Poet and visionary, Lord Byron was infamous for (among other things) transforming a skull found in his back garden into a drinking cup, burnished and set with chased silver, inscribed with a poem. In Tibetan Bhuddist practice, a katana, a vessel made from a skull, serves as a container for offerings made to any unfriendly deity; a tangible reminder of the transitory nature of life.
During the medieval Christian craze for annexing bits and pieces of saints and other venerated folks, skulls, too, were confiscated, altered, and used to counteract evil influences. The reverent hoped that drinking wine or medicine from a saintly skull would counteract poison, ensure truth telling, keep at bay the forces of darkness. Saints Theodulf and Sebastion, both parted out to sanctuaries, monasteries, churches in Northern Europe, ended as brainpan chalices.
We humans tend to collect oddments to represent things larger than ourselves; stones and twigs, bits of eggshell, a fallen leaf, a clipping of hair, bits of bones, collages of what we see, remember, dream. We know, have known since the beginning , that the universe is larger than ourselves, needs must be made tangible in paint, song, metal, stone.
I imagine that my ancestors, Celt, Goth, and Viking, mongrels all, took the heads of vanquished enemies, carried away jouncing at saddle bow and fashioned into jeweled cups. I see the truncated mementos shelved in rows, grinning. Looking a former adversary in the face, so to speak, must engender a sense of both triumph and relief. There’s a compelling immediacy to the bones of the skull, a sense of things contained, the remnants of tributaries of thought.
My grandmother died over a long period … or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she slowly sublimated. Like so many extremely elderly women, after a hundred years she just began to disappear. Each day she grew visibly smaller, her interactions more limited. The overwhelming need she had manifested for a century to talk, to connect, to interact, to socialize, all melted away into ever longer naps and periods of immobility.
I remember sitting at Priscilla’s bedside after a month of seeming coma, her once well-upholstered limbs draped in swathes of thin skin, batiked in bruises. She was quite literally turning into a shadow of her former self. I thought perhaps this was the week I’d be calling family, making use of the prearranged funeral contract.
Suddenly her eyes opened, great bright blue cataract-hazed pools set deep in bony orbits. She glared at me, suspicious, and gripped my arm with her claws. I extricated one hand, made sure her hearing aid was firmly seated in the ear nearest me.
“Grandmother, you know it’s ok to go now”, I said. “What are you waiting for?”
Silence. Her eyes closed. No contact today, any more than days previous. Suddenly, I heard what sounded incongruously like a giggle, eyes wide open and full of joy.
“I might miss something.”
She closed her eyes again, loosened her hold on my wrist, and drifted off into the depths. I never heard another coherent sentence from her again.
Each day after, as I sat by her bed, the bones of her body came clearer and clearer, like a skeleton in an archeological dig, one stroke at a time brushing away the sand of flesh, sand of time. At the end, the shape of her skull was clear, only the thin veil of skin and shreds of fine downy hair clinging to the beautiful bones.
I found myself plotting how to liberate that gorgeous skull before the last journey to the funeral home and crematorium. Surely the mortician could be satisfied with the rest of her, ample material to manufacture the “cremains”. Perhaps I could set her on the granite mantel piece in the living room that she’d sat in for 50 years. She’d return home, and I’d lay claim to her century’s memories .
I imagined holding her skull, cradling it in my hands.
Last summer I held the skull of a remote ancestor at the Tomb of Eagles. There, above the North Sea, I gazed into the cranium of a woman dead for possibly two millennia and traced the markings of blood vessels etched into the underside of the bone, like the meanders of the river in the Kilmartin Valley. They made perfect Celtic swirls and knots, mirroring the carved knots on the standing stones a few miles away.
Did my ancestors, too, peer into the opened skulls of their dead? Did they try to capture the traceries of thought and memory in their boney carved standing stones, skeletal counterparts of the now inscrutable blue tattoos once inked deep into living skin?
Skulls
Masks
Tomb of the Eagles
Autopsy
Seed pod
Skara Brae
Trepanning
Head injuries…saving bone chunks
Medieval reliquaries.
Cave paintings
Celtic knots
Baba Yaga
