Latin: verbum gemini hippopotamus
take their name from St. Augustine’s City of God, which refers to a man "double in his upper, but single in his lower half—having two heads, two chests, four hands, but one body and two feet like an ordinary man.” Yet, the skull appears to date from the Moche culture of ancient Peru (circa 300 B.C.E.); the subjects’ lives remain shrouded in mystery, with the only clues available from an extensive set of Moche ceramics found as grave goods in a tomb excavated in 1963 by a cousin of famed LSD-manufacturer and Grateful Dead soundman Owsley Stanley, who, during an acid trip, envisioned the odd “the skull hit by colored lightning and in the strike unified from many words, all words, and all heads, into a great singularity—which became the ‘Steal Your Face’ logo for the Grateful Dead.”
– BY DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN