The story of Rapunzel is a familiar one: beautiful princess, stolen from loving parents and locked in a doorless tower by an evil witch, possesser of hundreds of feet of hair, thick and strong enough to loose from the window and provide a means for the witch to enter the tower when she demanded it—and pretty enough to lure in a young prince who happened by the tower.
In the religion in which I was raised, we women were not allowed to cut our hair, not even to trim the split ends.
I was given the scripture that formed the basis for this belief, found in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 11: “For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.” We were strict followers of the King James Version, the only one considered a real translation, but the New International Version reads more clearly: “For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.”
If you want to cut your hair off, you might as well shave it, my mother would say. And that’s a disgrace. Or sometimes, even, That’s an abomination.
My grandfather was the pastor of our Pentecostal church and this was considered one of The Big Sins, the ones that were mentioned regularly, adhered to with the passion of someone surely doomed to hell the moment she touched a pair of scissors. As a child, I mostly didn’t question the rules—I didn’t dare question hellfire and brimstone—but I did develop a fascination with giving haircuts to my Barbie and other dolls.
In one legend of Venus, goddess of love, sex, beauty, fertility, Roman women cut off their hair to make bowstrings during a siege of Rome.
In another, the Roman queen and hundreds of other women lost their hair during a plague. In a plea to Venus for the end of the epidemic, women who still had their hair sacrificed it on her altars.
I don’t know what Venus wanted with hair.
In the original telling, Rapunzel’s fate was decided when her mother’s pregnancy cravings were so strong that her father stole an herb—the pale purple rapunzel—from the witch’s garden. To save his life and that of his wife when he was caught, the newborn was traded to the witch and named for the herb that caused her fate.
Isolated in the tower, she saw no one but the witch, so the young prince was the first man Rapunzel had ever seen and, naive as she was, she quickly began to allow him to climb her hair into the tower each night. Unlike the character in the Disney retellings, the original Rapunzel became pregnant. Furious, the witch cut Rapunzel’s hair in revenge and banished her to the desert.
While the story had an eventual happy ending, Rapunzel did not regain her hair.
The Rusalka, deadly water-dwelling women, are said to be the spirits of women who became pregnant out of wedlock and drowned themselves in shame.
The Rusalka are seen in moonlight combing their unbraided hair, golden or green, perpetually wet. In some versions, the woman can never leave the water completely—a foot or a lock of hair must always be dangling from where she sits on the earth—or she will die. In others, she will die only if her hair dries.
With her beauty, her translucent skin, and her long hair, the Rusalka lures men to their watery death on the river floor. If the origin story is true, this is only fair.
Mine was not the only religion that connected hair with spirituality. Sikhs often wear their hair unshorn to represent the perfection of God’s creation, to say this is my natural hair, to say this is a gift from God, to say why would I reject it?
In other faiths, such as Judaism and Islam, there are customs involving facial hair, wigs, veils, and other ways of wearing or covering one’s hair that correlate to a religious belief. The theology of tresses is wide, variant, contradictory, and old.
Rastafarians keep their hair long like a lion—the lion of Judah, leader of their belief system. Once, in Jamaica, I met a Rastafarian who, in discussing the choice to cut and brush his hair despite the common conviction that they should not do so, explained, I have my dreadlocks in my heart.
Berenice, ancient Macedonian queen, sacrificed her long hair to Aphrodite in return for her husband’s victory in war. Berenice left her hair in Aphrodite’s temple and, when it disappeared, an astronomer proclaimed that Aphrodite’s pleasure in the beautiful braid was so intense that she placed it in the sky, forming a cluster of stars.
The constellation Coma Berenices, or Berenice’s Hair, is most easily spotted by its three most brilliant stars, the second brightest of which is commonly called Diadem. The constellation contains one meteor shower, the Coma Berenicids, rocketing through space in memory of one woman’s hair.
Long, luscious, a fireball—Queen Berenice let down her hair and the whole galaxy took notice.
When I was growing up, a woman’s long hair was her glory; it gave her power over the angels, made her—almost—supernatural. I have a tendency to believe in ideas of magic, so I clung to this belief for a long time.
Still, I thought, if a woman’s hair is her glory, surely it should be beautiful, displayed, used for something good.
Once, as a teenager, I watched an evangelist’s wife pull pins from her hair, letting it fall in a straight, blonde sheet to her feet. She laid it over the bodies of praying women, called upon God to use it, her great sacrifice, her untouched hair.
I thought: God or Venus?
It is often said that, in biblical times, a woman with loose hair was promiscuous. In the Gospels, the woman who knelt at the feet of Jesus, washing his feet with valuable oil and drying them with her unbound hair, is thought to have been a prostitute.
Just shy of my sixteenth birthday, I bent my head over the bathroom sink and dyed my light reddish-brown hair a deep black that paled my already pale skin.
This too was forbidden, an affront to the color God had chosen my hair to be. At church, a group of older women surrounded me when prayer was called, dramatically describing the fires of hell and my certain doom. You know it will be hot, they said. You know you’re doing wrong. I bit down on fury and laughter.
My mother, in what she saw as a fitting punishment for my sin, forbade me from going to get my driver’s license that week as we had planned. You’ve shown that you are irresponsible, she said. If you can’t be trusted not to dye your hair, you can’t be trusted to drive.
I didn’t get my driver’s license until I left home for college, more than a year later.
The belief that hair holds power spans across cultures. Almost always, the longer the hair, the more power it holds.
In some Native American lore, the hair was a sixth sense, providing the unusually strong ability to detect enemies, movements, and energy. Once the hair was cut, this supernatural ability went with it.
In this way, the hair was thought to be an extension of the nervous system: our hair telling us what our conscious has not yet, standing on end to signify what it knows.
Your hair knows everything that has ever happened in your blood: the drugs you’ve taken, who your father is.
Several years ago, the Disney movie Tangled, a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, was released. In this movie, Rapunzel’s hair is nearly one hundred feet long, blonde and rolling out behind her, glowing with light and able to heal. When her hair is cut, it turns brown and loses its magical properties.
See, said the people from my grandfather’s church.
In the biblical tale of Samson, Samson is given special power from God: strength, inhuman and holy. The only caveat is that he must not, under any circumstances, cut his hair.
So often, in these stories of hair and faith, the hair is about power.
So often, in these stories, it is the woman who loses her power or causes the loss of power.
The first time I cut my hair, I was around eight or nine years old. I hid under my grandmother’s kitchen table with a pair of scissors and, taking a deep breath, lobbed a chunk off directly to the side of my face.
I felt brave and guilty, daring and afraid.
It was an accident, I insisted to my grandmother when she found me with the scissors in one hand and the chunk of light brown hair in the other.
She cried as she twisted the lock of hair and slid it into the pages of the Bible.
I’ve looked for that Bible and that hair as an adult, curious whether it is still there, but I haven’t found it and I haven’t been willing to ask her.
I’m still not sure what lesson that was supposed to teach me: forgiveness or shame.
When Samson fell in love with Delilah, she knew that he had been sent to destroy her people. It makes one wonder how and why Samson allowed himself to be drawn into the Philistine community. Was he trying to spy on them? Had he forgotten his task? Was he drawn in by their world, different from his as it was? Was he simply careless?
Delilah, neither careless nor forgetful of who Samson really was, began to look for his weakness, for the thing that would keep him from being able to destroy her. She found it when he, after lying to her countless times, even after knowing her plan to take his power, finally told her the truth: to take his hair was to take his power.
It’s unlikely that Samson didn’t know that he would wake to find his hair gone, and himself rendered powerless. It seems as if he chose his fate.
And yet, in this story, the hair grows back; the power returns; the hero is the hero.
Sif, known for golden hair that represented fields of wheat, was conceived in the form of a rowan to which the Norse god of thunder, Thor, clung. The two married, uniting sky and earth.
When the trickster Loki cut Sif’s hair as a prank, Thor forced him to have a headpiece of gold made to replace her lost tresses. This headpiece, made alongside the priceless spear of Odin, was woven from gold into hair longer and more beautiful than the goddess had before.
When I left home for college, I kept the long length of my hair for months, mostly to prove a point or, perhaps more accurately, to refuse to have a point proven.
My grandfather had included in a sermon the claim that women, upon leaving the church, immediately cut their hair. It’s a form of rebellion, to show their separation from God and their desire to fit in with the world, he said.
I, who had separated myself long before leaving, felt contrariness boil up.
When I did have my hair cut, a few months before my eighteenth birthday, I sucked in my breath when I felt the comb pull free from just below my shoulders. Fourteen inches of my hair lay on the floor around me. I resisted the urge to pull the salon’s cape tighter around my body.
I tucked the ends of my hair into my jacket until I could stand to look.
On my college campus, I was stopped by strangers who asked, Did you cut your hair? Aren’t you the girl with the long hair?
I always had been and now I wasn’t.
The Victorians wore jewelry made from the hair of those they loved, twisted into brooches, looped as pendants, delicately braided into watch fobs. It kept their beloveds close, paid honor to those they had lost.
On my honeymoon, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, I was brought to tears at the sight of Botticelli’s Venus, her impossible body rising from a pearlescent shell, flowing red-gold hair loosely clasped in one hand to cover her genitalia. The glory and brilliance of the color was doubled by the placement of the masterpiece, following painting after painting of somber scenes of Christ’s crucifixion, interspersed with the odd-faced Christ child and Madonna, often in dark corners and foreboding backgrounds. Venus stood beautiful and unashamed.
Arguably, the most famous mythological hair is that of Medusa, turned to serpents when she was cursed by Athena after being raped by Poseidon in the temple. She was fated to turn men to stone, lose her beauty to green skin and wild snaked locks. In other tellings, Medusa’s fury at being raped grew in her until she turned herself into a weapon against men, emerald-skinned, snakes curving about her face, able to stop men with a single look.
I was born with a thick head of black hair, covering my scalp, my ears, and even my back. The dark hair on my ears and back eventually fell out, never to be replaced, but the hair on my head dusted my shoulders before I was a year old.
In Inuit belief, every sin of mankind was borne through the water, carried to rest in the goddess Sedna’s hair. The sins built up, dirtying the hair of the goddess.
Sedna, like so many cursed women, turned down a man and as a result was cast into the sea by her father. As she tried to climb back into his boat, he cut off her fingers. Desperate to live, she continued to use her mangled hands to hold onto the boat. Her father cut off her hands, throwing them into the sea alongside her. As she sank, her fingers and hands multiplied, becoming all of the creatures of the sea. She reigned in the abyss, collecting sins.
At times, when the Inuit people needed her favor, they sent a shaman through a trance down to the dark depths of the polar sea to wash the Mother of the Sea’s hair until it was clean again, free of men’s transgressions.
I am always losing my hair: strands in the shower drain, in my hairbrush, on my pillowcase in the morning. This is normal—or, at least, close to normal. You, too, are probably losing between fifty and one-hundred-fifty strands of your hair each day.
The werewolf legend is thought to have come from Hirsutism, an abnormality which causes excess body hair or facial hair to grow in places it usually does not.
The ancient Egyptians were among the first to remove unwanted body hair, using beeswax or honey to strip the hair from their follicles or tweezers made from shells to pluck it free. They often left only their eyebrows.
Later, Queen Elizabeth I of England popularized the complete removal of women’s eyebrows in order to accentuate the forehead, using methods such as walnut oil, ammonia-soaked rags, and vinegar.
In middle and high school, I was constantly asked whether or not I was allowed to shave my legs and tweeze my eyebrows, whether that too was against my religion.
At sixteen, by the neighbor’s pool, I wrapped a towel around my body, shook my wet hair free from its bun atop my head, and worked my fingers through the snarls.
From a spot perched on the fence, my friend laughed. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, he said, let down your hair.
I rolled my eyes, annoyed and pleased.
The shimmer of a crush on him had played all summer, teasing at the surface. I picked at the ends of my hair, too long, too dry, too plain. I liked the comparison to something magic.
The ancient Greek gods are often shown with long hair, flowing absurdly in some otherworldly wind. Here, too, the hair is power, divinity, beauty—a sign of superiority.
Statues and paintings of Grecian women, though, are often depicted without pubic hair. The lack of body hair indicated their higher class, their superiority over the uncivilized and hairy masses.
I still keep my hair long. My hair stylist cuts a few inches every six months or so, as I work towards my thirtieth birthday and a blunt, bold bob. I want to know how I’d look with so little hair, I want to free myself of the connections I still hold between beauty and hair, goodness and hair.
Haircuts are hard for me, I tell her when I sit in the chair and take several deep breaths. She laughs, knowing how long it took for me to agree to more than half an inch at a time.
I went five years without a haircut in college and graduate school, both because I had little money to afford one and because it felt most natural not to, to let my hair grow as it would.
Caerus, young and beautiful personification of luck, is shown with a single lock of hair. With winged feet and a razor in hand, he is fleeting, dangerous. Once he has passed by, no one can seize him; no hair flows behind him.
I always lost games of tag, my hair a long rope with which to reach forward and catch me as I ran.
Poseidon once gave immortality and invincibility to Pterelaus, but it was linked to the latter’s golden hair. If his hair was lost, his power would be lost too.
Always, love is the downfall. When Pterelaus’ daughter fell for his enemy, she cut off his hair to allow his defeat. For this, she was killed.
Parallel to this myth is that of Scylla, princess of Megara, whose father had one lock of purple hair, secret of his invincibility. Scylla, too, fell in love with her father’s enemy, cut his hair, and presented it to her beloved as a gift. He scorned her for her disloyalty and left without looking back. As she tried to swim after his ship, she was drowned by her father, now a seabird.
Midway through my master’s program, I developed a mass on my thyroid and my hair began to fall out—handfuls of strands on my pillow every morning, entire chunks in the shower; my brush filled when I ran it, even gently, through my hair. By the time the mass was removed, my hair was several inches shorter and much thinner. I spent one morning too many staring at the frayed and pale ends before I settled up with my hair stylist, asking for all of the dry ends to be cut off, however many inches it had to be.
Who are you right now? she laughed.
In an old English fairy tale, one lovely young princess, treated cruelly by her evil stepmother, goes into the forest, banished or seeking freedom. In a well, she finds three golden heads who ask only for their golden hair to be washed and combed, so that those who might pass by and gaze upon them would think them pretty.
For doing this, she is rewarded with happiness, the downfall of the stepmother, true love, riches, and kingdom.
I don’t know why you would do that, my mother says when I see her and my hair is shorter, or darker, or framing my face with bangs.
I don’t understand what God wants with my hair, either.
I?understand that I was taught that being attractive was one of the worst things a girl could be: that if my hips swayed when I walked, I was causing men to sin; that if I wore makeup to look prettier, I was like Jezebel; that if my clothes showed my body, I was asking for it. If I cared about the appearance of my hair, I was vain, lacking in glory, a disappointment to God.
I confess: I care about my hair. I confess: I care about how it looks to you. I confess: I sometimes lie awake wondering if the gods will come for my hair, if God will punish me for getting rid of my hair, if my hair will ever be simply my hair and not a sacrifice.
Anna Sandy-Elrod is a poet, an English instructor, and the editor of Birdcoat Quarterly. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and three cats.
