Eaters of the Dead

Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Kevin J. Wetmore Jr

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781836391609
  9781789144444
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789144451
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, our fear of being consumed is both universal and terrifying.
Kevin Wetmore explores monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, considering ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, and actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies, this book examines those that consume corpses and what they tell us about ourselves and our fears.

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION: The Fear of Being Eaten

1 David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York, 2003), p. 3.

2 Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), p. 319.

3 G. D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth-century Britain to the Fifteenth Century (Selinsgrove, PA, 1995).

4 Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1985), p. 157.

5 Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York, 1998), pp. 58–9.

6 Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York, 2003), p. 64.

7 Ibid., p. 65.

8 Ibid., p. 68.

9 Val Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’, in The Ultimate Journey: Inspiring Stories of Living and Dying, ed. James O’Reilly, Sean O’Reilly and Richard Sterling (San Francisco, CA, 2000), p. 142.

10 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford, 1995), p. 67.

11 Erik D’Amato, ‘Mystery of Disgust: Why Do We Love Eating Lobster but Recoil at the Thought of Boiled Roach’, Psychology Today (1 January 1998).

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 The term ‘sociomoral disgust’ was coined by Dr Carol Nemeroff of Arizona State University, ibid.

15 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Cultures (Minneapolis, MN, 1996), p. 3.

ONE: Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm

1 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Conqueror Worm’, in Complete Tales and Poems (New York, 1975), p. 961.

2 Euripides, ‘Cyclops’, in Euripides’ Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, ed. and trans. Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard (Oxford, 2013), pp. 93–5.

3 Henry iv, Part 1 (5.4.85–6).

4 David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York, 2003), p. 133.

5 Ibid.

6 Stephen King, Gerald’s Game (New York, 1992).

7 Herodotus, Herodotus Book i, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 140.

8 Jamsheed K. Choksy, Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism (Austin, TX, 1989), p. 16.

9 Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Shehnaz Neville Munshi, Living Zoroastrianism (Richmond, 2011), p. 8.

10 Ibid., p. 280; James R. Russell, ‘Burial in Zoroastrianism’, in Zoroastrianism, ed. Mahnaz Moazami (New York, 2016), p. 1504.

11 Russell, ‘Burial in Zoroastrianism’, p. 1504.

12 William Woodville Rockhill, Notes on the Ethnology of Tibet (Washington, DC, 1895), p. 727. (Translation is author’s own from the Latin of the text.)

13 Margaret Gouin, Tibetan Rituals of Death: Buddhist Funerary Practices (London, 2010), p. 60.

14 Meg van Huygen, ‘Give My Body to the Birds: The Practice of Sky Burial’, www.atlasobscura.com, 11 March 2014.

15 Michel Heike, ‘The Open-air Sacrificial Burial of the Mongols’, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de, accessed 11 April 2017.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Apollodorus, Gods and Heroes of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Fear of Being Eaten
• One: Sky Burial, Cyclops and the Conqueror Worm
• Two: Eating the Gods, Gods Eating Men
• Three: Grendel and the Ogres
• Four: Ghūls and Ghouls
• Five: Asian and Oceanian Flesh-eaters and Corpse-devourers
• Six: Wendigo
• Seven: Human Cannibals
• Eight: Flesh-eating in Popular Culture and Contemporary Reality
• Conclusion: We Can’t Stop Eating
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index