This article argues that there is an implicit colonial rhetoric in images of headlessness associated with early travel narratives, especially Ralegh’s Discovery of Giuana, but also early maps, etc. The earliest draft included a bit about the same headless image coming up in one of Freud’s analyses, but the editors thought it detracted from the historicism of the piece. Still, interesting that the image of a person without a head and with their facial features in their chest lingered among the available symbols available to debase another.