Imagining the Possibilities Headdresses of a European Shaman**
A cold wind blows a light snow under the door skins of a reed hut. There, a woman bent and burdened by a hidden twist in the spine, hunched over a bright hot bed of coals, sputtering flames leap up as fat drips down from the meat cooking slowly over top. Her dirty hands move quickly as she works the hide of a young buck. She scrapes the flesh using an old rib filed flat and sharp, while humming the Deer-Hide-Processing song, nearly as old as the stones making up the ring around her cooking fire.
Reaching up to turn the darkening meat of flayed roast, she burns her fingertips. As quick as her hand recoils, the finger lands between her lips, soothed by her tongue. She spits a curse into the fire, and thinks to the remaining herbs just beyond the firelight she will collect in the morning to help with the swelling burn.
She has helped many before with charms and teas, hot poultices and the right prayers and offerings to the right spirits intended to help heal the harms. She is known for these skills, praised and feared as far as the stories of her powers have travelled. She is healer, helper, holy intermediary between the sky and the soil, the sun and the dark night, the blood and the desiccated leaves crunching underfoot. She knows the bones of beasts and the beasts come when she calls. She sang the dream which called the quarry. She called the hunt which brought the Deer who gave the meat to sustain her and her kith through the long winter nights.
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I saw this image a couple of years ago on the blog “Gather Victoria” of a woman, whose face was mostly obscured by a headdress made from the pelt, skull cap, antlers, and teeth of a Red Deer. There were tusks of a Boar framing what is revealed of her face below the eyes hidden by a dozen dangling teeth. Drooping over the forehead is the dark nose of the Deer perfectly skinned from the skull.
This, of course, is an artists rendering of a ancient headdress found in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Quite a few more headdresses similar to this have also been found in North Yorkshire in England. The headdress found in Germany is from around 7,000 – 6500 BCE, and the English ones have been figured to be about 11,000 years old. 24 headdresses found in North Yorkshire make up about 90% of all such known artifacts discovered.
The Red Deer buck whom the skull cap and antlers, and other assorted pieces came from is assumed to be about 50% larger than modern Red Deer from the area. It was also noted that some of the branches of the antlers had been removed, some seemingly before the headdresses were put to use, possibly to lighten the load of the wearer. Among the frontlet pieces found all had perforations carved out in front and sometimes in back, likely for some sort of lashing to affix the piece to the wearers head. Other headdresses with examples of the antlers being debranched possibly after the headdress had been long used, possibly in an act of decommissioning the headdress. The removed branches would have likely been used for the fabrication of barbed projectile tips for hunting and fishing.
I am curious about, inspired by, these headdresses not only because they are beautiful mythic artifacts of prehistoric connection with the landbase, but also in light of the white appropriations of indigenous headdresses here in North America; Why not offer white-encultured, euro-descended folks something that may have more meaning and connection to their own lineages and ancestries? How can we come to know our own ancestral regalia?
In a time when many of us white folks feel a strong disconnect from the land where we live it could be a beautiful craft wrought of patience, respect for our animal neighbours, and inspire deeper reverence for the natural world. Many white folks hunt but pass up the opportunities to work the hides and use the bones of the animals they kill. Why not remember our shared ancestral obligations and responsibilities to use what we take and to honour and elevate the animals who we hunt?
This work may be complicated by the fact that we are still settlers on others territories, but perhaps this work of reconnecting to our own lost traditions which were colonized out of our ancestors thousand or so years ago may bring a sense of solidarity, recognizing the work that still needs to be done to ensure that the folks who are indigenous to this place have the access to the land they want and need to achieve their own ancestral traditions.
I hope to learn more about deep ancestral traditions that have been unearthed from the soil of my long ago European family, and maybe through this uncovering find ways that my folks may have been in touch with the land. Imagine the possibilities of what it may have looked like? Imagine the possibilities of how it could look like now? Imagine the possibilities of what it may look like in the future? How will it feel? How would we like it to feel?
to learn more, check these out:
Archaeological Finds from Germany
Headdress reconstruction throws light on hunter-gatherer rituals
**In the research around these headdresses, the wearer is referred to as a Shaman, which originates from the Tungusic word šaman, meaning "one who knows". I feel complicated in using this word as it wouldn’t have been the title held by the person who I am hoping to describe. These days, the English language lacks appropriate titles and names to describe the intermediaries between the spirit of the land and the culture of humans. We could err on the side of “witch”, but this carries too much weight of the middle ages/burning times at one end of the spectrum, or the cartoonish Disneyfication at the other end. I considered the title “Seeress” but this name does not imply a strong connection with the land, nor does sorcerer, which I also find too fantastical and is now rooted in the imagery and language of “Dungeons and Dragons” (nothing against D&D, though) and associated genres. Perhaps borrowing from Proto-Indo-European languages we might use the title of “Taubran” which literally would translate to “one who practices magic”.
May we find the words again.