I Doff My Head for You

I. Invocation: A Head Full of Queens

I’ve always had a weakness for women who bled history with elegance.

Whenever one of them stirred beneath the surface—whether from the spine of a biography or the shimmer of a dramatized hem—I vanished willingly. Down the rabbit hole. Into her reign, her scent, her death. It began innocently enough: a film scene here, a footnote there. But soon it would spiral into a personal séance. I’d order books, watch every available documentary, consume six-hour miniseries in a single night. I didn’t just learn about her—I hosted her. My body became her altar. My mind, her court. Each queen who touched me left behind a strange residue, as if her jeweled head had been temporarily set on my shoulders, whispering: remember me better than they do.

Sometimes I’d find myself dressing in subtle homage—velvet sleeves, pearls knotted too tightly at the throat. I called it research. But I knew what it really was. Glamour. Possession. Devotion. I walked around my apartment like a half-resurrected ghost bride, forgetting for hours that my life was not, in fact, unfolding beneath a Tudor roof or in Versailles' gilded rotunda. That’s how deep the current pulls when the right woman grips you from beyond the veil.

And curiously, I met them one at a time, as if the Gods were handing me their skulls on a silver dish. Mary, Queen of Scots, arrived in my early twenties—tragic and storm-drenched, draped in black and betrayal. Marie Antoinette floated in like silk in my Saturn Return—coy, clever, and wrongly accused of frivolity. Anne Boleyn stalked in last, sharp as a needle, blood-slicked and phoenix-eyed. Each encounter was separate. Each reign cast its own spell. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the pattern: all three queens were scapegoats, all three were spectacles, and all three—most crucially—were beheaded.

It felt like a ritual.
One that had chosen me to finish the circuit.

And so the title came to me like a spell whispered from beneath a veil:
I doff my head for you.

It was cheeky, yes—a pun in the classic sense, a double entendre.
But it was also the most sacred thing I could say.
A gesture of both courtly submission and final sacrifice.

After all, to doff one’s head is to bow.
To off one’s head is to bleed.
I’ve done both.

And I suspect I’m not the only one.

II. Occult Implications of the Severed Head

Decapitation is not merely death. It is ritual erasure—a surgical severing of the divine channel. In all esoteric systems, the head is more than biology. It is the seat of vision, the crown of sovereignty, the vessel of prophecy, the mouth that names. To remove it is to halt the signal. To silence the God-line. To cauterize the future.

In ritual codes—especially those practiced beneath the visible strata of state and church—the severed head is a symbol of layered violence. It is never just about removing a person. It is about making an example of the divine within them. The head becomes an offering: a blood-soaked bouquet to power.

To cut off the head is:

— to blind the seer
— to desecrate the sovereign
— to mute the one who names the unnameable
— to warn all others who might dare speak or see

It is not execution.
It is ritual containment.

Consider the sacred precedents:
Medusa—a divine feminine force so potent, so untamed, her gaze could turn armies to stone. The men could not conquer her. So they decapitated her, turned her head into a weapon, and used it. Her power lived on—but only in service to patriarchal warfare.
John the Baptist—a prophet who spoke uncomfortable truths. He was beheaded not for crime, but for spectacle. A dancing girl asked, and a drunken king obeyed. The head of the seer on a platter. Vision devoured by entertainment.
Mímir—in the Norse myths, a being of immense wisdom. Even after death, his head was preserved, consulted, revered. The severed head as oracle. As relic. As trophy.

Once you begin to see it, you can’t stop.

Mary, Marie, and Anne were not merely executed.
They were sacrificed.
Not impulsively, not in chaos—but deliberately, ritually, with pageantry and steel.
Each had vision. Each held sway. Each used her voice, her mind, her charm, her will.
And each, in the end, was silenced—so that power could remain in the hands of men too frail to meet her gaze.

This is the occult truth beneath the historical one:

They were not punished for failure.
They were sacrificed for sovereignty.

To cut off the head is to claim the crown without the soul.
To parade the body without the vision.
To drain the feminine of flame and dress the theft as law.

But these women whisper still.
From portraits, from lace-lined tombs, from dream corridors and mirror glass.

The head, once removed, becomes myth.
And myth has a way of growing back.

III. Mary Stuart: The Catholic Phoenix

Mary came to me in velvet.

She entered my life like a ghost trailing lace through a shadowed corridor, her eyes rimmed in sorrow and defiance. I didn’t summon her. She arrived—as queens do—unapologetically, at the exact moment I was susceptible to haunted grandeur. I was young and romantic then, enthralled by symbols: blood-red rosaries, embroidered sleeves, the way a woman could embody both sovereign grace and spiritual danger. Mary Stuart fit the contour of that ache precisely. I saw her first not in text, but in atmosphere—in the hollow hush of cathedrals, in the tremble of a woman condemned by other women to make men feel safer. Her presence was so vivid, it felt like she was walking alongside me, pacing in exile just out of frame.

Her life was ritual architecture wrapped in velvet: raised in the French court, fluent in statecraft and seduction, crowned Queen of Scots just days old. She was married three times—each union more politically ensnared than the last. The Protestant tide was rising, and her Catholic blood shimmered like oil on water. Too beautiful. Too intelligent. Too Catholic. After her forced abdication, she fled to England seeking sanctuary. Instead, she found a gilded prison. Elizabeth I locked her away for nearly two decades—twenty years in which Mary's body was contained but her legend only grew. Letters intercepted, plots conjured in her name, whispers of rightful rule threaded through Catholic Europe like lit fuse.

Then came the axe.

In 1587, Mary Stuart was executed—not for any crime of action, but for what she symbolized. A feminine, Catholic, divine-ordained sovereign who refused to disappear. Her beheading was not justice. It was exorcism—a ritual cleansing to banish a woman who defied the Protestant logic of the state. They needed her gone not because she had acted, but because she existed in dangerous proximity to power. She was an echo of an older order, a relic that refused to rot.

In the occult reading, Mary’s death is not just political—it is archetypal.

She was the phoenix queen—flame-blooded, wing-cloaked, set alight on the altar of Protestant ascension. Her execution was a sacrifice to maintain the illusion of order, the same order her body threatened simply by standing tall in black mourning silk. The axe didn’t just strike flesh. It struck sovereignty wrapped in womanhood, mysticism, and sensual poise.

And she still haunts.
When I first met her, I didn’t know it was a haunting. But now I do.
Mary didn’t die quietly.
She scattered herself across history like burning feathers.
And some of us—those with heads still affixed—are beginning to remember her fire.

IV. Marie Antoinette: The Scapegoated Siren

Marie didn’t enter like a ghost.
She arrived like perfume—floating into the psyche in silk and sugar, unbearable beauty wrapped in mythic doom. She was everything I’d been warned not to love: decadent, detached, gilded. But I loved her anyway. Or rather—I mourned her, before I ever understood why.
Films framed her through a jeweled lens: fragile and defiant, trembling and theatrical, a creature both pampered and hunted. In some scenes, she is powdered melancholy in a rococo cage. In others, she is the last flicker of pleasure before the guillotine comes down. Her decadence never struck me as grotesque. It struck me as elegy. A final, fragrant gasp of beauty before the age of iron.

Born an Austrian princess, Marie was thrust into Versailles at the age of fourteen—a virgin bride yoked to a monarchy already rotting from within. The French people needed a villain, and she was handed the script: foreign, extravagant, frivolous, feminine. They painted her with accusations like blood—witchcraft, incest, sapphic salons, pearls while they starved. She became the mirror in which the starving could project their rage and the powerful could reassign blame.

She was not executed merely as a royal.
She was offered up as the symbolic stand-in for the entire Ancien Régime.

On October 16th, 1793, she was paraded through Paris in a common cart, her once-exquisite body shorn and bound, her face unpainted. She was thirty-seven. The guillotine fell not just on her neck, but on the throat of centuries. Her execution was broad daylight liturgy: this is what happens when a woman shines too brightly in the wrong era. Her head was the price of revolution, a blood-tithe to purify the Republic.

But even in death, Marie refused to behave.

The revolutionaries could not silence her image. They had taken her head, but left her silhouette behind—blush-laced, corseted, defiant. Her aesthetic became legend. Her myth outran their justice. They made her into a cautionary tale, but she emerged as a martyr of opulence, grace under siege, and sovereign femininity. And I—we—kept dreaming of her. Not as a queen, but as a siren scapegoated by hungry ghosts.

When I first met her, I didn’t want to. She seemed too pink, too powdered.
But slowly, I began to hear the elegy under the icing.
And once I heard it, I couldn’t stop.

Marie wasn't killed because she ruled.
She was killed because she reminded them what they had lost—glamour, beauty, the illusion that someone was in charge of the divine theater.
Her head became a sacrament.
And Versailles never recovered.
Nor did I.

V. Anne Boleyn: The Queen of Suspicion

Anne was a blade, not a bloom.

She entered my life like the flash of something metallic in candlelight—sudden, deliberate, and dangerous. Unlike Mary or Marie, there was no velvet about her. No wistful mourning veil. Anne was all edge: eyes like knives, tongue like scripture sharpened on salt. She didn’t haunt. She provoked.
She was the first queen who made me feel the risk of feminine intelligence. Not allure. Not beauty. Not even seduction. But intellect—coded, weaponized, and unleashed in a world designed to suppress it. And that? That was lethal.

Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, mother of Elizabeth I, was not born to rule—but she bent the world anyway. Her presence split England open like a geode: glittering on the inside, scandalous on the outside. Her rise was meteoric, mythic—fueled by desire, courtly intrigue, and a defiant refusal to play the mute consort. She refused to bed the king until she had a crown. She brought books to bed instead. That alone was witchcraft.

They called her a seductress, a sorceress, a curse upon the king’s manhood.
What they meant was: she was smarter than them.
And she paid for it.

In 1536, Anne was charged with adultery, incest, and treason—accusations as grotesque as they were fabricated. Her real crime was exhaustion: the court had grown tired of her sharpness, her miscarriages, her unrelenting refusal to be docile. Her downfall was arranged with cold efficiency, and unlike most queens, she was not granted the axe. She was beheaded by sword—an imported French swordsman, summoned specially, so the English execution could masquerade as mercy.

But no mercy was given.

Her death wasn’t a personal betrayal. It was national theater.
A necessary blood ritual to reset the order.

Anne had dared to rewire the circuitry of power—to speak freely, to read widely, to challenge the king’s will, to shape a future daughter destined to rule. Her beheading was the price for that recalibration. It cleared the path for the obedient Jane Seymour, for the Protestant cementing of Henry’s England, for a narrative where sharp women die quietly and leave no heirs of flame.

But Anne left one.

Elizabeth.

And her eyes?
They haunted Henry to the grave.

Personally, Anne undid me. She wasn’t soft. She didn’t inspire pity. She inspired respect.
She was the patron saint of razor-edged women—those who refuse to flatten themselves for love or kings or lineage.

She didn't whisper from beyond like a ghost.
She stared.
Unblinking.
And I felt myself rise to meet her gaze.

VI. Common Threads: The Pattern in the Blood

Mary, Marie, Anne.
Three queens severed from history at the neck.

Different lands, different eras, different sins—yet their blood trails form a perfect geometry across time. I did not choose them. I did not arrange this pattern like cards on a velvet cloth. They called to me—one by one—until their voices became a chorus in my bones. Now I can’t hear history without also hearing them.

Each woman was beautiful, yes—but more dangerously, each was powerful. And worse still: each was considered foreign. Mary’s Scottish claim was Catholic and inconvenient. Marie was Austrian in a French court during famine. Anne, though English, had spent her formative years in France and never fully belonged to the Tudor heart. Their “otherness” was always part of the sentence, whether spoken aloud or not.

But it wasn’t merely beauty or bloodlines that doomed them. It was function.
Each of them became a scapegoat, a vessel into which entire nations poured their shame, anxiety, and hunger for order. When regimes buckled or revolutions stirred, when kings trembled or the people starved, the solution was not structural repair—it was ritual bloodletting.
And what better offering than a queen?

They were accused of everything: adultery, incest, witchcraft, manipulation, treason, extravagance. The charges hardly mattered. What mattered was the pageantry of punishment—the ceremony of her downfall. Each was paraded, made visible in her disgrace, and publicly severed as a way of resetting the myth.
This is what happens to women who do not break.

And after the blade fell?
Romanticization.
Only once safely dead did they become tragic, beautiful, misunderstood. Statues were built. Films were made. Velvet was stitched in their honor. But the pageantry of their deaths had already done its work. They had become usable.
Their sovereignty dissolved.
Their image embalmed.
Their flame sanitized.

But not for me.

In the occult frame, they were never just queens. They were living sigils—incarnate glyphs of power unbent by patriarchy. Their deaths were not punishments but mass-level spells—sacrificial rites meant to reinforce the sacred myth of male order. They were killed not to protect the crown, but to remind the world who was allowed to wear it.

The State kills the woman to restore order through her blood.
To cauterize the wound she dared to leave open.

But I have seen too much.
Their heads are not silent.
They speak in my dreams—eyes unclosed, mouths unsewn, still naming.

They do not ask for pity.
They ask for witness.
And I doff my head for them.

“Let the next woman who loses her head do it with purpose. Let her be the storm they didn’t see coming.”

I doff my head and I’d off my head,

Majeye

This song is HILARIOUS. It’s from 1934. I recommend it as the epitome of a great drinking song; it’s about Anne Boleyn:
♪ “With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm” by Rudy Vallee and His Connecticut Yankees ♪