Gregory Minissale
Heads, skulls, and faces are used in many cultures and periods to mark boundaries between sacred and profane spaces. They are present on the edges of frames in paintings to signify a sacred space within. They are found in sculptures and reliefs carved into architectural thresholds and doorjambs. They are also found as ornaments in many ceramic vessels, demarcating contained interior from containing exterior space. In this essay, I will examine several examples from various cultures and time periods. Each section progresses chronologically with examples from different parts of the world, paying attention to similarities and differences in how heads function as attention-grabbing signs that divide space, and spaces of meaning, into binaries such as the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted, the esoteric and exoteric, internal and external spaces, and the safe and the dangerous. However, the head or heads used to bifurcate space also allow these binaries to be nuanced in various ways. The examples of heads on thresholds and borders, edges and frames surveyed in this essay are deliberately broad and global and sampled across the centuries to suggest something fundamental about how heads spark human psychological processes of segmenting categorical and culturally important domains. In many cultures and times, there is a general tendency to signify the opening of one domain into another by marking the border or threshold with heads and particular and culturally specific ways in which this general tendency is contextualized.
Although the head in art and craft is seen as a discrete symbolic or decorative motif in many myths and cultural traditions, the head is literally severed from the body and made into an object itself. This violence haunts the motif of the head in art and craft.[1] In several East European myths, a Baba Yaga is a cannibalistic witch who lives in a house surrounded by a fence on which she places the skulls of her victims to demarcate her territory. In a parallel development in myths and stories of an entirely different culture, Shodo Shonin, a famous Japanese saint and founder of the temple at Nikko, prayed for a bridge to enable him to cross a raging river, and a giant gatekeeper appeared wearing a garland of human heads around his neck. The giant threw snakes across the river, and the saint crossed over on their backs. A number of lintels and pillars found in Southern France were carved with severed heads associated with various enemiesâ decapitations.[2] The garland of human heads is associated with the gatekeeper who marks the boundary between two worlds â the sacred and the profane.
Lintel. Cambodia, Prasat Kok Po A (Angkor), Siemreap, 9th Century.
The kirtimukha (glorious face) is a feature found in temples and sculptures in India, Thailand, and Cambodia depicting the head of a lion over a doorjamb, niche, on a lintel, or containing boundary. The kirtimukha originated as an explosion of wrath from the third eye of SĂva, The Destroyer, one of the principal deities in the Hindu trinity which also includes Brahma and Vishnu. In the kirtimukha SĂva appears in the form of a raging lion, bursting forth as an answer to a mortalâs hubris and challenge to his authority. But SĂva relents and forgives the mortal and orders the lion to eat itself. It is continually seen with decorative scrolling stems or serpents being devoured or appearing to spew from its mouth. This is comparable with the Greek serpent eating itself â the ouroboros â leaving only the head to adorn his temples and images. The kirtimukha is an âapotropaic demon-mask, a gruesome, awe-inspiring guardian of the threshold.â[3] The ouroboros and the kirtimukha both help to create a bi-directional paradox: seen in one direction, they gobble up life, or in the other direction, they appear to give birth to the trailing limbs that they previously seemed to devour. There is something of the binocular rivalry of the rabbit-duck head here, where present perception depends on the exercise of a conceptual switch: a creature seen as eating itself (death) or expelling itself (creation).
Gorgoneion. Tondo of an Attic black-figured cup, end of 6th century BCE. Wikicommons public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gorgoneion_Cdm_Paris_320.jpg
In ancient Greece, a common talisman was the gorgoneion, a stone head or picture of a Gorgon, which was often placed on temples and graves to avert the evil eye and was also placed on the shields of soldiers to protect them against danger. Severed heads were carved on the prows of boats on Viking longships and in many cultures of the Pacific. In all these cases, references to the body become ways in which to signify both spatial and semantic distinctions: âThe body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures,â[4] and by extension the clay bodies of drinking and cooking vessels. These aspects of the body, particularly the head and neck, are also: âThresholds, whether spatial or temporal (such as rites of passage) are liminal zones, âbetwixt and betweenâ or transitions where danger lies. As people pass from one state (physical, psychological, social) to another, they encounter danger, which must be controlled through rituals that protect against pollution.â[5]
Michael Camille points out that the word âgargoyleâ derives from the roots garge (gurgle) and goule (throat). The body metaphor was used for the church and was especially resonant for the monks âfor whom every belch and rumble in the stomach signaled an invasion of their bodies. Just as the mouth and other orifices, such as the eyes, had to be guarded against the onslaught of evil, the entrances, doorways, and windowsâŚare those most entrusted with the protective gaze of deformed forms.â[6]
He goes on to write that all âedges,â thresholds and borders, mouths and orifices, were âdangerousâ and âpowerfulâ:
In folklore, betwixt and between are important zones of transformation. The edge of the water was where wisdom revealed itself; spirits were banished to the spaceless places âbetween the froth and the waterâ or âbetwixt the bark and the tree.â Openings, entrances, and doorways, both of buildings and the human bodyâŚwere especially important liminal zones that had to be protected.[7]
The threshold, the rim of the container, and the boundary between inside and outside are guarded or marked by the symbol of the head or the eye to arrange an encounter with the head and eye of the viewer, who self-reflects. This sometimes bars the way of the user, traveler or enquirer or, simply marks physically and conceptually discrete domains. As Eleazar Meletinsky, the Russian scholar of the history and theory of narrative, explains: âPrimary mythical and religious feelings are linked to the spatial threshold, which finds expression in the sacred control of the moments of âentranceâ and âexitâ in rites of passage and their corresponding myths.â[8]
Encephalitic Drinking and Ritual Vessels
In Stone Age Europe, as far south as present-day Turkey, and the upper reaches of Zealand in Denmark, prehistoric zoomorphic vessels for domestic use frequently incorporate the head and mouth in their decorative repertoires. There is a clay vessel painted in a typical rust-colored slip from Hacilar in Turkey (5250-5000 BCE), where the head forms the neck and spout of the jug and is described as a seated goddess with obsidian eyes.[9] Â On the other side of the world, the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) in China produced drinking vessels that also featured the heads of animals and humans.[10] And in Kyndelose, Zealand, typical oculi motifs pierce the surface of âencephaliticâ stone vessels.[11] These are some of the earliest examples of how food and drink are associated with the providence of gods or spirits that protect ancient springs and channels, drinking vessels, and, ultimately, human passageways from the ingestion of poison or evil spirits. This zoomorphic influence continues in the Iron Age. There are many kinds of animal heads: birds, bulls, and fishes in the Iron Age, drinking cups, ewers, jugs, buckets, and flagons. The elegant Basse Yutz flagons, unearthed in Austria, date from the mid-5th century BCE. The coverlets and handles â the vesselâs entry points â are guarded by dragonsâ heads with jaws agape.
Attributed to Aison and the Spetia Class of head vases. Libation scene. Janus-faced attic red-figure kantharos in the shape of satyr and female heads. Circa 420 BCE, terracotta, 20.5 cm (8 in) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Satyr_kantharos_Met_27.122.9.jpg
In Ancient Greece, the famous kantharos was a cup used for drinking wine, often for symbolic and ritual use or offerings. The kantharos was associated with the god of wine, Dionysos, the embodiment of abstract concepts such as vegetation and fertility, yet also associated with abandonment of the senses and ecstasy. The heads in these vessels thus seem to mark the boundary between reason and ecstasy afforded by the alcohol. These objects are by no means rare in using human heads to guard and mark, that is, to render visible the rim of vessels where food and drink are transported from two different domains: from the interior to the exterior, mimicking the function of ingestion, digestion, and expulsion of the life-giving properties of water and the ecstatic visions produced by the wine of fantastic zoomorphic images: dreamlike metamorphoses of animal, mineral, and vegetable. This is a bizarre circularity; it is possible to see the vessel as the result of intoxication, while the wine within it produces the intoxication. One loses oneâs head filled with wine, as the object of the vessel is a head filled with wine. The material objectification of a metalepsis is dizzying.
Gundestrup Cauldron, Denmark. Bern Museum. 150-0 BCE. Wikicommons public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silver_cauldron.jpg
A particularly striking piece from a bronze cauldron with a realistic human head wearing a Celtic torc and animated eyes flanked by the heads of two oxen was found in Rynkeby Bog in Denmark and is now housed in the National Museum, Copenhagen, dating from around the 4th century BCE. In the same collection is a perfectly-preserved aspect of the so-called âGundestrup Cauldron,â which is a gilded silver vessel featuring a head with wavy hair and a beard with corkscrew curls, also abutted by two oxen, dating from the first century BCE, said to have been produced in the Balkans but found in Denmark in 1891.[12] Later in the Bronze Age, copper-alloy bucket fittings in the shape of human heads with eyes and hair were found in Kent, England, dated to around 50 BCE.[13]
There are wide-ranging examples of drinking and cooking vessels decorated with zoomorphic or anthropomorphic heads even further afield. In Pre-Columbian art, the Moche and the Nazca, who flourished around 100 BCE-800 CE in Peru, were known for their trophy head jars, used to contain the decapitated heads of their enemies. The Nazca developed lively and expressive polychrome slip-painted clay vessels, particularly trophy-head jars, made after battles that feature âlarge raptorial birds decapitating human beings.â Moreover, the decorative style also featured zoomorphic heads that reference the Nazca headhunting cult. Several trophy heads have been discovered.[14]
In South America, the taking of heads as trophies, and for ritual use, stretches back prior to 1800 BCE and continues into the Inca period.[15] These heads were used in shamanic practices accompanied by pan pipes, where warriors drank chicha (corn beer), or hallucinogenic drugs derived from the San Pedro cactus, using vessels that feature trophy heads, as well as the cacti and pan pipes used in these ceremonies to connect to the spirit world.[16] Often, these pots were buried with the contents of the decapitated heads. Proulx explains that the:
prime purpose for taking heads was magical in nature â to ensure the continued abundance of the food crops. The trophy heads were symbolic of, or a metaphor for, regeneration and rebirth. This concept can be seen iconographically in various scenes where plants are growing from the mouths of trophy headsâŚIn their view of the world, the Nasca people must have placed great importance on the human head as a source of power. The burial of caches of trophy heads must have resulted in the concentration of a great amount of ritual power.[17]
These heads were used as offerings to the spirit world and as a way of warding off the calamities of famine, drought, and death. The trophy heads, and the vessels that feature or contain them, were meant to project a sense of agency, used as instruments to help control supernatural or natural forces.
What is remarkable is the continuum of marking these drinking and cooking vessels with human heads over several millennia. However, the impulse: superstitious or ritualistic, or both, to mark the rim, lip, and spout of these vessels with encephalitic-apotropaic symbols passed into ever-greater and more intensive decorative flourishes in the medieval era. Against the stereotypical notion that Islam forbids images, even early Islamic drinking vessels abound in brilliant zoomorphic and human-headed ewers and buckets of high-tin bronze and brass, or golden lusterware, only to be reintroduced into Europe via Italian maiolica.[18] There is also a significant sixteenth-century, or earlier, Benin bronze tradition of forming caskets and containers using human heads and decoration, along with carving wooden cups and jugs of human heads.[19]
Paintings and Sculptures
In astrolabes and atlases of the world in medieval European manuscripts and maps, it was common to see them framed by human heads. In a world map from a psalter now in the British Library, heads are painted on the very edges of the ends of the earth, marking the outer limits of the known and signaling the beginning of the fear and danger of the unknown terra incognita surrounding it.[20] In Hindu art, powerful gods are depicted wearing a garland of severed heads (the mundamala), often described as fifty or fifty-two in number, symbolizing the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. The wearer of the mundamala is thus shown as Brahman (the prelinguistic monism of the universe, reality, truth, and divinity).
The Goddess Kali. Calcutta Art Studio, Calcutta, 1883, print. 15 x 12 inches. Collection of Mark Baron and Elise Boisante. Indian Wikicommons public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calcutta_Art_Studio_-_Goddess_Kali_-_1883.jpg
Kali (Dakshina KÄlikÄ) is one of the fearsome Tantric goddesses. Kali is the goddess of death, time (the fullness of time), and change (first emerging as a distinct goddess around 600 CE). She is easily identified, wearing the mundamala. She also holds a severed head in her left hand. A good example is a striking nineteenth-century Bengali clay figure in the British Museum (G33/dc67), meant to act as an idol for worship (puja) of a black Kali with a golden crown and neckless skulls. The British Museum label relates to her blackness:
hints at the dissolution of individuality in the timeless darkness, which is also filled with the potential for new life. Kali loves battlefields and cremation grounds, where she dances surrounded by jackals and ghouls among the smoking funeral pyres. Once, her frenzied dancing threatened the stability of the whole universe, so the gods pleaded with Shiva to intervene. He succeeded in calming her by throwing himself among the corpses under her feet.[21]
As such, the rows of heads she wears as a garland vomit blood over her breasts, indicating a centripetal force â the garland is the boundary where the last vestiges of life are offered up and absorbed by the primordial darkness centered in the body of the goddess, engulfed in spasms of rage. But the mundamala also marks the containment of the goddessâs rage by SĂvaâs self-sacrifice. The worshippersâ prayers in word and gaze offered up to the goddess must alight on the row of heads and the terrible fury that lies beyond them. And because of the symbolism of the heads representing the alphabet, the heads are also the edges of articulation and language, the limits of our universe, before entering into Kaliâs prelinguistic heart of darkness, for Kali is the âdark mother.â Many of these clay figures are paraded in the streets in processions before being thrown into the cleansing river.
SĂva, as Bhairava (Incarnate Terror), is also known as the destroyer and the third deity of the Hindu triad of great gods, the Trimurti. He is also shown wearing a mundamala.[22] The heads serve to remind us of the godâs continual power of creating and destroying cycles of human civilization. Phenomenologically, the mundamala makes the worshippers or viewers wary of lifting their eyes to the deityâs face without a sense of awe or fear, which is so integral to worship and premised on the intersection between the profane and sacred. The frame of heads or eyes demarcate a boundary of ordinary consciousness that may be crossed only if fear or the exhaustion of intellectual thought are conquered. The mundamala is the boundary to another world co-existent with this, reached by the power of the gaze, which carries consciousness through the frame-garland of heads to what lies inside the head of the deity, et cetera. In Buddhism, the mundamala symbolizes the âabandonment of phenomenal appearances.â[23] Yet, this is also self-reflexive. We are also âgoing deeper into our own heads.â Such a fusion of horizons between art and consciousness and mind wandering is also interpreted as a message from the gods: when we seek to go beyond the frame of heads (and, in a sense, beyond our head), we are being invited to do so.
Mughal Painting
The last example shows us that even differences between faith traditions can be strongly marked by a row of heads. In The Disputing Physicians (c. 1596), a painted miniature in an illustrated book of poetry produced for Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), depicts a scene where two figures, each representing a different faith, are shown engaged in a debate about which religion is the true way. One has fainted, exhausted, and defeated. Behind these in the background is a representation of murals sourced from European art based on prints taken to Akbarâs court in the late sixteenth century by Jesuit missionaries to illustrate Christian doctrines in a failed attempt to convert the Muslims. The mural depicts St Matthew, the patron saint of painters, receiving guidance from an angel to record his vision so that he may paint it at a later stage. The mural is placed in a niche surrounded by a row of severed heads, which creates a boundary around the foreign cultural element. It is possible that the row of heads warns us to be cautious of the danger of following the wrong religious path, whether by going further into the pictorial space where the Christian narrative resides, and, analogously, sharing the fate of the swooning theologian in the foreground.[24]
The row of heads is a consistent framing device found in many Mughal illustrations that contain European or Hindu imagery and is usually represented as an architectural detail above an entrance. On its own, this detail may have signified little but seen in the various contexts outlined below, it is evident that such a frame of severed heads was probably used by the Mughal courtâs more superstitious artists as a magic charm or talisman to ward off the power these foreign images incorporated into Mughal illustrations, and the effects this might have on the artist or the viewer.[25] The row of heads is thus intended to warn of danger and is primarily used to signify a âthresholdâ either to guard secrets and bar the way of the traveler or enquirer, or simply to mark physically and conceptually discrete domains. The severed heads emphasize the frame that creates a self-contained area:
Self-contained means isolated from and even protected against two potential intrusions: (1) that of the pictureâs own environment, and (2) that of the spectatorâs intrusive presenceâŚframe or boundary are meant to protect that which is âwithinâ; the surface or plane that which is âbehind.â Both are seen as containing what is not of this world but of a separate or higher reality.[26]
For the Mughal Indian artist, the line of heads manifests a conceptual break that severs the dialogue between religions and the contiguity of truth and image. It provides an appropriate demarcation, propriety and superstition being the main motives, not, as might be assumed, simple mimesis or meaningless embellishment because there are many other instances where the heads have been used to isolate and encircle Christian imagery.[27] European subject matter was not singled out for this treatment alone. The heads were also used to warn viewers against Hinduism. In a folio in the British Library BÄburânÄme, Or. 3714 (c. 1590), entitled BÄbur and the Hindu Rock Sculptures at Urwa, f. 478a, severed heads adorn a Hindu temple on a hill. Another example of this architectural feature on a Hindu temple is an Akbar-period brush drawing of a prince kneeling before a Hindu ascetic surrounded by devotees, which depicts a nearby shrine carved with a row of heads.[28]
Conclusion
This essay has attempted to show how anthropological, art historical, religious, and cultural approaches to studying the head featured in antiquities, such as drinking and cooking vessels, architectural settings, and in paintings and marginalia, can open up fresh lines of inquiry and spark a rich association of ideas. This multi-disciplinary approach reveals a fundamental relationship between the head and the border or threshold, a marker that makes the viewer conscious of the bifurcation of space. However, importantly, this actual scission of space in the art object, architectural setting, and space depicted in the painting symbolizes some fundamental semantic oppositions. Thus, an actual divided space, marked by the symbol of a head, can cue a semantic space:
The fundamental building blocks of mythological systems of symbolic classification are not motifs but relationships in the sense of elementary semantic oppositions. The most important correspond to manâs sensory and spatial orientations above/below, left/right, far/near, internal/external, big/small, hot/cold, dry/wet, silent/noisy, bright/dark, and various colors arranged into a set of binary oppositions. These are later reified and supplemented by correlations of motifs in the cosmic space-time continuum (sky/earth, earth/underworld, earth/sea, north/south, east/west, day/night, winter/summer and sun/moon); correlations in the social dimension (self/other, male/female, old/young, higher/lower); contrasts at the margins of social solidarity, universal order, and of nature and culture (water/fire, domestic fire/fire of the sun, raw/cooked, home/forest, village/desert) in numerical oppositions (even/odd, three/four) in basic antinomies (life/death, happiness/unhappiness); and finally, in the most important opposition, the opposition between the sacred and the profane.[29]
I would like to suggest that what we have seen in the objects discussed in this essay is a set of oppositions such as sacred/profane, internal/external, above/below, higher/lower, raw/cooked, and by extension, harmful/unharmful, domestic/foreign, true/false, and life/death. Many of these binary opposites help us to interrogate the binary opposites organized in actual space. For example, the harmful/unharmful, domestic/foreign, and life/death, and the sacred and profane, can be signified by creating a frame, architrave, doorjamb, plinth, margin, border, or the lip, handle, or rim of drinking vessels. This draws the body into semantic space, organized by material objects and structures. With poststructuralism, it is now customary to doubt the validity of binary opposites, particularly if they are used to essentialize artworks and cultures to formulae. However, used as questions and initial points of inquiry, opposites may be seen instead as spatial distinctions and contrasts with a diversity of meanings and nuances embedded in individual cultures and periods, yielding a dynamic interplay and rich ambiguity of meanings and forms.
It is the power of the head and the face that allows us to move beyond fixed binaries. The head sparks a dynamic interplay of values in many different cultures and periods. It arrests and attracts the viewersâ gaze to make them aware of spatial and semantic thresholds and contrasts â the head in the object stares back and produces a frisson, an encounter with the viewing subject. How does this âpowerâ work in terms of the human brain, which has produced all these examples over thousands of years and across the world? How can a head staring out from a prehistorical vessel still provide an affective tone for the viewer today?
It is possible to look to evolutionary responses to answer these questions. The human brain is primed to pick out faces automatically in the world around us. In a world with potentially thousands of competing visual signals, the facial recognition system overrides them all and filters out all else. Scientists have found that face-selective neural responses are strongly related to spikes in visual attention, breaking the visual flow of free-viewing eye behavior with automatic fixations of the gaze in microseconds.[30] This instant fixation on faces is âecologically important because, in real social situations, directing oneâs gaze toward or away from faces and parts thereof (in particular, the eyes) is a crucial social signal and sets the affective tone of the social interaction.â[31] Thus, it is an important evolutionary development for primates to recognize friends or enemies, anger or attraction, and to quickly evaluate different animal heads as hunters or hunted. Face-sensitive neurons fire in microseconds without voluntary control: we do not choose to see a face in a visual field that is very complex; it seems to stare out at us; this is quite different from voluntarily choosing to see a face, one that we desire to see or are looking at while having a conversation. Still, in many of the objects and artworks surveyed here, we note the face that seems to stare out at us, and we may stay with it and think about the function of the object and ponder the reason why it seems to be placed there and why it seems to echo many other placements in similar objects in different cultures and times. The perceptual system is so rapid that it almost seems phenomenologically that the face jumps out at us before we even have time to recognize it or put it into words. From the beginning of the evolution of the facial recognition system, image makers, artisans, and artists did something that other primates could not do â they made graphic marks and shapes in materials to explore and express this facial recognition system, externalizing it in clay and twisted metal. Each act marking a head or face on the surface of a cave or in the sand reaffirmed this essential aspect of human nature: creating a face in inanimate material that appears to stare back. It is not surprising then that these heads, which seemed to possess such mysterious power, were carved onto thresholds and borders of spatial domains that marked important religious, cultural, and psychological distinctions and rites of passage.
[1] Of course, one cannot erase the memory of the towers of heads in Timurâs conquests, the Christian catacombs in Rome, and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
[2] Published in Heron, Tobias. âHeadhunting in Iron Age Europe. An evolutionary adaptation to a contingent environment,â 1884, Special Issue 1, 2020, 12â13. In the medieval Iranian poetry of the Khamsa of Nizami, there is a story of a princess who paints a seductive self-portrait luring men to her castle, and she then beheads them with the help of magic talismans. The heads are put on the embattlements â the princessâs failed suitors who were foolish enough to attempt to overpower the talismans.
[3] Zimmer, Heinrich and edited by Joseph Campbell. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilisation (New York: Harper Torchbooks: 1946), 175.
[4] Douglas, Mary. Purity, and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge 1966), 115.
[5] Pearson, Michael Parker and Colin Richards. Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 25.
[6] Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), 75.
[8] Meletinsky, Eleazar. The Poetics of Myth (London: Routledge, 2000), 34.
[9] See Powell, Thomas G. E. Prehistoric Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), 99.
[10] See examples in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, USA: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shang-dynasty and an altar set now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/76974
[12] Refer to âCeltic Deity, Gundestrup Cauldron,â World History Encyclopedia, https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13359/celtic-deity-gundestrup-cauldron/, date accessed.
[14] See âBowl,â The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/310356, date accessed. There are several key pieces in the Metropolitan Museum. For example see: âHead Jar,â The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/310517, date accessed.
[15] Proulx, Donald A. âRitual uses of trophy heads in ancient Nasca society,â in Benson, Elizabeth and Anita Cook (eds.). Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 119â136.
For an extensive study of trophy head practices all over the world, see Heron, 2020. The author deals with head hunting attributable to various factors such as trophy heads in war, appeasement of spirits, prestige, and status, trade, and peace offerings between tribes as widely distributed as Britain (Bredon Hill Hillhead, Caithness but also much later if one includes putting heads on pikes and embattlements in the medieval and later periods all over Europe), Montenegro, Southern France, Irian Jaya of West Papua, Nagaland (Northwest India), Jivaro (Peru), MÄori (New Zealand), Ibo (Nigeria), Mundurucu (Brazil), West Sumba, East Sumba (Indonesia), Timor and Ilongot (Philippines).
[17] Ibid., 135. MÄori also kept decapitated heads, mokomakai, that were âembalmed and preserved during peace as well as war. This honor was usually reserved for persons of importance and their loved ones, including women and children. The heads remained with the families of the deceased, who kept them in ornately carved boxes. They were protected by strict taboos and brought out only during sacred ceremoniesâ: Gilbert, Stephen G. and Cheralea Gilbert. Tattoo History: A Sourcebook. An Anthology of Historical Records of Tattooing Throughout the World (New York: Juno Books, 2000), 67.
[18] See, for example, a thirteenth-century octagonal cast brass mortar made in Iran, where there are heads carved into the sides, and the inscriptions invoke a spirit of protection and immunity from danger for the owner. Refer to Melikian-Chirvani, Assadullah S. Islamic Metalwork from the Iranian World, 8th-18th centuries (London: HMSO, 1982), 161â163. The author notes that âSince mortars were an essential accessory of pharmacy and alchemy, as well as magic, some unorthodox inspiration might, perhaps, account for this strange iconography.â (p.162). There are earlier examples: the famous Bobrinski Bucket (Hermitage St. Petersburg), 1163, inlaid brass, has dragon-headed handles and human-headed hastae on the uprights of the inlaid calligraphy which declares blessings of health and prosperity to the owner. See  Irwin, Robert. Islamic Art (London: Laurence King, 1997), 84.
[19] See Hall, Henry Usher. âAfrican Cups Embodying Human Forms,â The Museum Journal, 15:3, 1924 (originally published), https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/1246/, accessed date.
[20] See a world map from a medieval psalter in the British Library Ms. 28618 f. 9r in Camille, 1992, 14. The heads appear on a circle surrounding the world at the cardinal points.
[21] Refer to âFigure,â The British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1894-0216-10, accessed date.
[22] SĂva Bhairava committed the sin of severing one of the heads of Brahma, for which he was punished by being marked with the fifth head of Brahma stuck to his hand and forced to wander in the wilderness. This could only be washed away by a confessional pilgrimage to the Ganges. In many representations of SĂva Bhairava, he is shown wearing a crown of skulls and a severed head as the central jewel in the crown. (British Museum OA 1952 11-1-9. Gift H. G. Beasley). In the more benign form of SĂva, coupled with Parvati, he wears an effigy of the Ganges, often portrayed as his consort, as the head of a woman in his matted hair, creating a confluence of associations, with his being cleansed of the head of Brahman by the Ganges.
[23] Huntington, John C. and Dina Bangdel. The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art (Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2003), 270.
[24] For an extensive formal, mythological, and iconographical analysis of Mughal art, see Minissale, Gregory. Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
[25] âA talisman is a magic image which is supposed to have the power to hinder people from approaching places near which it is put.â Wilson, C. E. Commentary to the Haft Peykar (London: Probsthain & Company, 1924), 67. As a repellent force, the talisman may keep away good things as well as bad: âThe reason is a soul, and thou art its body. Thy soul is a treasure, and thou art its talisman. How can this treasure give thee light, until thou breakest the talisman at its door.â Darab, Ghulam H. (trans.). Makhhzanol Asrar: The Treasury of Mysteries of Nezami of Ganjeh (London: Probsthain & Company, 1945), 230.
[26] Puttfarken, Thomas. The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 7.
[27] The same motif, represented as a row of heads on the architectural frieze of a background building or mural, appears in various Mughal paintings. There is a Mughal Virgin and Child, now in the San Diego Museum of Art, published in Okada, Amina. Imperial Mughal Painters, Indian Miniatures from the 16th and 17th Centuries (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 87 (fig. 84). Another row of heads appears in a miniature in the Johnson Album, British Library, a Last Supper, far top left of the picture, reproduced in Butler, John F. Christian Art in India (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1986), 103. Similarly, a frieze of carved heads was added to a tinted drawing now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of St. Catherine of Alexandria with Preceptors IM.284-1913. In yet another religious painting, this time a Presentation at the temple, a woman sits on a Savonarola chair, signing with a quill pen an open book held by a maid. In the foreground stands a large ewer with a boldly painted head, which may be taken as another form of the talismanic device of severed heads, see Christieâs sale catalog, Important Islamic and Indian Manuscript, and Miniatures, October 16, 1980, Lot 63. Two other instances are a tinted drawing of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the Prophetess in the British Library Johnson Album, 14.4 (heads on the architectural frieze and pillar) and a tinted drawing of a Christian priest kneeling in prayer with the feature of a row of heads in the background and two figures on a wall (Johnson 14.5.)
[28] See Sothebyâs sale catalog, Fine Indian and Persian Miniatures, London, July 9, 1979, Lot 175.
[30] Minxha, J. et al. âFixations Gate Species-Specific Responses to Free Viewing of Faces in the Human and Macaque Amygdala,â Cell Reports, 18:4, 2017, 878â891.
[31] Ibid., 888. (My italics). This aspect is based on a study by N. J. Emery. See Emery, N.J. âThe eyes have it: the neuroethology, function, and evolution of social gaze,â Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 24:6, 2000, 581â604.
Gregory Minissale is a Professor of Art History, specializing in global modern and contemporary art and critical theory at the University of Auckland. His research interests are in the psychology of art, mental health, multicultural phenomenologies, and queer theory. His books: Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism (2021) and The Psychology of Contemporary Art (2015) are both published by Cambridge University Press.