The Myth Of The 'Celtic' Head

John Billingsley

I have been a headhunter now for fifteen years. It was a spontaneous conversion for which I have no one to blame or credit save myself....

But perhaps hunting is too aggressive a word for the gentle pursuit of seeking out carved heads, yet the pursuit is the same - one gets to know the favoured places, one seeks in those places first of all and on those lucky days one emerges with a clutch of drawings or photos and another crudely-carved head goes down on the record.

Many people know the kind of heads that I look for as 'Celtic heads', and indeed when I started researching and cataloguing it seemed that the general impression was that either the heads were actually Celtic (or Romano-Celtic), or were heirs in a continuous line of tradition from Romano-British times. This idea has come under serious scrutiny since, but is still encountered in antiquarian and earth mysteries circles.

Originally deriving from Anne Ross' masterly Pagan Celtic Britain (1967), the 'Celtic head' is characterised as a crude and stylised approximation of the human head, with certain typical features such as a pear-shaped face and lentoid eyes. Its frequency in Celtic culture led Ross to describe its religious significance as constituting a cult of the human head. However, while most archaeologists agree in general about the cultic significance of the head in Celtic religion, they also feel that the case has perhaps been overstated admittedly with the benefit of enquiry that simply was not available when Ross was writing her masterwork. I myself can see no doubt about the magical and mediatory role of the human head and representations of it in Celtic society, but I would suggest that the 'Celtic head' that we hear of today, as an object of folk-religious art, hardly exists. In all, the term 'Celtic head' seems to owe its appeal more to modem romantic notions of the Celts than to any identification of an artefact with Celtic period or culture.

Any serious investigation of the subject reveals the cultic significance of the head to not only pre- and postdate the Celts, but also that the kind of stylisation encountered in Celtic circles has much wider currency. There are several reasons to question the modern understanding of the 'Celtic head' . As I have mentioned, the human head quite obviously had mystical meaning in cultures other than the Celts, occurring the world over, including pre-Celtic Europe. Thus, the religious perception of the head was not unique to the Celts, although it can be argues that they gave more intense concrete expression to the motif than it had ever had before.

Another important caveat to Ross' work is the actual cult status of the head. Various readers of Pagan Celtic Britain have understood the expression 'head cult' to imply that the head itself was the object of devotion, and although the chapter itself in that work does not necessarily imply that, some of Ross' later work has. This literal view seems rather doubtful; the wide range of contexts in which the image is found makes it apparent to my mind that the head functioned as a symbol, which itself was a common thread between bona fide cults and folk belief.

Another problem with the 'Celtic head' is the alleged style. Again. this is not a point that Ross has strongly emphasised in Pagan Celtic Britain, but it has been reinforced by antiquarians attracted to her theory, such as Sidney Jackson. The typical features that are typically quoted for the 'Celtic head' have so many variations that the best one can say is that it is a definition of exclusion rather than inclusion; anything which looks like portraiture or classical figurative art is not a 'Celtic head'. Yet some of those heads illustrated in catalogues of Celtic art, including Pagan Celtic Britain, quite plainly stretch this definition, too. Of the crude heads which do fit the definition, some are quite obviously deliberately carved to avoid portraiture and to present a symbolically appropriate likeness of the head, but others give rise to a suspicion that the mason just wasn't very good. It is to be borne in mind that until Romanisation, the Celts particularly in Britain - had very little experience of carving in stone, so that at least some heads that can be authentically dated to the Celtic period may be crude because they are attempts of the artisan to familiarise themself with the new material.

However, by far.the most damaging criterion to the notion of the 'Celtic head' as we encounter it today is that of date. It is not possible, of course, to date stone carving, and the most reliable evidence associating a stone head with the Celts is its recovery from an archaeological level corresponding to that period. As with many portable objects, this is not always possible, and many heads have been classed as Celtic not because of their archaeological provenance but because of their superficial similarity to carvings strongly indicated to be Celtic. This was more the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s than recent years, when it has come to be realised that quite a number of stone heads previously thought to be Celtic probably date from considerably later than that. Ross' original sample of stone heads largely from the Hadrian's Wall border region which has provided a large amount of information on Celtic religion, probably suffers less from this re evaluation of data than do heads in other areas, but nonetheless are still subject to the same reservations.

One area which shows how unreliable the term 'Celtic head' is as a descriptive label for a certain type of artefact is West Yorkshire. Here, especially in the upper Aire and Calder valleys, an astonishing corpus of crudely carved stone heads led both Sidney Jackson and Anne Ross in the 1960s to suspect they had stumbled on a treasure house of continuity, but by the early 1970s it had become apparent that caution was vital. When I took up research in this region in the late 1970s, it became apparent that very few perhaps ten percent at mod - of the literally hundreds of heads in West Yorkshire could be ascribed to Celtic origin, even bearing in mind the persistence of local placenames and customs testifying to Celtic influence and late settlement. In fact, it soon became apparent that most of the crude heads in this area, at lead, were of seventeenth century date, a time for which no claim for Celtic continuity could credibly be made¹. Further research indicated that the same motif of the severed head occurred locally in the same century in furniture and judicial execution by means of the guillotine, while nationally it was found on vernacular architecture of other areas (though to a lesser extent than Wed Yorkshire) and on weaponry (topics to be discussed in future articles for Northern Earth).

The situation is, in other words, that the majority of 'Celtic heads' found in England are quite clearly not Celtic at all! Moreover, the absence of any style that could plausibly be advanced as typically Celtic further renders the term 'Celtic head' unserviceable at best and misleading at worst. There can be no denying the religious significance of the severed human head in Celtic culture, nor that the head was frequently, for deliberate symbolic purposes, carved in a highly fundamental manner so as not to resemble any human of this world - yet to describe any and every such carving as Celtic is to misunderstand the power of the head motif in cultures other than the Celts, to decry the vitality of post mediaeval folk culture in England, and to miss the very important question of why the human head, treated in a most basic and symbolic way, has maintained its important role in folk perception and resurfaced so strongly in the 17th century.

The 'Celtic head' is therefore a problem. To call a seventeenth century head a 'Celtic head' is like calling Stonehenge a Druidical monument - simple nonsense. We need to use another term that embraces all those crude stone or wooden heads which embody deliberately non classical features, whether through artifice or lack of skill, and whether undateable or known to be of post-Celtic date. We need a term which will save archaeologists and antiquarians the embarrassment of conferring prehistory upon a relatively modern object. We need a term which will demystify the Celts a little. We need a term which may remove the temptation for antique dealers, buyers ant thieves to displace a head from its original provenance. We need a term which describes accurately the recurrent cultural urge to make a human face as an image to avert evil or otherwise have dealings with the otherworld and understands a depersonalised mask as the most appropriate way to express that intention. It would seem advisable to restrict the term 'Celtic head' for use only when referring to those carved by pagan Celtic masons. As a generic descriptive for this whole class of heads, I suggest 'archaic head', for that is what they all are, whether carved in the final centuries of this millennium or the final centuries of European prehistory.

NOTE 1.In any case, the fashion for carving crude stylised human heads moves in waves, rather than as a continuous tradition, suggesting that we need to look at a somewhat more enigmatic notion - the process of 'recurrence' rather than 'continuity ' in magical and religious custom.

ILLUSTRATIONS: A Selection of 'Quasi-Celtic' Heads drawn by Craig Chapman

1. Todmorden, W. Yorks.. (15th C.)
2. Heptonstall, W. Yorks. (c. 1965)
3. Yorkshire 'mortuary chair' (17th C.)
4. 1660 datestone, Halifax, W. Yorks.
5. 1855 datestone, Bacup, Lancs.
6. Hebden Bridge, West Yorks. (1795)
7. Ikoma, Japan
8. Filitosa, Corsica (2000 1500 BCE)
9. 3-faced head, Corleck, N. Ireland (Celtic)

PRlNCIPAL REFERENCES

BILLINGSLEY, John. Archaic Head-carving in West Yorkshire& Beyond. M.A.Thesis, Sheffield University, 1993.

GREEN, Miranda. The Gods of the Celts. Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1986.

JACKSON, Sidney. Celtic & Other Stone Heads. Private, 1973.

ROSS, Anne. Pagan Celtic Britain. London, 1967 & later editions.

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