What the ancient Greeks teach us about hair pulling

Hair pulling behaviour features quite a lot in ancient Greek literature - as anyone checking out this blog will know - and it is interesting to note that two forms of hair pulling are revealed.

One form of hair pulling is ritualistic - hair pulling that would have been conducted at funerals or at times of intense grief as a consciously performed social act. Indeed, as the body of the deceased was paraded or displayed family and loved ones would have yanked and pulled out hairs as an expression of their grief and inner pain. In many respects such behaviour served as a sincerity signal, whereby the pain of yanking out hair would reveal the genuine nature of the grief being felt as it is not something you would do for the sake of someone you didn't feel strongly about.  

Of course, this raises the question as to why a public display of hair pulling would emerge as an expression of grief?   In my view there are two reasons.  Firstly, inflicting pain on oneself releases endorphins, the body's own natural pain killers.  So on some level the mourner is attempting to inflict intense pain on himself as a way of triggering endorphin release and reduce the pain of his grief.  Using hair to do this does not involve causing any real damage to the body, but does produce a dishevelled appearance that socially marks him as a mourner to onlookers.  The second reason is that hair pulling is a behaviour that humans have always manifested, and is recorded in Hippocrates writings (see this site for more information on Hippocrates' notes on hair pulling).  In this respect, the mourners can be viewed as enacting a behaviour that is associated with intense distress and psychological frustration.

These days people do not pull out their hair at funerals because hair pulling itself is very little known and has lost its cultural significance.  However, it remains far more common than the statistics of official reported cases would have us believe.  Indeed, it has always been part of the human repertoire of body-directed actions that the Greeks were the first to record.  I like the fact that what is so little known of today was once a common spectacle among the ancient Greeks.