Brazen Head

The first oracle-head of medieval legend belongs to a pope. William of Malmesbury, writing around 1125, reports a story about Gerbert of Aurillac, the brilliant scholar who became Pope Sylvester II in 999: that he had cast the head of a statue under a careful reading of the stars. It would not speak unless spoken to, but then it told the truth, yes or no. Asked whether he would be pope, it said yes. Asked whether he would die before singing mass in Jerusalem, it said no. Gerbert felt safe as long as he avoided the Holy Land, and forgot that Rome had a church called Jerusalem. He sang mass there, fell ill and died.

Four centuries later the legend had moved to Oxford. In Robert Greene's comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589, printed 1594), the friar-philosopher Roger Bacon spends seven years building a head of brass that will speak strange aphorisms and wall England round with brass. He and Friar Bungay watch it for some sixty days, waiting for it to talk, until Bacon, exhausted, hands the watch to his comic servant Miles with strict orders to wake him the moment it speaks, and falls asleep mid-sentence.

It speaks. “Time is,” says the head. Miles is unimpressed: seven years of study for two words? “Time was,” says the head, and Miles lets his master sleep. Then, with a flash of lightning, “Time is past,” and a hand appears and smashes the head with a hammer. Bacon wakes to find seven years in pieces, because the one person with questions slept through the only minute the oracle was open.