Burn It or Bury It

Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims

(Page 5 of 8)

Hair derives its existence from within the body; it grows with an apparent life of its own; it can be separated from the body; and it is relatively difficult to destroy. Thanks to these aspects of its natural history, hair came to be considered inextricably linked with the life force itself. These attributes in turn led to a role in magic. Hair was not only important as it grew but was deemed valuable even after being cut. Discarded, it might be used by a bird to make a nest, an action that somehow acquired the reputation of resulting in headaches or even death for the hair's owner. One underlying theme of the Samson story was the widespread belief that to allow your hair to fall into an enemy's hands was to court disaster. Aleister Crowley, the influential twentieth-century proponent of witchcraft, secretly disposed of his own cut hair so that his foes couldn't use it in spells against him. This is the kind of primitive magic practiced by people who venerate the supposed relics of saints or by anyone who hoards a lock of a lover's hair.

Like other primates, we groom ourselves and each other. Inevitably the human imagination has run wild with this natural habit. One medieval belief apparently traces to the sparks of static electricity created when we comb our hair. Witches, and sometimes women in general, were thought to influence storms, to create lightning and even hail by combing their hair. Some ancient Romans, convinced that untimely haircuts inspired such atmospheric turmoil, waited until storms were actually in progress before flocking to the barber. Cutting hair at the wrong time of the moon, at a bad time of day, in March, on Sunday all have been prohibited.

Witches could increase the power of a spell merely by shaking their hair during its incantation. Fortunately for the victim, however, the power of hair could work both ways. People who thought themselves bewitched could throw some of their own hair into a fire to afflict the witch with the pain of the flames. Another superstition claimed that the brighter the hair burned when thrown into a fire, the longer its owner would live. In India the Bhils once defused the magical powers of suspected witches by clipping a lock of their hair and burying it. The Tiwi, who live on Bathurst Island north of Australia, believe that the recently dead are lonely and desire to take their survivors to the grave with them. Knowing that they are in pukimani (spiritual danger), the survivors disguise themselves by painting their bodies and cutting off and burning their hair. A superstition in Germany led people to carry a bag of straight hair on the abdomen for three days to learn if they were the victims of spells. If the hair did not become tangled during this time, they considered themselves free of magical problems.

In his 1946 volume Witchcraft and Black Magic, Montague Summers describes the murder of Nelson Rehmeyer, in Pennsylvania in 1929. Locally considered a practitioner of black magic, Rehmeyer was thought to have placed a hex on the Hess family. Informed that the only efficient way to battle a hex is with a countercharm, several men set out to procure the requisite lock of Rehmeyer's hair. Unfortunately he was reluctant to part with it, and in the ensuing struggle he was killed.

Other reasons for keeping hair clippings have arisen. "It is held by the lower orders," wrote an observer in Dublin in the 1860s, ". . . that human hair should never be burned, but should be buried, it being stated in explanation that at the resurrection the former owner of the hair will come to seek for it." James Frazer, the Scottish anthropologist, described in his huge compilation The Golden Bough the beliefs of old women in an Irish village "who, having ascertained from Scripture that the hairs of their heads were all numbered by the Almighty, expected to have to account for them at the day of judgement. In order to be able to do so they stuffed the severed hair away in the thatch of their cottages."

Historians consider a fifth-century-b.c.e. Zoroastrian liturgy entitled the Vendidad the source of many surviving Eastern notions about the magical power of hair. In it, Ahura Mazda, the supreme creative deity of Zoroastrianism, instructs Zarathustra in the proper disposal of bodily artifacts. The god tells him to transport both nail parings and hair clippings at least ten paces away from the faithful, twenty from fire, thirty from water, and fifty from the bundles of holy twigs called baresma. "Then," he adds with Monty Python precision, thou shalt dig a hole, ten fingers deep if the earth is hard, twelve fingers deep if it is soft; thou shalt take thy hair down there and thou shalt say aloud these fiend-smiting words: "Out of his pity Mazda made plants grow." Thereupon thou shalt draw three furrows with a knife of metal around the hole, or six, or nine, and thou shalt chant the Ahuna Vairya three times, or six, or nine.

The Ahuna Vairya was the most frequently uttered Zoroastrian prayer, roughly equivalent to the Lord's Prayer in Christianity. Fingernail clippings required separate rituals. Both hair and nails, united with that other potent bodily product, blood, were used by the ancient Egyptians in a potion that supposedly rendered a victim powerless to resist the magician's influence. And, in one poignant ritual, Egyptian widows buried a lock of their hair with their husband's body, presumably as a vow of continuing devotion in the afterlife.

Samson's Hair

I confess there are in Scripture Stories that do exceed the Fables of Poets, and to a captious Reader sound like Gargantua or Bevis. Search all the Legends of times past, and the fabulous conceits of these present, and 'twill be hard to find one that deserves to carry the Buckler unto Sampson. . . .

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Michael Sims has written about science and culture for newspapers and radio, and for magazines ranging from American Archaeology to Creative Loafing. He is also the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts and Adam's Nave.