Cranioklepty (29 page)

But is the skull really Geronimo's? In 1986 the Apache representative Ned Anderson met with George Bush's brother Jonathan, who offered to hand over the skull. But Bush stalled, and when a skull was finally offered more than a week later, it appeared to be that of a young boy. Suspecting a bait-and-switch, Anderson refused the skull—but did Skull and Bones really have the right one?
²⁵⁴
The description of skulduggery is certainly colorful, but it mentions a tomb with an iron door, while Geronimo was buried in a regular grave. Numerous inside sources have suggested that Prescott Bush fabricated the story from whole cloth; certainly no independent evidence exists that Geronimo's skull is still housed at Yale. On February 17, 2009, however, descendents of Geronimo formally filed suit against Skull and Bones for the repatriation of his remains, hoping that a federal law suit would help to clarify the matter once and for all.

Prescott Bush notwithstanding, cranioklepty was first and foremost the work of phrenologists. William Williams had called phrenology the first new science since the Second Coming (which Swedenborg claimed had already taken place in 1758). And in many ways it
was
a new science for a new time—it boldly claimed to lay bare centuries-old mysteries through a cursory touch of
the scalp, making visible what had long been hidden. It was a product of the Enlightenment, to be sure, but its popularity was owing in part to its ability to tap into a deep wellspring of anxiety and hope about who we are, why we act the way we do, and why we create art and imagination. In those days of rapid progress and advance, all things seemed possible, and phrenology's claims to explain the human mind and the mystery of genius did not seem at all far-fetched then, as they seem today. As a science and as a social movement, phrenology has long since exhausted itself, but the curiosity and yearning that fed it remain fervently alive.

If phrenology was a New Science for a new age, it also hearkened back to something very ancient, to the mystery of life contained within the bones, an unknowable secret dug up from deep sepulchers and overgrown cemeteries. Those who took it upon themselves to take the heads of famous men such as Haydn, Beethoven, Browne, and Swedenborg looked forward and backward at once—to a future when the meaning of “genius” might yet be revealed and to a past that stretched down a long path of
mementi mori
and saints' relics to the silent truths locked deep in bone.

As phrenology moved from a theory to a science to an art and finally to a sideshow, its practitioners were always careful not to predict genius from the shape of the skulls and instead to confirm only the already established genius in the heads before them. When examining the heads of men such as Haydn or even Browne, phrenologists
assumed
them to be geniuses. What these “scientists” were doing, in essence, was not proving the genius of
the skull's owner so much as the validity of their own clinical tenets. The phrenologist could never hope to read something in a genius's head that wasn't already known; it was instead phrenology itself that was under scrutiny. And this is really what the skull represents to science: a proving ground. A breadth of new sciences have been tested against the skull, which has been held up to phrenology, anatomy, craniometry, and anthropology, to name only a few disciplines. The skulls remain the same; it is the science that changes. And in two centuries of endless attempts to identify genius through some objective measure, it's worth noting that the geniuses themselves were never questioned. It would seem possible that at least one true believer might at some point have argued that the skull shape of someone like Browne may in fact have contraindicated that he was the genius others believed him to be. The identification should have worked both ways. But no one ever made such a claim. When it came to a definition of genius, the ultimate measure could never really be the skull—the measure was always the writing, the music, the art itself.

T
HE SKULLS OF
these artists came to light during a time of enormous upheaval and stayed aboveground long enough to witness vast changes, long enough that their postmortem odysseys began to develop lives of their own. In his biography of Haydn, Karl Geiringer referred to Rosenbaum's theft in a brief final chapter titled “An Incongruous Postlude.” But were these episodes really all that incongruous? If the hallmark of great artists is that
they live on, obtaining immortality through their creative works, then might it not be fitting that their bones, too, have a share of immortality? Maybe we have two halves to our lives—the time we spend on earth and the time afterward, perhaps equally brief, during which our works outlive us. Perhaps the odd, even unfortunate odysseys of these skulls are just the physical traces of those second lives.

Perhaps the vicar of St. Peter Mancroft, F. J. Meyrick, was thinking along these lines when he entered the reinterment of Sir Thomas Browne's skull into the church registry and wrote, in the “age” column, “317 years.”

St. Peter Mancroft's burial book.

PHOTO TANYA MCCALLIN, COURTESY NORFOLK RECORD OFFICE AND
CABINET
MAGAZINE.

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