Eaters of the Dead

Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

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

Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies. By examining these seemingly inhuman acts, Eaters of the Dead reveals that those who consume corpses can teach us a great deal about human nature—and our deepest human 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