The Cult of Skulls:
From Severance to Sculpture
"They embalm the heads of their enemies in juniper oil then flaunt them before the eyes of their guests. They refuse, in way of exchange, even the heads' very weight in gold."[1] So wrote the Greek geographer, Strabo, in describing Celto-Ligurian tribesmen who inhabited strongholds in the hills of Provence from the fifth to second centuries B.C. Who were they and in what kinds of barbarous rites did they indulge? Were they, indeed, an "atrocious people," as one contemporary eyewitness described them?[2] Were they a "society of headhunters," as a modern historian has put it?[3]
Celto-Ligurian: the amalgam alone raises questions. For Celts and Ligurians sprang from two totally disparate cultures. The Celts, an Indo-European people who emanated from central Europe and infiltrated southern France some time in the sixth century B.C. , brought with them a highly evolved, hierarchical social structure and a whole set of advanced skills ranging from metal craft to charioteering. The Ligurians, on the other hand, were autochthonous.
Inhabiting perched sites above the Mediterranean coastline since the Neolithic, they were overwhelmed, it would seem, by the far more sophisticated, dynamic culture propagated by the Celts. Together, as a gradually assimilated people, they came to observe the same rites, worship the same divinities. Whether the particular kind of skull veneration they both commonly practiced originated with the Celts or Ligurians remains to be determined. In any case, the cult quickly took on considerable magico-religious significance. In sites such as Roquepertuse, Entremont, and La Cloche, considerable numbers of skulls have been discovered totally removed from any funerary context whatsoever, but in close topological association with the sanctuaries themselves. Clearly, the skulls were the object—the "sensate receptacles," as one archeologist put it[4] —of a particular form of worship.
As the severed heads, presumably, of enemy warriors, these "trophies" were either embalmed in oil or coated in fresh clay. They were then left on exhibit in egg-shaped alcoves carved especially for the purpose within the monolithic columns and overriding lintels of the sanctuary proper. More than simply displayed, these skulls were enshrined. Today, lodged once again in the alveoli of colonnades that have been patiently reassembled in the Musée de la Vieille Charité, Marseilles, these decomposed heads possess a barbarous magnetism, for they still manage to inspire that most archaic of all psychic reactions: ambivalence itself. Holding us between repulsion and respect, terror and deference, we're still, it would seem, affected by these gutted husks. Much like the mask of the gorgon, the skulls belong neither to this world nor the next, but to that wavering interface, that intermediary realm between being and non-being, the living and the dead. Threshold figures, they command passage.
The earliest irrefutable example of a skull treated as both a separate entity and a venerated object dates from the Mousterian (about 50,000 B.C. ). The skull,
belonging to a Neanderthal, was discovered without any anatomical connection in the Grotto of Guattari at Mount Circe, Italy, in 1939. It had been deliberately, even delicately, laid into a circle of stones prepared for its reception. Examples such as this are extremely rare in the Paleolithic. Another would be the skull of a woman found at Le Mas-D'Azil and dating from the Magdalenian (about 12,000 B.C. ), her empty eye sockets studded with carved bone to simulate a gaze. Whenever such examples arise, the skull itself should be considered a relic or reliquary, not a trophy. It should be attributed, that is, to ancestor worship rather than to a cult based on the deliberate acquisition of magical properties. This holds true throughout the Neolithic. For example, skulls discovered at Mureybet along the banks of the Euphrates were originally mounted on small clay pedestals along the walls of domestic sanctuaries. There, as the venerated heads of ancestors, they were left on display. Throughout the Fertile Crescent, from Byblos on the Phoenician coast to central Anatolia, heads such as these have been discovered modeled in lime (Halaf), impregnated in tar and enveloped in a braided hair net (Nahal Hemar), or richly inlaid with cowrie shells (Jericho). At a necropolis at Beidha, archeologists were surprised to discover a number of beheaded skeletons lying in the stone coffers they'd just unearthed. It would appear that the population, upon abandoning the site, had taken their most venerable possessions—the skulls—along with them.
It's not until we reach the Iron Age proper that the "Cult of Skulls" comes to be associated with headhunting. It should be noted, however, that despite the immense generic difference between the severed head of an enemy warrior and that of a beloved kin, both were invested with transcendent powers. As "sensate receptacles," both possessed hierophantic values far exceeding those of simple keepsakes. To the contrary, they were actively charged with
the propitiatory: with the talismanic virtues of an interceding agent, be it in favor of an individual, a family or a clan (as with the skulls of ancestors), or an entire tribe (as with the skulls of enemies). In each of these cases, they afforded "protection, abundance and fertility," in Fernand Benoit's words, to those fortunate enough to possess them.[5]
Along with the expansion of the so-called Warrior Cultures in the Iron Age, the practice of headhunting spread commensurately. From the oppidum of Puig-Castellar in Spain to Stanwick in Yorkshire, England, skulls have been discovered that hung once from metal hooks at the entrance to settlements. They were charged, no doubt, with those same expiatory powers mentioned above. Within Celtic mythology alone, don't we have an entire "literature of decapitation," as one historian has put it?[6] One only need mention Cu Chulain's exploits in the Tain or the severed head of Brân in the Mabinogion which spoke out and assured its captors of the joys of unending prosperity.
The Celto-Ligurian oppida in Provence have yielded evidence, however, of yet a further level of development in the magico-religious treatment of the human head. At some point between the beginning of the third and the end of the second century B.C. , we have, in Brigitte Lescure's words, "that crucial moment of passage from an expression based upon actual matter—the bones themselves—to one of plastic evocation: that is to say, sculpture."[7] We're moving, in that very moment, from fact to artifact and, in so doing, from substance to symbol: from the magical investment of matter to its semiotic representation. Certainly it's a moment through which all civilizations, if permitted, will transit. It's one in which they come to sublimate an earlier practice, based on a belief in the innate power of material objects, for that of their effigiation: sculpture, in this instance, replacing skulls. The severed head is rendered now in limestone, the hand of its captor (in several instances) running through the locks of its hair. In these Celto-Ligurian oppida , evidence of that transition,
that moment in time, has come to light within little more than a few square meters of excavated space. That all-decisive event in the evolution of any culture has been circumscribed in places such as these a full twenty-three hundred years after the fact. Within a specific patch of meticulously inspected earth, the moment itself—one might say—has been isolated.
It should be noted, however, that the sculptures didn't entirely replace the
severed heads: the cultic observation of both one and the other continued to coexist until the end of the Celto-Ligurian world itself. As irrefutable proof that severed heads continued to be taken, both skulls and sculptures have been unearthed at sites such as Entremont from the exact same stratigraphic levels. other cults, other cultures have offered up similar examples of such parallel practices, venerating, simultaneously, organic substance and its graphic substitutes. Christianity, in its adoration of both the bones of its blessed, encased in reliquaries, and their images, glowing radiant from icons, embraces (as much as any religion) such parallel practices. The former, of course, antecedes the latter. As both a psychic and cultic phenomenon, the veneration of bones belongs to a far more archaic mode of worship. As deeply rooted as it is, could it ever, in fact, be fully suppressed, replaced, sublimated into a panoply of figurative equivalents?
Here, history itself will come to answer our questions, for in 123 B.C. , a culture, infinitely more advanced and more sophisticated than that of the Celto-Ligurians—not only in terms of socioeconomic structure and technological achievement but also in regard to the elaboration of those "figurative equivalents"—destroyed these fortified hill villages, one after another. At the Mus6e Granet in Aix-en-Provence, there is more than adequate evidence of such devastation. It appears that the Roman army, in attacking oppida such as Roquepertuse, Entremont, and La Cloche, went directly after the sculptures themselves. Lobbing off noses and cheeks, sectioning entire necks, planting their axes squarely down the center of so many limestone skulls, they beheaded, disfigured, massacred the lifeless representations of a society's singular devotion. They not only laid low the population itself but the objects of its veneration, what the Celto-Ligurians had only recently managed to translate into sign, effigy, sculpture. In short, the works of an emergent society found themselves
barbarized by a culture considered immeasurably more advanced. The sign, here, was taken for substance; the figuration, for figure.
One can only wonder, in the face of all this evidence, whether civilization represents anything more than its own tireless, often aborted efforts to "shore image": to bring its vision of the sacred, finally, into the shelter of some ineffaceable effigy. Here, for instance, within the context of a late Iron Age culture, we've followed the transition of one such vision as it went from the "sensate receptacle" of a severed head to its representation as sculpture. That transition has always depended on the sublimation of its subject. The final result, however—the sculpture itself—is far from being assured the kind of inviolability one might expect. Completed, it finds itself exposed to exactly the same conditions, vicissitudes, fates as the civilization it epitomizes. Sculpture can be shattered, frescoes obliterated, entire libraries burnt. What might only have been attained after an immense psychic effort on the part of a particular culture can be lost in no more time than it takes, say, to sack a small protohistoric citadel.
Here in these abandoned, wind-swept ruins that still ooze, occasionally, fractured bits of sculptured anatomy, we come to realize that we're not merely witnesses to the past. Whatever level of transfigurate expression we ourselves may have reached can be undone as swiftly as theirs was. A carved earlobe here, a nostril there—vestiges, we call them—come to remind us of this all too evident fact.