The legend of the knight beheaded for promiscuity

On the misty plain of modernity, the spectral silhouette of a knight errant appears. He has no head, but he rides impetuously, blind, deaf to reason, and guided by instincts that spring from the belly, not the spirit. He rides a black, neighing horse, and his gallop echoes the beat of an anxious heart, addicted to the search for something no longer known.

This is the Headless Horseman, the ultimate symbol of the contemporary soul, who rides through apps, bars, parties, and digital corners, where bodies offer themselves as commodities and identities that dissolve at the touch of a screen.

His head has been cut off by the modern cult of immediate pleasure. Where logos, conscience, prudence, and the desire for amorous transcendence once resided, there is now only emptiness. The eyes that once sought the other's face have now been replaced by algorithms that slide left or right. Love, that wild horse once tamed by patience and truth, is now reduced to anatomy, to "type," to pose.

The first encounter, once a ritual that heralded the possibility of a communion between two destinies, has now become a fleeting performance in which two masks touch and lie to each other in the name of feigned authenticity. Intimacy occurs before knowledge; in a house beginning with the roof where the body surrenders itself without the soul ever wanting to inhabit.

In this promiscuous decadence, not only are heterosexual encounters disfigured, but homoerotic encounters, widely promoted under the banner of “liberation,” often fall into terrains even more vulnerable to the logic of consumption.

Tradition, even within its limits, recognized eros as an ordering force, as a ladder to the transcendent. Modernity reduced it to impulse, a biological drive, and, in a schism of the moment, the knight lost his head because he rejected the rule of reason and the beauty of waiting.

Lisbon awoke in late July to one of the most shocking crimes in its recent history: a decapitated body abandoned in the heart of downtown Lisbon, like a postmodern version of a Greek tragedy. Days later, the head was delivered to a hospital, almost as a sacrificial gesture, or as a sudden awareness of the absurd.

It wasn't a fit of rage, nor mental alienation, experts have so far pointed out. It was a raw, free, and, precisely for that reason, abysmal choice. It is at this point that the philosopher Kierkegaard haunts us: "Anguish is the possibility of freedom." The killer chose destruction. And then, in a grotesque inversion of contrition, he sought hospital treatment, handing over his head as proof and a relic of the void.

And then the most disturbing face of this story emerges: that of normality. The accused, authorities say, had no history of serious disorders. He surrendered calmly and cooperatively. The evil did not come from a delusional mind, but from an individual capable of calculating, decapitating, and still functioning socially after the crime.

Rossio, where heretics were once burned and crimes tried with inquisitorial pomp, is now the scene of a crime without ideology, without belief, and without explanation. A crime without a head.

Like the Headless Horseman wandering in search of something lost, this macabre act symbolizes the modern man who has already lost his mind—his reason, his compassion, his sense of others. Decapitation is the literal separation of thought and human connection: a life without reflection, an attraction without empathy.