“Belonging to them are many strange things... Among these is the head, in which fortune-tellers from among them believe. They set it up under caput draconis. They find a hairy, blue-black eyed man with knotted eyebrows. They lure him with whatever he wants until they bring him to the house of the temples. He is stripped and seated in a trough filled with sesame oil up to throat. It is then sealed at the top just from where the head stretches out. They fasten the cover with nails and seal it with lead in such a way that his head remains outside and his body in the oil. Then they feed him dried figs soaked in sesame oil each day. They suffumigate his nose and face with an incense they call the incense of amazement. They recite invocations [special] to them and they keep doing this for 40 days without giving him water while the effect of the oil takes place until his nerves are softened, his joints are relaxed, his veins break, and he becomes pliable as wax. On the appropriate day, they congregate and recite special invocations, and suffumigate with an incense. They grab his head and pull it from the first vertebrae. It is pulled out along with the veins attached to it until they all exit from the vertebrae, and the body remains in the oil. Then they seat him in an embrasure over sifted ash that they make from olive ash, containing a little ash from the remains of [burnt] bodies. They wrap him with some fluffed cotton and suffumigate him with an incense of theirs and the head would tell them about the rise and drop of prices, the alteration of states, and what happens in the world, while his eyes are still seeing but not blinking. If perhaps they ignore planetary devotions, he would demand them, chastise them, and tell them about what goes on in their very selves, and if they perhaps should ask him about the sciences and arts, he would answer."
Ghāya, Brahmans (II.12)This weirdo it right up my alley! A prophetic severed head that you get by soaking a body in goo until it gets all bendy and you can just pull it off!? That's amazing! My amazing partner Jeanne told me about this after she saw it in a twitter thread by the scholar Liana Saif @MaslamaQ. Saif goes on to detail how Caliph al-Ma’mūn accused the entire town of Harran, of being in a cult devoted to a prophetic head he dubbed the ''Adherents of the Head''!
She also points out that Ibn al-Nadīm (an Arabic scholar from 932-995CE) & Al-Dimashqī (an Arabic geographer 1256-1327CE) also wrote descriptions, with slight variations, of the prophetic head. To be a bummer of a realist, it turns out it was really an basic illusion where someone was under a table with a hole cut out and their head was in a plate of congealing blood. It's similar in theme to the Mechanical Turk in which an automaton could best a human at a game of chell. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. Similar to Ama*on's Mechanical Turk in which menial search tasks are performed by actual (extremely poorly paid) humans but meant to look like high powered processors.
Even though the prophetic head was a hoax I still love it. And we'll get to even weirder hoaxes later.
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