[*AQuietPlace*]

Okay, here's one source I found:


Here are two commandments about how to cut your hair:

Leviticus 19:27. Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.

Deuteronomy 14:1. Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.

The pagan priests would trim the corners of their heads and their beards, much like monks have done. You'll note, however, that almost everyone has a ridge on their head where the frontal and parietal bones join. This is the ridge whose highest point is at or near the "crown". And what do pagan priests do? They shave the hair off the crown, creating what has been termed a tonsure (Figure 1). Some who prefer to keep their heads mostly bald (or have trouble growing hair) may opt for wearing a thin ring of hair around their heads, called a "monastic crown" (Figures 2 and 3).



Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.


The tonsure was a pagan practice because by it, they showed obedience to the sun god! Note what Alexander Hislop in his "The Two Babylons" Chapter 6, Section 2, writes (my emphasis is in bold):

Now, as Rome set so much importance on this tonsure, let it be asked what was the meaning of it? It was the visible inauguration of those who submitted to it as the priests of Bacchus. This tonsure cannot have the slightest pretence to Christian authority. It was indeed the "tonsure of Peter," but not of the Peter of Galilee, but of the Chaldean "Peter" of the Mysteries. He was a tonsured priest, for so was the god whose Mysteries he revealed. Centuries before the Christian era, thus spoke Herodotus of the Babylonian tonsure: "The Arabians acknowledge no other gods than Bacchus and Urania [i.e., the Queen of Heaven], and they say that their hair was cut in the same manner as Bacchus' is cut; now, they cut it in a circular form, shaving it around the temples."

Maimonides adds (Book 3, Chapter 37): "We have explained in our large work that it is prohibited to round the corners of the head, and to mar the corners of the beard, because it was the custom of idolatrous priests."

So the practice of trimming the corners of the head and beard are actually pagan practices and should not be practiced as such.