater and more reliable.” The German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt and his French collaborators Antoine Louis and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin meant their device to deliver more “humane” executions—surer than the shaky hand of the ax-wielding executioner. And they had a good chance to test it on thousands of enemies of the Revolution executed during the Reign of Terror in the 1790s.
But the guillotine’s harvest of heads raised some unsettling questions. How sure and quick was a guillotine death? Witnesses reported severed heads with chattering teeth and rolling eyes. Experimenters poked and prodded to get a response from fresh-cut heads. Did it take 5 seconds or 15 minutes for life to end? What happened to the sensations and memories stored up in a head? We’ll never know. Researchers asked, but the heads never answered.
Larson is a good storyteller. She includes lots of grisly details, and also some astonishing facts—if Severed weren’t a book about lost heads you could say “jaw dropping” or “eye opening” facts that convey humor and horror. A sample: Early modern London employed a full-time “keeper of the heads” paid to arrange traitors’ heads and body parts “to their best effect”; on June 17, 1794, the Terror’s hard-working executioner cut off a record 50 heads in 28 minutes; and Madame Tussaud said she modeled a wax image of her friend Robespierre while cradling his fresh head in her lap. A smiling 16-year-old Damien Hirst posed beside a drooping severed head set on a table in a morgue. Ten years later, Hirst, still smiling, circulated the image into the art world. And then there are the experimental “preparations” of dogs and monkeys with transplanted heads. Sad notes on the monstrosities lurking in the human imagination.
But there’s humor here, too. We can all picture Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts shouting her “Off with their heads” at a puzzled Alice. But I kept thinking of one illustration from Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, a burly executioner conjured from my childhood memory by Larson’s book. “The executioner was whistling and swinging his axe idly, because at the moment he had nothing to do. In spite of his business, he really seemed to be a very pleasant man. ‘The King says you must chop off my head,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Oh, I’d hate to,’ said the executioner, looking at him with a friendly smile. ‘You seem such a nice boy.’”
Of course, the executioner can’t cut off Bartholomew’s head because the boy can’t take off his hat. Severed doesn’t cover the gentle humor of Dr. Seuss’s story, but Larson does begin to explain why I’ve carried that image of the masked executioner around for all these years. To be human is to have a head that houses a brain and carries a face. And so we are all haunted by the thought of losing our heads.
How common is head taking? Not very, even though it seems to turn up throughout a long human history and raise just the sort of troubling questions that Larson pursues. It seems maybe Pitt Rivers had it right, after all. If you compare tools and practices across cultures, you catch a glimpse of what it means to be human. Larson adds a virtual cabinet on decapitation to the museum’s venerable collections. It’s a disturbing story, to be sure, but one that seems to keep on weaving its awful way through our human history.
Ann Fabian, a professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, is the author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
