Sainte Valérie, by Jaques Laudin II
St. Valerie of Limoges was one of many Catholic early Christian saints who was a cephalophore - a martyr who carried their head in their hands. Many of these cephalophores supposedly spoke, prayed, or walked somewhere, after being beheaded.
Painting circa 1700, via Wikimedia Commons.
“Cephalophore” is an interesting word - it means “head-bearing”, and has the same Greek root as “cephalopod,” which means “head-foot”.
For a while, there was a family of molluscs with distinct heads, and a family of filiform mushrooms that were called “cephalophores”, but both uses of that term in taxonomy are obsolete by a couple centuries.
(Source : cabbagingcove, via frenchvan1lla)
Katsukawa Shunsho, The actors Ichikawa Danjuro V as a skeleton, spirit of the renegade monk Seigen…, 1783.
(Source : neitherlandish, via frenchvan1lla)








