Cutting My Hair

The day after my cat died, I cut all my hair off. I vaguely remembered something about different cultures who do this for mourning purposes. I wasn't thinking, I just knew I needed to do it. Interesting...

Other particularly female rituals concerning burial were things like self-mutilation and hair cutting. Some critics have argued a parallel between mourners cutting their hair and a similar action during ritual sacrifices, in which the priest cuts a lock from the sacrificial animal to demonstrate its willingness to die. The cutting of a mourner’s hair indicates either a willingness to allow the dead to rest in the underworld or a resemblance of female self-mutilation as a way to lesson emotional anguish by conversion into physical pain.
-Rehm, Rush. Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Runeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy,p. 26.