Eat Thy Neighbour

A History of Cannibalism

Daniel Diehl, Mark P Donnelly

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780750943734, 9780750943727
• eBook ISBN: 9780752486772
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Cannibalism is unquestionably one of the oldest and deepest-seated taboos. Even in an age when almost nothing is sacred, religious, moral and social prohibitions surround the topic. But even as our minds recoil at the mention of actual acts of cannibalism there is some dark fascination with the subject. Appalling crimes of humans eating other humans are blown into major news stories and gory movies: both Hitchcock's Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were based on the crimes of Ed Gein, who is profiled, along with others, in this book. In Eat Thy Neighbour the authors put the subject of cannibalism into its social and historical perspective.

PART ONE

CULTURAL
CANNIBALISM

One

A Word of Warning: Cannibalism in Myth, Legend, Folklore and Fiction

Humanity’s morbid fascination with cannibalism dates from well before the dawn of recorded history. Long before anthropologists and archaeologists found irrefutable evidence of early man’s taste for human flesh the knowledge that human beings engaged in cannibalism was already embedded deep in our collective psyche. This inherent knowledge was incorporated into some of our earliest stories and handed down from generation to generation, probably as cautionary tales intended to warn listeners that there were some forms of behaviour that really must be avoided. But if cannibalism was too frightening and too alien for humans to contemplate, who then was it that might engage in such horrific behaviour and still escape the censure of law and social mores? It was, of course, the gods. Cruel, petty and pernicious, the ancient gods served not only as a source of awe and wonder, but provided a vast storehouse of cautionary tales meant to instruct mere mortals as to which behavioural patterns were best left to those who were ultimately above the law.

In the earliest Greek legends the god Cronos (better known as Saturn) was a member of an ancient race of violent and warlike giants called Titans: Cronos was, in fact, the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Despite this enviable pedigree, Cronos was even more cruel and paranoid than the majority of his race. It was widely believed that he devoured five of his offspring in succession because he had been warned that one of them would eventually usurp his power. Obviously the story had a happy ending. Cronos’ long-suffering wife (and sister) Rhea hid their sixth child – none other than Zeus – so that he could grow up in one piece and sort out his dad’s little problem. Rather than simply kill Cronos, Zeus fed him an emetic that caused him to vomit up the rest of the kids who, amazingly, seemed none the worse for the experience.

A similarly gruesome Greek legend, and one with a far more cautionary element, tells the story of poor Pelops, who was murdered and cooked by his father, Tantalus, who thought he was such a clever fellow that he could serve human flesh to the gods and they would never know what it was. Obviously Tantalus was not as sharp as he thought he was, and the gods caught on to the ruse. Tantalus was properly punished and Pelops restored to life after his butchered body was returned to the cauldron in which it had been cooked. All a little silly, maybe, but even in the days of myth and legend cannibalism was seen to bring about serious repercussions. It also made a cracking good storyline, which was used again and again by classical Greek storytellers who had less interest in appeasing the gods than appeasing their audience. When the blind poet Homer wrote his immortal works, the Iliad and the Odyssey in the seventh century BC, he would have been hard pressed not to have included at least one story about someone who ate someone. In this case, a gigantic Cyclops named Polyphemus threatens Ulysses and his crew, devouring several of them before Ulysses outwits him, puts out his single eye and escapes.

Tragically, even in the civilised world of the classical Greeks, the phenomenon of cannibalism was not unknown in the real world. In the religious cult dedicated to the worship of the drunken, half-mad god Dionysus, the annual wine-fuelled revels frequently got far enough out of hand for crazed bands of female acolytes to attack young boys dressed as their god, tear them limb from limb and eat them raw. More than once the celebrants became completely demented and roamed the countryside, killing and eating any man who came within grabbing distance. To their credit, the Greeks were embarrassed by these unsavoury events, but stamping them out proved more than a little problematic. Still, cannibalism in general was seen as an awful thing and charges of consuming human flesh were often levelled against foreigners as an expedient way to make them look like barbarians. Such accusations were a device that would be used by successive societies for thousands of years to come.

At least one Greek, the historian Herodotus, was a little more understanding when describing the beliefs and practices among non-Greek societies. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus wrote his Histories, in which he described a variety of cultures, both real and imagined. In describing a people he called ‘Issedones’ who, he claimed, lived south of the Ural Mountains, Herodotus said, ‘When a man’s father dies, his kinsmen bring beasts of the flock to his house as a sacrificial offering. The sheep and the body of the father of their host are cut [up] and the two sorts of meat are mixed together, served and eaten.’

Herodotus tells a similar story about an Indo-European people known as ‘Padaens’ who had an even more direct approach to cannibalism, not waiting until the soon-to-be-dead had shuffled off the mortal coil before consigning them to the pot. He wrote, ‘. . . when a man falls sick, his closest companions kill him because, as they put it, their meat would be spoilt if he were allowed to waste away with disease. The invalid, in these circumstances, protests that there is nothing the matter with him – but to no purpose.’ There seemed to have been a sexually specific aspect to this practice of the Padaens, because Herodotus insisted that if the sufferer was a woman it was her female friends who dispatched and devoured her and, likewise, males were eaten only by other males. While it all sounds a bit Monty Python, the Padaens were eventually identified as the Birhors, who did, indeed, kill and eat their dying. However, they insisted that it was only the immediate family who engaged in this peculiar rite because inviting non-family members to the memorial feast would have been sacrilegious in the extreme. This is a practice which is known to anthropologists as endocannibalism and is a concept which we will revisit in greater detail in chapter three.

Numerous other tribes, peoples and ethnic groups described in the Histories were credited with similar cannibalistic practices; virtually all concerned eating the dead in some form of memorial service rather than flesh-eating for its own sake. What is surprising – given the Greeks’ xenophobia and insistence that cremation was the only respectful way to dispose of the deceased – is that Herodotus remained amazingly non-judgemental about the whole thing. He wrote, ‘If it were proposed to all nations to choose which seemed the best of all customs, each, after examination was made, would place its own first.’ A similarly lenient attitude was taken four centuries later by another Greek, Strabo, when he described the funereal customs of the Celts, who consigned their progenitors to the dinner table with the deepest dignity and reverence.

While the Greeks may not have devoured their dead, they did dispose of the body by cremation. This may seem entirely unrelated, but only if you do not firmly believe that the physical body must be preserved for a continued existence in an afterlife. This, however, was precisely the attitude of the ancient Egyptians and, in all likelihood, the beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian practice of burying the dead. Possibly through their centuries of contact with Egyptian culture, particularly during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaton who is generally accepted as the first person to institute the concept of a single deity, the Hebrews came to believe that only the physical survival of the body could guarantee the person’s eventual resurrection with the coming of the Messiah. Consequently, for the Jews, like modern Christians and followers of Islam, the bodies of the deceased were sacrosanct. To eat, or even to cremate, them could only be seen as the ultimate act of sacrilegious desecration. An early example of just how serious a matter cannibalism was to the Jews can be found in the Old Testament second Book of Kings, chapter 6, verses 24–30, which are excerpted and condensed, below.

²⁴ And it came to pass . . . that [the] king of Syria . . . went up and besieged Samaria. ²⁵ And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it until an ass’s head was sold for four-score pieces of silver . . . ²⁶ And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him saying, Help, my lord, O king. ²⁷ . . . ²⁸ And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. ²⁹ So, we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son. ³⁰ And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes . . .

Curiously, the act of cannibalism viewed with such obvious horror by the ancient Jews was, in a sense, incorporated into the most central tenet of the Christian religion, the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. Although the Eucharist will be dealt with again, in the next chapter, it is worth noting that in the Roman Catholic Church, the wine and bread used in the Communion are believed to literally transform themselves into Christ’s body and blood in the mouth of the communicant through the miracle of transubstantiation. Instances of far more blatant acts of cannibalism also found their way into Christian legend. In the legend of St Nicholas, who became the patron saint of children and the progenitor of Santa Claus, the good saint is reputed to have resurrected two children after they were murdered, cut up and sold as meat by a pagan butcher.

No less an author than William Shakespeare also used cannibalism to intrigue his audiences in Titus Andronicus, and in Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century classic Robinson Crusoe, the eponymous hero’s friend, Friday, is introduced when he escapes from a band of fierce cannibals. In the 1960s, sci-fi author Rod Serling gave the subject a modern twist in his short story ‘To Serve Man’, wherein the true purpose behind a seemingly benign alien invasion is revealed when an alien book, whose title also served as the title of the story, proved to be a cookbook. Even children’s literature is redolent with frightening characters who dine on humans, especially children. In Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack encounters a giant who bellows ‘Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’ In Hansel and Gretel the abandoned children are lured into captivity by a wicked witch who puts Gretel to work sweeping and cleaning, while Hansel is kept in a cage where he is fattened up before being shoved into the oven. Even today the visage of the terrifying cannibal is never far from the best-sellers’ list. In Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, the character Dr Hannibal Lecter steals the show with the single line, ‘A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.’

A classic tale of cannibalism, based on numerous real-life sea disasters, came from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe. In Poe’s ‘Narrative of Gordon Pym’ we read a fictionalised – and completely fantastic – account of a group of shipwrecked men who, after a series of disastrous adventures, are left to drift in a lifeboat without food or water. Nearing death, they agree to draw lots, the loser to be killed and eaten to ensure the survival of the remaining castaways. As we shall see in the next chapter of Eat Thy Neighbour, such nautical tragedies have happened more than once in real life.

If fictionalised tales of cannibalism have been employed to heighten the reader’s sense of fear, the same device has been used in more than one instance of biting satire.

In 1728, Jonathan Swift, best remembered as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, became incensed over the British Parliament’s callous disregard for the plight of Irish peasant farmers. Due to increasing taxation, high rent and repeated crop failures, thousands of Irish were barely staving off starvation while others were actually starving to death. Rather than reduce rents to a level commensurate with a given year’s harvest, the predominantly English landowners preferred to raise the taxes to compensate for the shortfall in crop sales. In a short tract generally known as A Modest Proposal, Swift wryly suggested a solution which he insisted would satisfy all concerned. If the Irish did not have enough money to feed their families, and the landlords were being deprived of their income because of their tenants’ poverty, Swift suggested that the Irish sell their children to the landlords as a food source. In this way, he argued, the Irish tenant farmers would increase their income while simultaneously reducing the number of mouths to be fed. A small excerpt from A Modest Proposal will serve to illustrate Swift’s vitriolic condemnation of British policy: ‘I grant that this food will be somewhat dear [but not too much for the rich landlords] who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good, fat child, which . . . will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat.’ Not surprisingly Swift was vilified by the British government. It would seem that starving the Irish was perfectly acceptable but even the suggestion of eating them was intolerable.

In a more recent context, the redoubtable team from the 1960s’ Monty Python’s Flying Circus took on the subject of cannibalism in a piece called the ‘Undertaker Sketch’. In this sketch, a man brings his deceased mother – whose body has been stuffed into a large refuse sack – to a funeral home to make arrangements for her burial. Here is a portion of that sketch.

Undertaker:	Can I have a look? She looks quite young.
Man:	Yes, yes she was.
Undertaker:	Fred!
Fred’s voice:	Yeah?
Undertaker:	I think we got an eater.
Man:	What?

Another Undertaker pokes his head around a door.

Fred:	Right, I’ll get the oven on. (Goes off)
Man:	Er, excuse me, um, are you suggesting eating my mother?
Undertaker:	Er, yeah, not raw. Cooked.
Man:	What?
Undertaker:	Yes, roasted with a few French fries, broccoli, horseradish sauce.
Man:	Well, I do feel a bit peckish.
Voices from audience:	Disgraceful! Boo! (etc)
Undertaker:	Great!
Man:	I really don’t think I should.
Undertaker:	Look, tell you what, we’ll eat her, if you feel a bit guilty about it after, we can dig a grave and you can throw up in it.

A section of the audience rises up in revolt and invades the set, remonstrating with the performers and banging the counter, etc, breaking up the sketch.

What is interesting about this morbid bit of comedy is not that the Pythons would perform it; there was almost no subject they would not gleefully tackle. What is interesting is that even these brilliantly irreverent comics felt it necessary to ameliorate the effect of their own comedy by having the audience rise up in righteous anger and storm the set. Even here, the sense that there are bounds beyond which one must not tread is strictly adhered to.

Two

Ancient Origins: Archaeological Evidence of Cannibalism

Although the earliest humanoid remains – found in Africa and dating from 3.5 million years ago – show how the human species originated and what our progenitors looked like, they are too few, and too scattered, to tell us much about the social structure in which proto-man lived. For such details we have to fast-forward three million years and travel to China. At a dig site known as Dragon Bone Hill, just south of Beijing, the plentiful remains of 500,000-year-old Peking Man show clear evidence that among the various food sources accessed by these early people were other humans; probably other members of their own genetic stock. This does not imply that human meat was a regular menu item, but when other animals were scarce, or the only available creatures were too fierce to tackle, members of less warlike clans may have been seen as easy prey. Cannibalism may not have been a practice of choice, but in times of need, any meat is better than none.

Evidence of cannibalism at Peking Man sites is similar in nature to that found at Gran Dolina in north-central Spain. Spain has proved the world’s most fruitful site for the recovery of human remains between 1.5 million and 100,000 years old and a significant number of these sites have shown evidence of cannibalism. Other bones dating from 100,000 years ago, and providing nearly identical evidence, have been found in Krapina, Yugoslavia. Similarly, 12,000-year-old human remains found at campsites in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset show signs of cannibalism almost indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One – Cultural Cannibalism
• Part Two – Case Studies of Taboo Breakers
• Notes on Sources
• Bibliography
• Plates