While the world is going ape over chatgpt, the possibilities it opens and the dangers it carries, I recall that this device is by no means the first of its kind. Indeed stories about so called “brazen heads,” as they were called, have been with us for a millennium, if not more. What follows is a short list of the best known men (there seems to have been no women among them) who were rumored to have built or otherwise obtained such heads, each one complete with a few details.
The Roman poet Virgil (70-18 BCE). Widely recognized as perhaps the greatest Roman poet, he entered the picture in January 1245. That was when a French priest, Gautier of Metz, published Imago Mundi, later translated into French as L’Image du monde. Mixing facts with fantasy, it is an encyclopedic work, based on a great many different sources, about the creation, the earth and the universe. Gautier credited Virgil with having created an oracular head that answered questions. Seventy-four years later, in 1319, the story was retold by Renard le Contrefait. The latter may also have been the first to specify that the head was made of brass.
Pope Sylvester II (original name Gerbert of Aurillac). Pope from 999 to 1003. A true polymath who had plenty to say about both ecclesiastical and secular topics, he studied in Spain, a country then under Muslim rule which was considered the cutting edge of civilization. The English historian William of Malmesbury in his History of the English Kings (ca. 1145) says that he took with him a load of secret knowledge whose owner, who went in pursuit, he was only able to escape through demonic assistance. Among the “secrets” was a bronze head that would answer yes/no questions on a variety of topics, but only after having been spoken to first. Later it told Gerbert that if he should ever read a Mass in Jerusalem, which at that time was controlled by the Crusaders, the Devil would come to get him. Whereupon Gerbert cancelled a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To no avail: reading Mass in Rome’s Church of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, he fell ill and died soon afterwards.
Robert Grosseteste (1168-1252) was an English clergymen who rose to become bishop of Gloucester. Of him John Gower, in his long didactic poem Confessio Amantis (1390), wrote the following lines (1390):
For of the grete clerc Grossteste
I rede how besy that he was
Upon clergie an hed of bras
To forge, and make it for to telle
Of suche thinges as befelle.
And sevene yeres besinesse
He leyde, bot for the Lachesse,
Of half a minut of an houre,
Fro ferst that he began laboure
He loste all that he hadde do.
The lesson is clear. Lovers, do not tarry but seize the moment. Or else you may lose everything just as Grosseteste lost his talking head.
Roger Bacon (1220-1229) was an English monk who was credited, among other things, with the invention of gunpowder as well as a number of other devices. An anonymous 16th-century prose romance,The famous historie of Fryer Bacon, describes one of those as a precise brass replica of a “natural man’s head.” Including, not least, “the inward parts.” It tells how Bacon, struggling to give it speech, summoned the Devil to ask him for advice. Satan announced that the head would speak after a few weeks, as long as it was powered by “the continuall fume of the six hottest simples,” a selection of plants used in alchemical medicine. Over the next few centuries the story caught on and was retold many times. In 1589 it was adapted for the stage by Robert Greene and incorporated into The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay, one of the most successful Elizabethan comedies. Greene’s Bacon spent seven years creating a brass head that would speak “strange and uncouth aphorisms” to enable him to encircle Britain with a wall of brass that would make it impossible to conquer.
Unlike his source material, Greene does not cause his head to operate by natural forces but by “nigromantic charms” and “the enchanting forces of the devil“:[i.e., by entrapping a dead spirit or hobgoblin. Bacon collapses, exhausted, just before his device comes to life and announces “Time is,” “Time was,”” and “Time is Past” before being destroyed in spectacular fashion: the stage direction instructs that “a lightening flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a hammer.”
As late as 1646 Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxica Epidemica wrote that “Every ear is filled with the story of Frier Bacon, that made a brazen head to speak”.
*
I doubt whether many people alive today take the story seriously (if our predecessors ever did). Still it is nice to know that Dublin boasts a pub named The Brazen Head, said to go back all the way to 1198. May chat gpt one day play a similar role?