Why do friars shave top of their heads

Peter's tonsure, while some monks — particularly devotees of St. Paul — chose to shave their entire heads in what's called an eastern style. Then, there was a Celtic or Simon Magus tonsure. Like the name suggests, it was common in the British Isles and Ireland, but its exact characteristics are debated. Some say Celtic monks would shave the fronts of their heads from ear-to-ear while leaving the rest long, while McCarthy's research suggests heads were shaved to include a fringe across the front.

No one is completely sure because the Celtic tonsure was outlawed in According to Kaliaperumal Karthikeyan of the Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College, Celts had been sporting the tonsure well before they met anyone who ever called themselves Roman. There was no religious belief or basis for the head-shaving that historians have been able to determine , and when Christianity came to the Celts, they decided to keep wearing their tonsures in the same way they always had.

McCarthy says that was a huge problem for a few different reasons, and the church's outrage over this different hairstyle was so great there was call for clerics who wore it to be excommunicated. English Heritage says the different monks' tonsures were a visible sign of something the Christian church absolutely didn't want: different views not just on hair, but on other traditions, too.

The bigger point of contention was how the date for Easter was figured out each year. Both traditions used the lunar cycle to find the date, but the methods were so different that the Roman and Celtic dates could be as far as a month apart.

And it wasn't just a few people following one tradition or the other — even royal households were divided down the middle. Cite this page: Carr, K. October 31, About the Author: Karen Carr. Related Posts. Impeachment and the Epic of Gilgamesh. September 26th, 0 Comments. Neptune discovered — on this day. September 22nd, 0 Comments. Climate strike today. September 20th, 0 Comments. Racism and Anglo-Saxonists. September 19th, 0 Comments. Scarcity and the Iliad. Brother David April 1, at pm - Reply.

Karen Carr April 2, at pm. Brother David March 30, at am - Reply. Celtic monks shaved the front part of their head from ear to ear but left the hair in the back hanging longer. Some Celtic monks pulled that hair around to form a semi-circle from one ear to the other. Reference: Sherrow, Victoria. Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Sign up to join this community.

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