Druid haircuts

[Walhalla-Wacht]

This may already be in another thread (bare with me, I'm new here) and may not be of much relevance, but I was wondering if anyone knew anything about the details of the druids hairstyles. I read somewhere that they shaved the front of their heads from ear to ear, as opposed to the Christian/Catholic monk method of the top of their head shaven of.
Any further info?

[Dathi]

Greetings,
You may find this pikkie of interest, a representation of the Celtic tonsure. As seemingly worn by St Colmcille.

colm1.jpg

Colmcille Tonsure

(213.78 KiB) Downloaded 1304 times

An "Examination of the Celtic Tonsure" is here: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4489324/THE ... XAMINATION

Dathi

[Frog]

Eeek!

That's what my hair's doing of it's own!!!!

[DJ Droood]

you know what it makes his head look like, eh?

[Nicholaas]

There is no way on this green earth I would do that to my head.

[wyeuro]

i've never been able to believe in this 'druid tonsure'. i believe they may have worn a hat, which over a long life-time wore away circular areas of their hair, or been genetically prone to a particular pattern of baldness, or both, that may have even been imitated in renaissance times by would-be reconstructionists misled by descriptions or even pictures that no longer exist, although women used to remove all the hair from their foreheads as a kind of fashion in the renaissance - that too may have been a mistaken imitation. the celts were/are prone to baldness, the latin types were not, and the latin writers of rome may have thought the druids' natural baldness was a carefully tended sacred tonsure because they couldn't imagine it happening naturally.
wyverne /|\

[DJ Droood]

The tonsure was worn by slaves in ancient times...in the case of monks, their master was Christ...no idea if the druids had one...think I read they did somewhere, but who knows...Romans wore their hair to their necks. The Germanics wore their hair long and styled, as a sign of their freedom. The Dying Gaul has hair like a 70`s glam rocker...a spiky mullet...perhaps druids should wear lime-spiked mullets.

[Jake]

the celts were/are prone to baldness, the latin types were not, and the latin writers of rome may have thought the druids' natural baldness was a carefully tended sacred tonsure because they couldn't imagine it happening naturally.

On the contrary, the Romans were very familiar with male pattern baldness, as a stroll through a museum display of Roman busts will reveal. Julius Caesar very famously sported a comb-over. And in his "Epigrams," Martial satirizes several men for their baldness and their attempts to disguise it.

[wyeuro]

wyeuro wrote:

the celts were/are prone to baldness, the latin types were not, and the latin writers of rome may have thought the druids' natural baldness was a carefully tended sacred tonsure because they couldn't imagine it happening naturally.

On the contrary, the Romans were very familiar with male pattern baldness, as a stroll through a museum display of Roman busts will reveal. Julius Caesar very famously sported a comb-over. And in his "Epigrams," Martial satirizes several men for their baldness and their attempts to disguise it

.

sorry, i'm distinguishing between latin peoples, the dark eyed, small, olive complexioned mediterraean peoples who normally have luxuriant hair growth right into old age, and the fairer, finer-haired, northern peoples, among whom baldness is much more common. these two races are much more mixed together than they were. it is significant to me that the traditional native speakers of latin -related languages are of this darker mediterranean race, where-as the statues of roman dignatories rarely show mediterranean features. in fact some of them look very celtic to me.
wy

[Jake]

sorry, i'm distinguishing between latin peoples, the dark eyed, small, olive complexioned mediterraean peoples who normally have luxuriant hair growth right into old age, and the fairer, finer-haired, northern peoples, among whom baldness is much more common. these two races are much more mixed together than they were. it is significant to me that the traditional native speakers of latin -related languages are of this darker mediterranean race, where-as the statues of roman dignatories rarely show mediterranean features. in fact some of them look very celtic to me.
wy

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the notion of a "Mediterranean race" went out of fashion shortly after the goosestep, do you have any actual statistical evidence that baldness is less common among olive-complexioned southern Europeans than among northerners with fairer skin? What is the evidence that these two "races" are more "mixed together" now than they used to be or that the Italic languages were developed by "darker" people?

where-as the statues of roman dignatories rarely show mediterranean features. in fact some of them look very celtic to me.

Which only goes to show how subjective and useless our notions of race can be. But as the class of people who had statues made of themselves would generally be the same class of people who were writing things down, what does this do for the idea that the "Latin writers of Rome" were unable to imagine baldness "happening naturally" since it was obviously happening to themselves?

[wyeuro]

sorry. for some purposes, and in some academic jargons, though i wasn't using one, 'races' was the wrong word. i should have said 'peoples'.

subjective thinking isn't always useless. on reading in a 19th century novel that a certain character is 'italianate' in appearance, most of us would immediately envisage a dark haired, short, olive-complexioned, brown-eyed person before recalling that there are also fair ones up in the north where there used to be gauls. or if shown a photograph of a tall, fair, blond woman and a short, olive-complexioned, dark-haired one, most of us, if asked to identify the italian would point to the short dark-haired one, expecting to find 'italian' features there, and would be surprised to find the 'italian' features on the tall, fair, blond woman. i think that subjectively, most of us would be happy with the idea that mediterranean people in general are darker than most northerners, shorter too, and less prone to baldness in old age.

it would be against all reason to dismiss this perception just because we haven't got statistics. it would also be bringing arguably unjustifiable contempt for common sense, nous, direct personal experience, common knowledge, and the myriad other perfectly dependable non-academic ways of knowing that all manner of human beings have evolved over the past several millennia. that's why many universities are now re-examining the whole phenomenon of 'official' knowledge and its associated power structures from post-modern perspectives developed during the last century and advancing rapidly in this one. the official historians no longer claim to know facts like that, though text books still have to teach the prevailing theories long after they've been discarded by the inner circles.

But as the class of people who had statues made of themselves would generally be the same class of people who were writing things down,

well, that's gone beyond the evidence right into the realms of *prolly-would productions*, which is where we've been with it over the past centuries.

the sense we've got of our past is constantly changing as paradigms shift under the weight of new evidence, new insights, and new tools and lenses for interpreting the vast array of data as it comes to us form many resources, and managing the fine-tuning of our historic vision. a thorough discussion of this is probably beyond the scope of this thread, and anyway, off-topic. if you want to take it off the board, congenially of course, pm me.

my take on it is this: if you wished to govern a remote foreign people, you'd send them a statue, have your praises mightily sung around it, and you'd send them
a constant stream of literature in your entourage's best efforts at their language, translated perhaps by one of your scholars so that the foreigners could read it, with a law book, a biography and a full account of what glorious things you'd done to warrant their meek submission or grateful worship, along with an up to date account of the history of your culture. according to this hypothesis, any site found with a lot of texts in the local language or an inflected form of it, is not likely to be the home of the culture of origin of the statue, and very unlikely to be the native language of the statue. i'm speaking on the same 'prolly' level as you are, but that's what hypothesis is, isn't it?

There is no way on this green earth I would do that to my head

.

well said, nicholaas. it resounded like the thud of a druid's staff on the hard ground.

[Jake]

subjective thinking isn't always useless. on reading in a 19th century novel that a certain character is 'italianate' in appearance, most of us would immediately envisage a dark haired, short, olive-complexioned, brown-eyed person before recalling that there are also fair ones up in the north where there used to be gauls. or if shown a photograph of a tall, fair, blond woman and a short, olive-complexioned, dark-haired one, most of us, if asked to identify the italian would point to the short dark-haired one, expecting to find 'italian' features there, and would be surprised to find the 'italian' features on the tall, fair, blond woman.

Yes, assuming that most of us were holding onto Anglo-Saxon 19th century ethnic stereotypes then presumably this would be how most of us would feel.

i think that subjectively, most of us would be happy with the idea that mediterranean people in general are darker than most northerners, shorter too, and less prone to baldness in old age. it would be against all reason to dismiss this perception just because we haven't got statistics.

I have to wonder if this "most of us" have spent any time in the Mediterranean. The problem with this sort of subjective analysis is that, by definition, it varies from person to person. My own stereotypical image of Mediterranean men, based on my own experience rather than on novels or photographs, is the direct opposite of yours when it comes to the pate. In my mind they're virtually all bald by the time they're 50. My half-Italian husband holds the same view and credits his "Irish genes" for maintaining the hair on his head and preventing the luxurious follicle growth on his back and shoulders "enjoyed by so many Italian men."

It's unwise, potentially harmful, and usually unjust to accept statements about what "most people" of a given place look like, eat, do, believe or wear without facts to back them up.

it would also be bringing arguably unjustifiable contempt for common sense, nous, direct personal experience, common knowledge, and the myriad other perfectly dependable non-academic ways of knowing that all manner of human beings have evolved over the past several millennia. that's why many universities are now re-examining the whole phenomenon of 'official' knowledge and its associated power structures from post-modern perspectives developed during the last century and advancing rapidly in this one. the official historians no longer claim to know facts like that, though text books still have to teach the prevailing theories long after they've been discarded by the inner circles.

Cures for male pattern baldness are found among the writings of Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. That's indisputable.

One of the tasks of post-modernism is to deconstruct the "common sense" knowledge that serves to reinforce and reproduce imperialist and colonialist discourses about the "Other," which, for centuries in northern European discourse, has included statements about southern European "racial" appearances and attitudes.

But as the class of people who had statues made of themselves would generally be the same class of people who were writing things down,

well, that's gone beyond the evidence right into the realms of *prolly-would productions*, which is where we've been with it over the past centuries.

Not really, no. The earliest known Roman to write about the druids was this guy:



Followed shortly thereafter by this guy:



Notice the hairlines.

Neither of them, by the way, mentions anything about druids wearing a tonsure. Nor does any other classical Greek or Roman source, rendering the discussion of the alleged Roman interpretation of Celtic baldness completely moot. The earliest mention of a druidic tonsure is in 7th century Irish sources like Tirechan's biography of St. Patrick.

the sense we've got of our past is constantly changing as paradigms shift under the weight of new evidence, new insights, and new tools and lenses for interpreting the vast array of data as it comes to us form many resources, and managing the fine-tuning of our historic vision.

Certainly. Though this doesn't mean that we just make things up and call them history. Evidence is still required.

[wyeuro]

yes, there's a lot of research to be done. i'm off to give those statues a close look - they've certainly got a lot to say to us still.
wy

[Aoife]

They also look quite old