The Virgin Mary’s Hair from the Talisman of Charlemagne

In my final post featuring this week’s theme of hair in Medieval Europe, I’d like to conclude with . . . . magical hair! You are looking here at the Talisman of Charlemagne, which totally sounds like something out of Dungeons and Dragons, but is an actual object from 9th-century Germany. Medieval people thought that it contained the hair of the Virgin Mary, which was far more precious then the bejeweled-gold pendent that was made to accompany it.

Oh, those wacky Middle Ages. The idea that the very special deceased were so holy that they could shape events among the living was ubiquitous. People of all social ranks believed that the mortal remains of these saints (relics) made for a strong connection with the sacred dead. People travelled on pilgrimages to see them, engaged in theft to get them, and carried them into battle for good luck. The relics could bring about the miracles of the saint they belonged to: which brings me back to hair.

In the Medieval Catholic tradition, the two holiest people — Jesus and his mother — were thought to have ascended into heaven, leaving no mortal remains. Unlike other saints, whose relics often involved their hands, heads, or torsos, Jesus and the Virgin Mary differed. And that is why the hair of the Virgin was especially significant – her body might have gone up to heaven intact, but she evidently left some strands behind. The great 9th-century Carolingian dynasty had this reliquary-talisman prepared because a few locks of Mary’s hair were considered extremely powerful.

There were other saints whose hair became relics. In some accounts, one of the ways one could tell if a deceased were holy enough to be considered a saint is if their hair remained intact or even grew after death. Collecting the hair of the departed declined in popularity after the Protestant Reformation, only to surface again in the Victorian era as a macabre (to us) custom of weaving the strands of dead loved ones into ornamental hair wreaths.

P.s. in the later Middle Ages, Mary’s hair was replaced with a piece of the “True Cross”: the one Jesus was killed on. Ahem. There were quite a lot of True Cross relics.