Of all the gestures that mark a change of status, cutting the hair is perhaps the most universal. It appears in puberty rites, weddings, mourning and religious consecrations. Arnold van Gennep listed it among the most typical rites of separation: to cut the hair is to detach oneself from a previous condition, and to offer it is to hand that condition over to a higher power.
Why hair
Hair has qualities that make it an ideal symbol:
- it grows continuously, like a visible measure of time and life;
- it can be cut without pain or harm, yet the cut changes one's appearance conspicuously;
- once cut it stays intact for a long time, and can therefore be kept, offered or buried.
For this reason many cultures have considered it a part of the person that can stand for the whole.
The hair promised to the river
In the Greek world it was a widespread custom to let the hair grow during childhood and adolescence and then offer it to a deity at the passage to adulthood. The recipient was often a river, regarded as a nourisher of the young.
The most famous example is in book XXIII of the Iliad. Achilles had let his hair grow to offer it to the Spercheios, the river of his homeland, on his return home. Knowing now that he will not return, he cuts it and places it in the hands of his dead friend Patroclus, on the funeral pyre. The gesture unites two passages: Achilles' unfulfilled maturity, since he will not live an adult life at home, and his mourning for his friend.
Theseus at Delphi
Plutarch, in the Life of Theseus, records that it was the custom for young men leaving childhood to go to Delphi and offer the god the first fruits of their hair. Theseus is said to have gone there, but cut only the front part of his hair; Plutarch adds that this way of cutting it took its name from him. In Athens too, as seen for the festival of the Apaturia, the offering of a lock accompanied the young man's entry into the phratry.
Mourning
In the ancient world, cutting the hair was also a sign of mourning. In Greek epic and tragedy locks are offered on the tombs of the dead: in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Electra recognises the return of her brother Orestes precisely from a lock laid on their father's grave. The severed hair becomes a bond between the living and the dead.
The first beard in Rome
In Rome the male passage was marked, besides the toga virilis, by the depositio barbae, the first shaving of the beard. The hairs of the first shave could be gathered and offered to a deity.
The historian Suetonius relates that the emperor Nero, during the games he had founded, placed his first beard in a golden box adorned with pearls and dedicated it on the Capitol. The historian Cassius Dio records that Octavian had himself shaved for the first time when already an adult, celebrating the event with a festival and giving a public banquet. The gesture could thus carry both family and political value.
The religious tonsure
In Christianity, cutting the hair became the sign of entry into religious life. The tonsure of monks and clerics, practised in different forms in East and West, indicated renunciation of the world and consecration to God. Nuns too, at their clothing, had their hair cut in many communities.
In Buddhism, shaving the head accompanies the ordination of monks and nuns, as a sign of renouncing worldly identity. In the Hindu tradition there is a samskara called chudakarana, the child's first ritual haircut.
The abstinence from the blade
The gesture of cutting has, in many traditions, its opposite: the prohibition on cutting the hair. In the Bible, whoever took the Nazirite vow was not to use a razor for the whole duration of the vow, and at the end shaved his head and offered the hair on the altar. In the hajj too, during the state of consecration, the hair is not cut, and cutting it marks the end of the sacred period.
| Gesture | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Letting it grow | Time of waiting, consecration, margin |
| Cutting | Separation from a previous state |
| Offering | Handing over that state to a higher power |
In short
- Cutting the hair is one of the most widespread rites of separation across cultures.
- In the Greek world young people offered their hair to rivers or gods at the passage to adulthood.
- Achilles cuts for Patroclus the hair promised to the river Spercheios.
- In Rome the first beard was laid aside and offered, as Nero did on the Capitol.
- Tonsure, the Nazirite vow and monastic shaving make hair a sign of consecration.
