Eat Thy Neighbour E-Book

Daniel Diehl

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 458

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

EAT

THY NEIGHBOUR

EAT

THY NEIGHBOUR

A HISTORY OF

CANNIBALISM

MARK P. DONNELLY AND DANIEL DIEHL

First published in 2006 by Sutton Publishing Limited

This revised edition first published in 2008

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

© Daniel Diehl and Mark P. Donnelly, 2006, 2008, 2012

Daniel Diehl and Mark P. Donnelly have asserted the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 8677 2

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 8676 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

Both DANIEL DIEHL and MARK P. DONNELLY are authors, screenwriters and historians. Over the last decade, they have collaborated to create nearly one hundred hours of documentary television programming and have co-authored ten books, including Tales from the Tower of London. Their next book, The Big Book of Pain focuses on the history of torture and corporal punishment.

All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Contents

Acknowledgements

Part One – Cultural Cannibalism

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

2. Ancient Origins: Archaeological Evidence of Cannibalism

3. Institutionalised Cannibalism: Rituals, Religion and Magical Rites

4. Cannibalism in extremis: Famine, Disaster and Warfare

Part Two – Case Studies of Taboo Breakers

5. Keeping it in the Family: Sawney Beane (c. 1400–35)

6. The Proof of the Pudding is in the Tasting: Margery Lovett and Sweeney Todd (1789–1801)

7. A Hunger for Adventure: Alfred Packer (1874)

8. This Little Piggy Went to Market: Karl Denke and George Grossman (1921–4)

9. Candy from a Baby: Albert Fish (1924–34)

10. The Shallow End of the Gene Pool: Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas (1951–83)

11. Psycho Killer qu’est-ce que c’est? Ed Gein (1954–7)

12. From Russia with Hate: André Chikatilo (1978–90)

13. Zombie Sex Slaves of Milwaukee: Jeffrey Dahmer (1978–91)

14. Sushi Dreams: Issei Sagawa (1981)

15. Even the Best of Families: Hadden and Bradfield Clark (1984–92)

16. Stocks and Bondage: Gary Heidnik (1986–7)

17. Bringing Home the Bacon: Nicolas Claux (1990–4)

18. Spider on the Web: Armin Meiwes (2001)

19. Something Completely Different: Marc Sappington (2001)

20. A Rising Tide of Flesh Eaters? The Future of Cannibalism

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Christopher Feeney, our editor at Sutton Publishing, for his continued support of our work. A special thanks to Martin Smith, author of River of Blood, for helping us find some amazingly obscure dates and places. Thanks also to Matt Loughran for leading us to the Monty Python sketch, and to our photo researcher Peter Gethin.

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 indistinguishable from those found in Yugoslavia, Spain and China. Nearly identical physical evidence has been found at innumerable campsites of Neanderthal man, but since there is wide controversy as to whether or not Neanderthal was actually a close relative of modern man or a dead-end offshoot of our family tree, his eating habits may not qualify in our argument. For our purposes, however, Neanderthal hardly matters because there is ample evidence that those who were unquestionably our direct ancestors did, indeed, eat each other. If this evidence is correct, it indicates that cannibalism was, to a greater or lesser extent, practised by human tribal groups in nearly every corner of the globe, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, as many anthropologists argue, finding a heap of human bones – even when they are randomly mixed with the bones of game animals – is not viable evidence of cannibalism. The question now becomes: what proof do we have that ancient people were actually eating each other and not just rotting quietly away in a corner of their cave?

Among the first signs anthropologists look for when examining suspected sites of cannibalism are tool marks made when flint knives have been used to remove flesh from bone very shortly after death. While such marks may look like random scratches to the layman, to the trained eye they are as identifiable as a signature or fingerprints. Again, there are those who argue that defleshing is not proof of cannibalism. It may be that the flesh was removed from the bones of the dead and the skeletal remains reverently cleaned and buried or placed in an ossuary, or bone box. True again. There are many recorded societies that did exactly this and they were not cannibals, so we must look further for definitive proof of the practice.

The next piece in assembling our cannibalistic puzzle is determining exactly which types of bones are present in the spoil heap. In many cases, where the discarded bones are found at sites suspected of being field stops during a hunting expedition, it is only particular bones such as ribs, spine, hands and feet that have been discovered. The assumption here is that the meatier parts of the carcass were cut away and hauled home while the less savoury parts were left in the field. When it is the heavily fleshed long bones of the arms and legs that are discovered, they tend to be found at permanent campsites and randomly mixed with animal carcasses, all of which bear the marks of de-fleshing tools. In such cases these long bones often provide one more bit of telling evidence. The large knuckle ends of the bones have been crushed – as have corresponding bones of animal carcasses – in order to remove the protein-filled marrow. When these factors are combined they provide a preponderance of evidence that would surely stand up in any court of law. As a race, we are most certainly guilty of eating our neighbours. But if early man went around eating people indiscriminately, he would probably have eaten those closest to hand – the members of his own tribe – possibly beginning with those least able to defend themselves, the children and women. Had he done this, humanity would have died out in no time at all. In point of fact, there seems to be some evidence that Neanderthal was more than a little indiscriminate as to who he ate and we could conjecture that this might have been a contributing factor in his extinction. Obviously, if the human species was going to flourish, there had to be rules about who got spit-roasted and who did not.

One archaeologically substantiated instance of cannibalism, which has provided no clear-cut clues to the underlying cause, has left scholars scratching their heads in confusion and social activists shaking their fists in anger. It has only been a century and a half since the American Indian was the whipping boy for expansionist-minded white America, but in recent decades the Native American’s past has been transformed into something sacrosanct. Now, the image of one of these supposedly peace-loving, spiritualistic tribes has been called into question by discoveries in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, once the home of a people known as the Anasazi. The Anasazi flourished throughout the American south-west between AD 700 and 1300. During those six hundred years they developed a complex and advanced society that spread across Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Remnants of their culture can still be seen in the towering cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and numerous other sites scattered across the Mojave Desert. The question of their disappearance has long troubled scholars and historians and, until recently, the accepted wisdom has been that a massive drought caused the Anasazi social structure to collapse. Certainly, there is ample evidence that as their population expanded they despoiled their land and hunted the game to near extinction. If this alone was not enough to raise the ire of those who believe the Anasazi were back-to-the-land-minded conservationists, recent evidence has caused one of the greatest social controversies since Charles Darwin proposed the theory of human evolution. Thanks to a mounting pile of physical evidence, many archaeologists and anthropologists have become convinced that the Anasazi practised cannibalism.

In 1994, the remains of seven dismembered bodies were found at an Anasazi site at Cowboy Wash, 40 miles east of Mesa Verde. All of these skeletal remains bore the distinct marks of defleshing and shattered bone ends described earlier as convincing evidence of cannibalism. Additionally, human blood residue was found inside fragments of cooking pots. Even more ominous were the human skulls that showed evidence of having been set on a fire to cook their original contents before being cracked open. While accusations of racism and political incorrectness were being thrown around, scientists continued to gather evidence; by the time they completed their research, similar remains had been gathered from no fewer than fifty Anasazi sites.

Most alarmed by these findings were members of the Hopi, Zuni and other Native American tribes who date their ancestry to the Anasazi. When a scientific symposium was held to discuss the Anasazi findings, the word cannibalism was excised from the conference’s formal name. In a politically correct compromise, it was entitled ‘Multidisciplinary Approaches to Social Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest’. Dr David Wilcox, curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona, explained the problem succinctly when he said, ‘Our understanding of the Anasazi is exactly parallel to what was thought about the Maya years ago – this advanced society, responsible for beautiful things, that now we realize was not a peaceful place.’ Even Dr Wilcox, it seems, hesitated to use the ‘C’ word. There were those, however, who did not; among them were Christy Turner, professor of anthropology at Arizona State University and Richard Marler, a molecular biologist at the University of Colorado Health Services Center in Denver.

Turner not only followed all the established guidelines for proving cannibalism but added one of his own. ‘Pot polish’ is a term Turner uses to describe the shine given to bone fragments which have been continually stirred while being cooked in an earthenware vessel. Lo and behold, the human bones from the Anasazi sites bore the distinctive sheen of pot polish. For his part, Marler was asked to analyse a coprolite found among the remains of a cooking fire at one of the sites where human bones were discovered. ‘Coprolite’ is the technical term for preserved human faecal matter. According to Marler’s tests, the Anasazi coprolites contained human myoglobin, a protein found only in muscle tissue. Although myoglobin is found in all animals, the myoglobin in each species of creature is unique and distinctive. In the coprolite Marler examined, not only was there human myoglobin, but there was a complete lack of myoglobin from any other species. In Marler’s words, ‘All we have found from the Cowboy Wash samples is human myoglobin – no other species. If you didn’t eat human beings, this protein would not show up. This proves they put the meat in their mouths. They had a human meat meal.’

The burning question, of course, is WHY the Anasazi ate human flesh. Christy Turner believes the Anasazi were invaded by a group of Toltec Indians who were, indeed, cannibals. These invading Toltecs used torture, corpse mutilation and cannibalism to terrorise the Anasazi over a protracted enough period of time to destroy their civilisation. Others hold that simple starvation, brought on by a series of droughts and crop failures, along with the general depletion of game animals, may have led the Anasazi into cannibalism.

Whatever the reason, the controversy over Anasazi dining habits is sure to rage for years to come. Terry Knight, a Ute Mountain tribal leader who supervised the Cowboy Wash excavation, has a reasonable view on the matter: ‘Like any other civilization, there were good, productive people, and there were bad people.’ Southern Methodist University archaeologist Michael Adler puts it even more curtly when he says, ‘This is not a happy past.’

What the Anasazi controversy makes clear is that most early societies, their geographic location and precise place along the time-line notwithstanding, were often unstable. When, for whatever reason, a society began to collapse, and the generally accepted rules of behaviour broke down, the prospect of cannibalism might become an appealing alternative to starvation or wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. Certainly, if drought or some other natural disaster killed off a succession of harvests, or the game died out or moved on, the neighbouring village, or the people next door, might start to look pretty inviting.

Three

Institutionalised Cannibalism: Rituals, Religion and Magical Rites

It was, in fact, the ancient Greeks – one specific ancient Greek – who first tackled the tricky job of identifying and classifying the phenomenon of cannibalism. In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian and chronicler Herodotus coined the word that is still generally accepted as the proper term for eating human flesh. The word is ‘anthropophagy’ and is a combination of the Greek words ‘anthropos’, meaning ‘man’, and ‘phagein’, meaning ‘to eat’. Anthropophagy may not be as evocative as cannibalism but it is more technically correct and therefore the descriptive term of choice among historians, scientists and anthropologists. So, if anthropophagy is the proper, technical term for humanity eating its own kind, what then is the origin of the word cannibal?

That term was coined by the great explorer Christopher Columbus, no less, following his landfall in the West Indies island group known as the Lesser Antilles: what we now call the Caribbean Islands.

Among the tribes of the Lesser Antilles were a people who referred to themselves as ‘cariba’. The Spanish explorers erroneously assumed this was their name for themselves when it was actually a descriptive noun meaning ‘bold’ or ‘brave’. The Spanish had some trouble pronouncing cariba, and pronounced it ‘caniba’. From caniba evolved ‘cannibal’ and once it was discovered that the ‘cannibals’ committed the ultimate sin of eating human flesh, the name of the islanders took on an entirely new, and more general, meaning. In the five centuries since Columbus’ travels to the New World the term cannibal has been used to vilify nearly any culture seen as inferior, to describe those groups and individuals who consume, or have in the past consumed, human flesh, and to add titillating excitement to an endless litany of stories, both factual and fictitious.

But historians, scientists and anthropologists being, as they are, a precise lot, find that one term is not enough to cover the varying reasons for eating our own species. Under the general heading of anthropophagy there are the sub-classifications of ‘endocannibalism’ – eating dead friends or relatives as an act of respect – and ‘exocannibalism’ – the act of eating enemies slain in battle or killed as a sacrifice to some small and angry deity. It is worthy of note that in classifying the different types of anthropophagy, even science has fallen back on the common term ‘cannibal’.

There are a variety of primary reasons why a society might practise cannibalism. It may be part of a ceremony meant to honour the dead; as a post-battle celebration in which the prowess of an enemy is absorbed by the victor; as a means of inflicting one final insult on a fallen enemy; as a desperate means of fending off starvation or to overcome a severe protein deficiency in the staple diet. Of course, there are also societies who eat people just because they like the taste. If a society eats flesh as a right of conquest (exocannibalism) or to revere the memory of the dead (endocannibalism) there is usually a religious aspect to the proceedings. Certainly there is an element of this concept in the Christian ceremony of Holy Communion particularly if, as those who follow the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church believe, the bread and wine used in the service quite literally turn into the blood and body of Christ through the miracle of transubstantiation.

In this chapter we will examine a number of first-hand accounts, provided by chroniclers, explorers and anthropologists, of exocannibalism, endocannibalism and just plain eating your neighbours; but all within social structures where cannibalism, in one form or another, is an accepted norm. Most of the societal groups we will encounter are, by most modern standards, primitive and warlike. In such societies, human flesh has often been considered little more than another form of booty to be shared out among the victorious. Because of the vast historical scope of these records and the number of instances and locales in which the phenomenon has been recorded, we cannot attempt an in-depth coverage of the subject. Rather we will present a few selective accounts, divided by geographic region.

One of the first verified accounts of martial cannibalism comes from the Roman historian and chronicler Tacitus. According to his Annals warriors of the Celtic tribes – particularly those in Britain – took the heads of their slain enemies and gave them to their priests, or Druids, who ate the brain believing that by so doing they would be imbued with the wisdom, knowledge and cleverness of the enemy. It is a pattern that we will find repeated with predictable regularity throughout the rest of this chapter.

The first contact of Europeans with cannibals in the New World came hand-in-hand with the discovery of the Western Hemisphere. Among the first people with whom Christopher Columbus’ 1492 expedition came in contact were the Caribs mentioned earlier, and they routinely devoured their slain enemies. Another tribe of the same island group, the Arawak, who had not originally been cannibals, had taken up the practice as a means of revenging themselves on the Caribs. As the practice spread among the islanders, its battle-related significance dwindled. Where once it had been purely a victory right, it devolved into a simple shopping expedient. People were boiled, roasted, smoked, salted and eaten raw as an integral part of the Caribbean diet. The most popular way of preparing flesh was to roast it over a grill of green wood called a ‘barbacoa’, which has survived in the modern word barbecue. In essence, derivations of this term came to be used for both the grill and the meat that was cooked on it.

If the Spanish at first assumed the dining habits of the Caribbean people were a localised phenomenon, they revised their opinion after invading Mexico. In 1520–1 the Conquistador Hernan Cortez led a gold-hunting expedition of 550 heavily armed men into the land of the Aztec and encountered cannibalism on a mind-boggling scale. Because the Aztecs were wiped out by a combination of Spanish aggression and European diseases, most of what we know of them comes from contemporary accounts by priests travelling with the Spanish forces. Among the best of these accounts is that written by Fr Bernal Diaz, who was one of several dedicated priests who went to the new world in an attempt to convert the natives of Central and South America to Christianity.

Even as they entered Aztec territory, the Cortez expedition found half-devoured corpses scattered along the roadside and caged humans awaiting consumption. It is true that the majority of Aztec cannibalism was carried out in connection with ritual sacrifice, but the Aztecs were undoubtedly one of the most sacrifice-happy groups ever to inhabit the planet. In these ceremonies, the victim or, more often, multiple victims – frequently numbering in the hundreds or thousands – were paraded to the top of pyramid temples where their chests were cut open and their still-beating hearts ripped out. The bodies were then kicked over the edge of the pyramid to be divided among the people below according to social rank; the priest and noble class getting the revered internal organs, thighs going to the high council, and the commoners being left with the lesser chops and roasts. On particularly solemn occasions the king would eat a dish called ‘man-corn’ in which finely chopped flesh was mixed with maize meal and eaten during a religious ceremony. Sometimes the flayed skins of the victims were offered to the fertility goddess. Infants – who were obviously not prizes of battle – were offered to the rain god. There seemed no end to the number of reasons, and the number of gods to whom people were sacrificed, but the Aztecs always managed to gobble up the carcasses. The Spanish were told that in 1486 as many as 20,000 had been sacrificed and eaten over the course of a four-day religious orgiastic food-fest. When the Catholics challenged the fact that the natives sacrificed human beings to their gods, the Aztecs replied that yes, they did sacrifice their enemies to please and appease their god but – in a none too delicate reference to the Catholic communion rite – noted that the Spanish ate their god . . . and the Aztecs thought that practice barbaric. With mutual hatred now firmly established, the Spanish proceeded to declare all-out war on the Aztecs.

During a conquest nearly as bloody as the sacrifices practised by the Aztecs, Cortez saw many of his own men captured, sacrificed and devoured. Obviously, the result was a thorough demonisation of the Aztec and, by extension, nearly all the inhabitants of the New World. By 1530 many Europeans already had the sneaking suspicion that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. It was a legacy that would follow the white man, and the Indian, into the colonization of what is now the USA and Canada.

Although the initial relationship between white settlers and Native North Americans was cordial enough, the continued mass incursion of whites into Indian Territory put a strain on public relations, particularly when the territory of the more aggressive, warlike tribes of the Great Plains started to be overrun. What most Europeans never understood was that the American Indian tribes had cultures as varied and diverse as the Europeans themselves. Some were peaceful farmers, traders and trappers while others were professional raiders, thieves and warriors. Although there were inevitably conflicts between white men and red men, only a few of the tribes routinely indulged in the cannibalism with which many of them were eventually charged.

Even before the Europeans encountered the really warlike tribes of the Midwest, there were encounters with tribes whose ferocity was almost beyond belief. The Iroquois were particularly aggressive and treated their prisoners with uncompromising cruelty. After extensive and highly creative tortures, prisoners were either beheaded and spit-roasted or simply roasted alive and eaten by the tribe at a celebratory dinner. The practices of the Iroquois were well recorded by a series of Jesuit priests who lived and worked with them over a number of years. The priests, presumably, managed to gain their trust. Other eastern tribes who practised cannibalism in one form or another were the Montaignes, the Algonquin and the Micmac.

Further west, the Dakota tribes were cannibals, but limited the practice to the bodies of fallen enemies who had performed particularly well in battle. Their hearts and livers – believed to be the seat of wisdom and courage respectively – were eaten by the victorious warriors who had engaged in the fight. The Dakota were very particular that only the bravest of their enemy made it to the table. To consume the body of a coward would have been disgusting. Along the north-west border of the USA, the Thingit, Tsinshuan and Heilsuk practised cannibalism, but only as a part of tribal magic. Other Native American tribes, particularly those in what is now Canada, often forced their prisoners to eat strips of their own flesh before being killed and butchered, as a means of inflicting one final humiliation.

The close association – for good or bad – of the white and native cultures brought about an inevitable degree of cultural cross-pollination. When the family of famous mountain man, Jeremiah Johnson, was wiped out by a Crow Indian war party, he went on a one-man revenge spree. Over several years, Johnson claimed to have killed 247 Crow and eaten every one of their livers. No matter how many braves and warriors were sent against him, Johnson killed them, leaving their liverless bodies as a calling card. Eventually, the Crow agreed to a truce. They would stop hunting Johnson if he would stop eating Crow.

If Europeans discovered numerous tribes of cannibals in the USA, their experiences in South America were equally disturbing; and because these encounters came hard on the heels of the discovery of Caribbean and Aztec societies, the belief that all Native Americans must eat each other disastrously influenced relations with more peaceful civilisations. A case in point is the encounter between Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Inca people of Peru in 1532–3, only twelve years after the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortez.

In a typically brutal and unnecessary attack, Pizarro and his soldiers destroyed the Inca capital, killed the cream of the imperial troops and took King Atahualpa captive. Atahualpa was told in no uncertain terms that he would bow to the power of Spain and adopt the religion of his conquerors. Despite being in obvious peril of his life, Atahualpa said he bowed to no man and told the Spanish exactly what he thought of their religion. His people, he said, only sacrificed their enemies to their gods and certainly did not eat people. The Spanish, on the other hand, killed their own God, drank his blood and baked his body into little biscuits which they sacrificed to themselves. He found the entire practice unspeakable. The Spanish were outraged and had Atahualpa publicly strangled on 15 August 1533.

The first objective account of South American cannibalism comes to us from a German sailor, Hans Staden, who was shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast only a few years after Pizarro’s encounter with the Inca. According to Staden, the local tribe, the Tumpinamba, had taken a prisoner during a battle with a rival tribe. The prisoner was dragged into the village where he was subjected to the taunts and jeers of the local women, but was allowed to retaliate in kind, even being provided with overripe fruit and pottery to throw at his tormentors. Eventually, the tribal executioner appeared with a war-club and, after another exchange of insults, feints and parries, he proceeded to batter out the prisoner’s brains, to the cheers of the crowd. The victim’s blood was collected in ceremonial jars and immediately drunk by the old women and children of the tribe. According to Staden, ‘Mothers would smear their nipples with the blood so that even babies could have a taste of it’. The body was then cut into quarters, roasted and eaten. Curiously, as barbaric as this sounds, it was purely ceremonial and only inflicted on a single representative of the enemy.

Although the example above took place nearly five centuries ago, the practice of cannibalism in South America, particularly along Brazil’s Amazon basin, survived well into the twentieth century. The Cubeo tribe routinely made war for the specific purpose of eating captured enemies. In battles where more captives were taken than could be eaten at a single celebration, the excess meat was dried and saved for later. Those who were destined for immediate consumption were subject to a particularly horrible fate; their penis and scrotum were cut out, and worn over the genitals of the victorious warriors while they performed a celebratory dance. After the dance, as many enemy as were deemed appropriate to the size of the crowd were roasted and eaten. But it appears that not only the enemy found his way to the Cubeo table. When the mood struck them, they would dig up their own dead, who had been cremated before burial, grind up their bones, mix the powder with the local beer and drink it.

Other tribes along the Amazon who practised cannibalism but generally limited it to captive enemy warriors were the Tarianas, Tucanos, Tupi-Cuarani, Tupinamba, Panche and Paucura. The Paucura, who seemed to be gourmets, kept their prisoners caged for some time before consigning them to the pot or gridiron, fattening them up on fresh fruit and vegetables to improve the flavour of the meat. The Panche, who ate their enemies like the other tribes listed above, also ate their own firstborn in a gruesome fertility rite. Obviously, this kind of thing can get out of hand; the Tupi-Cuarani began practising cannibalism as a post-battle ritual, but decided they liked the taste of human meat so much that it became a routine affair. The same was true of the Cashibos who lived on the Brazilian/Peruvian border. They started eating their deceased parents as a sign of respect but eventually extended the practice to what can only be considered big game hunting. Cashibo hunting parties would lure hunters from other tribes into ambush by imitating the sound of birds and animals, turning the rival hunters into the hunted.

Some South American tribes were far more selective, and respectful, about who they ate. The Cocomas only ate their deceased relatives and friends, not only consuming their flesh but, like the Cubeo, grinding up their bones, mixing the powder with beer and drinking it. The Cocomas insisted it was a solemn gesture and that it was a far better fate to end up inside a warm friend than to be buried in the cold ground.

If images of fierce Amazonian tribes and bloodthirsty Aztecs have become an accepted part of history, the cannibalistic activities of certain African tribes have entered the realm of legend. Until relatively modern times, if you heard the word cannibal, the image your mind would most likely conjure up would not be Anthony Hopkins as the campy Hannibal Lecter, but a fierce, fat African chieftain watching gleefully while his henchmen tossed an English explorer – pith helmet and all – into a boiling cauldron. Like so much about cannibalism, it is an image based on half-truths twisted entirely out of shape.

Africa is a huge continent and vast areas of it have never experienced cannibalism, even though some Europeans bent on land acquisition and colonisation accused perfectly innocent tribes of the practice. Explorers such as Dr David Livingstone, and others equally famous, never once recorded an encounter with a cannibal. Those who did were probably exploring either the Congo or adjoining Cameroon, along Africa’s western coast, both of which were hotbeds of man eating. Even those tribes that did indulge in the practice were often so particular as to the nature of their flesh eating that special cooking implements and pots were reserved for the purpose. Naturally, even those Africans who lived far from cannibalistic tribes were aware of the practice long before the white man set foot on their continent and this, like the encounter between Inca King Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro, led to some awkward assumptions.

When Scottish explorer Mungo Park visited Africa between 1795 and 1797 it was almost inevitable that he encountered gangs of chained slaves awaiting shipment to the Americas. One of the things that struck him most was the slaves’ firm belief that they were going to be eaten by their new masters in that faraway world. Park did his best to dissuade them of the idea, but discovered the reason for their fear was all too real. When slaves were sold to many West African tribes the cooking pot was, indeed, their ultimate destination.

Half a century later, French-American explorer Paul DuChaillu witnessed first-hand the reasons behind the queries that had been posed to Park. DuChaillu was in the territory of the Fang people in the Cameroon when, in his own words, ‘I perceived some bloody remains which looked to me to be human, but I passed on, incredulous. Presently we passed a woman who solved all doubt. She carried with her a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we would go to market and carry thence a roast or steak. In fact, symptoms of cannibalism stare me in the face wherever I go . . .’ According to DuChaillu, when a Fang tribesman died, his or her body was simply sent to a nearby village to be chopped up and sold at the local market. There seemed no ceremonial purpose to the practice beyond a convenient way to dispose of dead bodies. When there were not enough natural deaths to supply the demand for human flesh, slaves were purchased from outsiders and dispatched, like cattle, to the marketplace. The practice was so commonplace, and the locals so blasé about it, that when DuChaillu met the king of the Apingi people, his majesty presented him with a trussed-up slave, saying, ‘Kill him for your evening meal; he is tender and fat, and you must be hungry.’

If the Cameroon was crawling with cannibals, its next-door neighbour, the Congo, was even more so. Even the most famous Congolese tribe, the Ubangi – once noted for their massive, ornamental lip plates – routinely ate the meat of slaves. We do not know which tribe, or tribes, in the Congo began the practice, but it seems that it was an idea whose time had come, and it quickly spread from one tribe to another, each giving it their own peculiar twist. Although no tribe claimed to eat raw flesh, some insisted that thigh steaks were best, others preferred arms, while some claimed that hands made the juiciest snacks.

German explorer Georg Schweinfurth toured the Congo and its environs almost constantly between 1869 and 1888 encountering, and recording, an endless stream of cannibalistic practices. Among the Azande the practice was so common that signs of it were everywhere. From trees hung shrivelled hands and feet, and skulls from past meals were displayed on stakes outside the huts. The Azande told Schweinfurth that almost no one was considered too good, or too bad, to be eaten, if the occasion arose. Enemies captured or killed in war inevitably went to the kitchen, as did any Azande who died unless their relatives went to extraordinary lengths to protect the body. On one occasion, Schweinfurth saw a one-day-old infant who had been left in the glaring African sun to die so it could be prepared for the evening meal. When Schweinfurth went off to explore the river Uele he encountered the Monbuttu tribe who, he insisted, were even more dedicated to devouring their neighbours than the Azande. Although the Monbuttu kept herds of cattle sufficient to supply their dietary needs, they still preferred human flesh, taking special pleasure in eating captured enemies. When an enemy warrior was taken in battle, Schweinfurth said, they were herded, ‘without remorse, as butchers would drive sheep to the shambles . . . to fall victims, on a later day, to their horrible and sickening greediness’. King Munza of the Monbuttu made a notable concession to Schweinfurth’s visit by insisting that no one should be seen eating human flesh in public as long as the white visitor was among them.

The Bambala, also of the Congo, preferred human flesh after it had been buried in the ground long enough to begin to putrefy. Another reported delicacy among the Bambala was a paste made from a mixture of human blood and flour.

Even the massive influx of Christian missionaries during the latter half of the nineteenth century could do little to stem the tide of cannibalism among the various Congolese tribes. The Revd Holman Bentley worked for the Baptist Missionary Society’s outpost in the Congo for many years during the later decades of the Victorian era and reported numerous anecdotes concerning the local addiction to eating people. On one occasion, while Bentley and others were at dinner, they were interrupted by a young Boshongo chief, who asked to borrow a knife. To the horror of the missionaries, the man was later discovered to have used the knife to slit the throat of a slave girl and dismember her. When he was arrested, the chief had some of the girl’s limbs, along with those of other victims, in a shoulder bag. It seems, however, that not all the local tribes went in for such a do-it-yourself approach to cannibalism. Some family groups, or perhaps several families, would pool their resources to buy a human haunch or even an entire, living slave who would be kept in a cage, fattened up and killed when he was judged ready for cooking. According to Bentley, ‘The whole wide country seemed to be given up to cannibalism . . . They could not understand the objections raised to the practice. “You eat fowls and goats, and we eat men; why not? What is the difference?” The son of Matabwiki, chief of [the] Liboko, when asked whether he ever ate human flesh, said: “Ah! I wish I could eat everybody on earth!”’ Bentley insisted on the veracity of these amazing occurrences when he wrote, ‘This is no worked-up picture, it is the daily life of thousands of people at the present time in Darkest Africa.’

Towards the end of the Revd Bentley’s African assignment, his assertions were upheld by Captain Sidney Hinde who served with the Congo Free State Force during much of the 1880s and 1890s. In his memoirs, Hinde wrote, ‘What struck me most, during my expeditions throughout the country, was the number of cut-up bodies I found. Neither old nor young, women or children, are exempt from serving as food for their conquerors or neighbours.’ It was a situation that would long outlast the easily shocked Victorian sensibilities.