As members of the Church of Release will tell you, and as you have doubtless heard from your reputable friends, there is no greater relief and source of lasting enlightenment than having a hole in your head.
It is called trepanation, from the Greek trypanon (“a borer”), and it is one of the oldest forms of medical intervention known today. The trepanation is a classically simple operation— so simple, in fact, that you can perform it on yourself with some minor preparation (this is not advice): get a drill; press the drill into your skull until you’re through the bone (being careful not to press into the brain itself); and, supposing you survive the process, enjoy life as a newly minted member of Homo Sapiens Correctus.
Wait! wait! before you run off to your hardware store or garage, we at the Kook Science Resistance have compiled the following summary of the ancient (and modern) practice of trepanation for your further study. We again caution that this is not medical advice, but that, as always, we leave it to you to judge the truth for yourself . . .
“People said his brain was infected by devils. . .”
“Since science and magic are in their early stages indistinguishable, it is difficult to differentiate between ritual or magical and therapeutic motives underlying the practice of trepanation.”
It is uncertain why, as far back as the Neolithic, our ancient ancestors first began to make holes into their own skulls. Some have argued it was the earliest form of medicine, a simple but effective means of relieving pressure caused by injury. Others suggest more religious purpose, from the purging of evil spirits to the opening of the third eye.
Whatever the intended purpose, it has been established by archaeology that the practice arose in cultures across the world, from Mesoamerica to Africa. Hippocrates himself, acclaimed father of Western medicine and author of the Hippocratic Oath, taught and detailed the best methods of trepanation.
However, as useful as this technique may have been considered in times past, it was discarded by later medical authorities, classed as little more than superstition. Enlightened People, it seemed, found the very idea of cutting holes in the skull to be, rather than a cure for malady or madness, a very mad thing to do, an operation best left to the primitives and ancients.
“Homo Sapiens Correctus”
“This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skull to get permanently high.”
Joe Mellen, “Bore Hole” (1970) [2]
A person may be forgiven, in our modern age with our greatly expanded knowledge, for thinking it insane to believe putting a hole in one’s own head is a good idea, and it perhaps will not shock persons of such thinking that Bart Huges, on reporting to the hospital ten days after trepanning himself in 1965, was held for three weeks by medical authorities on suspicion of being schizophrenic.
He was not, after multiple tests of his competence, found to be insane— though one can forgive them for not finding him to be sane in the most conventional sense. An early student of LSD, Huges had come to the conclusion that a state of permanently altered consciousness could be achieved by increasing blood flow in the brain, and that the simplest way to enact such a change would be to make a hole in the skull, an adult reforming of the fontanelle. And so he did. With a drill.
People did not line up to join his cause.
Joe Mellen was one of the few who did, a man undeterred by the flinching shudder that many of his fellow users experienced at the thought of a non-metaphorical third eye gap. In 1966, with the encouragement of Huges and the assistance of his partner, Amanda Feilding, he haphazardly attempted the procedure with a hand-turned trepanning device; and again, in 1970, unsatisfied with the earlier attempt, he performed it with an electric drill.
At last, after one drill repair and a great deal of blood, the hole was completely through. Recounting the experience, Mellen would later report: “Steadily, almost imperceptibly, over the next four hours I felt myself get higher and higher. I got higher than I had thought possible. I felt so light and free. It is very hard to put in words the feeling of change, but I felt very relaxed, as if everything would fall into place now.”
If one puts the adult norm of consciousness at zero and the LSD users at one hundred, then the childhood level [is] attained by trepanation and that is thirty. . .
Amanda Feilding
As witness to the change in Mellen following his second, more successful, trepanning attempt, Feilding was convinced to perform one on herself. This time the pair were more carefully prepared, Feilding using a dental drill, Mellen documenting the procedure on film for use in what would become their pro-trepanation piece “Heartbeat in the Brain” (now unavailable after limited showings; segments can be seen in the 1998 documentary “A Hole in the Head”)
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, in the United States, Peter Halvorson was suffering from a depression for which he could find no relief. Numerous sessions with psychologists, drug trials, other odd therapies offered him no respite. Such was his condition that when, in the late 1960s, as he met with Bart Huges in Amsterdam, Halvorson found himself haltingly receptive to the theories promulgated by the now-father of modern trepanation.
And so, in 1972, like Mellen and Feilding before him, Halvorson drilled a hole into his skull. Of the experience, he has said: “I could hear a gurgling, and I could feel the shifting of volume in the brain water. There was a warm feeling as my metabolism cranked up a bit.” [3]
The trepanation, it appeared, had cured him.
The 1970s and 80s saw a small movement of the successfully trepanned attempt to promote its methods to the general public, but their efforts to spread Huges’s ideas were generally unsuccessful. Feilding ran twice for Parliament in the UK on the platform of trepanation— she lost.
Today, Feilding remains the primary proponent for the study of trepanation, her Beckley Foundation being one of the few to seriously continue the push to have the surgery reconsidered by medical experts. The method remains a curiosity, given little serious treatment or consideration for study. It has, for all purposes, been left to the kooks.
“Trepanation for the National Health”
If Amanda Feilding had her way in 1979, what benefits would be accrued by those members of the British public who elected to have a trepanation performed?
According to the Trepanation Trust, once the skull has been reopened, the patient experiences a “[restoration of] the full pulsation which was lost when the skull sealed. The pulse wave then blows up the brain capillaries with blood to the level of childhood, accelerating brain metabolism and empowering the brain to permanently regain its youthful level. An equivalent volume of cerebrospinal fluid is squeezed out to make room for the extra blood and thereafter the ratio between the two fluid volumes in the brain is altered in favour of blood. An increase in energy and well being is the result. With more contact between capillaries and brain cells the brain functions more efficiently.” [4]
Trepanation has further been promoted as a cure to migraine headaches, chronic depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, stopping the voices from entering your head . . .
To date, none of the suggested benefits have been proved to the satisfaction of the medical community. Would-be trepanners are left to their own devices in pursuit of such interests.
Conclusion
Unproved, archaic, and even laughable to modern medical thinking, the science of trepanation will continue to hold the fascination of the open-minded, as it has through human history. It may be that the learned doctors of our world will once again embrace it as a solution and benefit in the future, but, for now, we can but watch those intrepid questioners and questers who seek to broaden our knowledge of human health, and pray our heads are not exploded when the trepanned clairvoyant onslaught of tomorrow rushes over the horizon of time to seize the world from us with their psychic scanning powers.
- Trepanation in ancient times (TrepanationGuide.com)
- Joseph Mellen, “Bore Hole” (1970, English, PDF): “Bore Hole is a prose account of how [Mellen] became a teacher of brainbloodvolume and the Ego.”
- “You Need It Like a Hole in the Head?” by Michael Colton (Washington Post, May 31, 1998)
- Archive.org stored copy of Trepanation.com (2001), “Why Trepanation?” and the follow-up “Trepanation & the Mechanism of Brain blood volume”
The following materials provide a far more comprehensive look into the science and history of trepanation.
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A Hole in the Head, 60 minute documentary, directed by Eli Kabillio (IMDB)
Kisi medicine man performing the “operation of the skulls” (from “A Hole in the Head”) -
“The People with Holes in their Heads” by John F. Mitchell (from Eccentric Lives & Peculiar Notions, 1984)
“The hole story” by Jon Bowen (Salon, April 29, 1999)
“Trepanation: history, discovery, theory”, edited by Robert Arnott, Stanley Finger, C.U.M. Smith (2003, $$$)
A DIY Trepanation, interview by Bryan Henderson (BMEZine, 2000)
An illustrated history of trepanation by “Mo” (orig. June 13, 2007)
“Like a Hole in the Head” by Christopher Turner (Cabinet Magazine #28, “Bones”, Winter 2007-08)
Il Terzo Occhio (“The Third Eye”, Gamberi Fantasy, October 30, 2009, Italian)