Retro Week: Rangda

Brushing up on the Celtic mythos (as I've been doing lately) confronts us with the story of Cú Chulainn.  And a strange one it is, dragging the skull bag out of preRoman obscurity and pinning its contents like sticky fluffy dice to a suspiciously medieval chariot.  So many of the Irish oral traditions entrusted almost wholesale to monastic scribes have since been bowdlerized by the Victorians and systematically cleansed of the Celts' less romantic proclivities that you think of farthingales before arterial spray.  But make no mistake, they were all about the cranial bling and there's not enough vaseline in the world to soften up that little detail.

To be confronted with the extent to which your ancestors were headhunters and obsessive skull collectors is a strange sensation.  It is stratified; into academic acceptance, psychological rationalization and then personal reflection, the latter process enlivened by looking around at the number of masks lining the walls and realizing they are rolling their eyes and saying duh- you have a thing for heads.

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