Cephalophores!

🎃The Spoooooooookiest Saints!🎃

What’s a cephalophore, you ask? Some kind of cephalopod? A cool, underground subculture? The super-est of superfoods? A conspiracy???

Nope, nope, nope, and almost, but nope! Cephalophores are a type of Catholic Saint. We have martyrs, incorruptibles, confessors— all kinds of saintly mini-categories that you may or may not be familiar with. Cephalophores, though, are of specific folkloric interest because they are not named less for what they did and rather how people remember them. Cephalophores are Catholic saints who are commonly depicted as headless. They did the no-head thing wayyyyy before the Headless Horseman made it cool.

St. Aphrodisius

One of the earliest Cephalophores is St. Aphrodisius who was martyred in around 65 A.D. under Emperor Nero. These saints pop up through the centuries in all parts of the Christianized world, many of them martyrs under Roman Emperors, but some completely unrelated. The general structure of Cephalophore tales goes something like this:

- Person A is acting as witness for Christianity (preaching, praying, becoming a nun, etc)

- Person B doesn’t like that (an emperor, a governor, pagans, a suitor)

- Person B beheads Person A

- Person A picks up their own head and keeps acting as a witness (oftentimes continuing a homily or praying)

- Person A eventually stops, sets their head down, and dies

- People stunned by the miracle convert to Christianity and build a temple/church in Person A’s honor

- Person A gets canonized as a saint!

Of course, there are many variations of this motif. The Welsh St. Winifred, for example, is venerated as a martyr cephalophore even though she ultimately survived her beheading after her head was restored by her uncle, St. Bueno, who was of course dead at the time. She became a nun and eventually an abbess. St. Chrysolius was a bishop sentenced to execution by Rome, but the guards missed his neck and just took off the top of his skull which split into three springs on the ground and now their waters cure throat and eye ailments. St. Denis, by far the most widely known cephalophore, became the Patron Saint of Headaches, and St. Emygdius earned himself a cult after his intercession saved a small Italian town from earthquakes.

So what’s up with this headless motif?

Catholics have a reputation for being gratuitously gory in their expressions of conquering death, and things only get more bloody the deeper you dive. Eternal life was one of the biggest selling points of early Christianity, so it’s no wonder that these sorts of traditions and stories resonated so strongly with the newly converted. Early Catholic artists and storytellers were clearly inspired by seeing the flesh as sacred, but also discardable. Statues of St. Lucy still have her carrying her own eyes in a little bowl, St. Bartholomew carries his own skin, and every Mass we eat our own god! But instead of being perceived as grotesque or horrifying, these expressions are perceived as exciting. They demonstrate a playfulness around death, that death is not something to fear but something full of wonder and excitement. When you die, anything could happen! And if you have faith, well, it’ll probably be something cool?