by Bill Schutt
27 The short-term, positive effects of cortisol release include a burst of energy (through an increase in blood sugar levels) and a lower sensitivity to pain (by reducing inflammation).
13: Eating People Is Bad
Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush you squalling thing, I say.
Peace this moment, peace or maybe,
Bonaparte will pass this way.
And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you,
And he’ll beat you all to pap,
And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel snap, snap, snap.
— The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
The word taboo has a Polynesian origin, and the English explorer and navigator Captain James Cook reported that its use by the South Sea islanders related to the prohibition of an array of behaviors—from eating certain foods to coming into physical contact with tribal leaders. Unfortunately for Cook, the first official link between the terms taboo and cannibalism may have been based on his crew’s initial, though evidently mistaken, fear that Cook himself had been cannibalized.
On February 14, 1779, after what turned out to be a serious misunderstanding, Cook was clubbed to death by Hawaiian islanders, who then cooked and deboned his body before divvying it up among local chiefs as a way as of incorporating him into their aristocracy. Since it was only right that Cook’s own people got their share of the body, a charred section of it was returned to Lieutenant James King, who asked the Hawaiians if they had eaten the rest of it. According to King, “They immediately shewed [sic] as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us?” So while the islanders had murdered, cooked, and filleted the explorer, they hadn’t eaten him, though the latter point is often misrepresented in accounts of the incident.
Reay Tannahill, a British historian who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, was perhaps best known for her books Food in History and Sex in History. In 1975 she wrote Flesh and Blood, the first scholarly study of cannibalism accessible to the general public. In it, Tannahill proposed that Judeo-Christian customs related to the treatment of the dead contributed to the strongly held belief that eating people was wrong. Specifically, she referred to the “belief that a man needed his body after death, so that his soul might be reunited with it on Judgment Day.” Since cannibalism involved dismemberment as well as other procedures familiar to those in the butchery profession, it was no surprise that these practices induced in Christians and Jews alike “an unprecedented and almost pathological horror of cannibalism.”
Decades later, others, like journalist and author Maggie Kilgore, addressed questions related to the prevalence of cannibalism taboos. They suggested that in addition to wanting the bodies of the dead to stick around intact until Judgment Day, our picky rituals concerning what foods could or couldn’t be eaten (e.g., the Jewish ban on eating pork) were just as important.
To Kilgore, the term “you are what you eat” is a reflection of the importance of food as a “symbolic system used to define personal, national and even sexual differences.” Outsiders and foreigners, according to Kilgore, are often “defined in terms of how and, especially, what they eat, and denounced on the grounds that they either have disgusting table manners or eat disgusting things.” For example, the derogatory term “frogs” for French people is based on their consumption of frogs’ legs—something the British (who coined the term) would presumably never do. Likewise, and once again echoing anthropologist Bill Arens’s stance, calling someone a cannibal becomes a means of using dietary practices (whether real or imagined) to define a particular culture as savage or primitive.
Of course this idea leads to the question of whether cannibalism might be more frequent or more readily acceptable in cultures that don’t hold Judeo-Christian beliefs about the afterlife or whose adherents follow diets with fewer religious or culturally imposed restrictions. First, though, let’s investigate how the Western cannibalism taboo became so widespread—a phenomenon that began with an ancient civilization whose early writings would go on to influence both Christian and Semitic cultures.
In all likelihood, the first mention of something approaching cannibalism in Western literature occurs in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, which dates from approximately the 8th century BCE. On an island stopover, the adventurer Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Latin) and his men enter the cave of Polyphemus, a Cyclops (albeit one with a human shape). Luckily, the giant is out tending his flock, so the Greeks make themselves at home: lighting a fire, eating some of the big guy’s cheese, and trying to decide what else they can steal. The party ends abruptly when Polyphemus returns home and blocks their exit with an enormous stone. Odysseus tries to bluff his way out, bragging about the city he had recently sacked and presumably his soon-to-be-famous wooden horse trick. He also tells Polyphemus to be extremely careful, since he and his pals are well protected by the gods. The Cyclops, however, appears somewhat less than impressed. According to Odysseus:
Lurching up, he lunged out with his hands towards my men and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground he knocked them dead like pups—their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor—and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap, devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!
After washing down the gruesome meal with milk, the giant falls asleep. The next day, Polyphemus consumes two more of the Greeks for breakfast and another pair for supper, and although Odysseus feels that the jury is still out on his intimidation ploy, his men suggest that he come up with an alternate plan. Soon after, our hero talks the Cyclops into drinking some wine he and his men had brought, telling the giant that they’d intended to present it to him as a gift—before he started eating everybody, that is. After downing three bowlfuls, Polyphemus falls down drunk, “as wine came spurting, flooding up from his gullet with chunks of human flesh.”
Presumably skirting bits of their partially digested crewmates, the vengeance-minded Greeks uncover an oar-sized piece of wood they had previously sharpened and buried under the sheep dung littering the cave floor. After heating the tip, Odysseus and four mates snap into battering-ram mode, slamming the point home and poking out the snoozing Cyclops’s favorite eye. The crafty Greeks avoid the enraged Polyphemus and also manage to make him look bad in front of his giant friends, who have stopped by to investigate the ruckus. The following morning, after the Cyclops rolls away the stone to let out his flock, Odysseus and his men make their escape—hanging beneath the bodies of the giant’s sheep.
In Theogony, Homer’s fellow poet Hesiod recounts the tale of Cronos, the Father of the Gods, who learns from his parents (Heaven and Earth) that his own son will one day overthrow him. To prevent this, Cronos eats his first four children, but the youngest, Zeus, is spared when the children’s mother hands her husband a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes instead of baby Zeus.
I interviewed classicist Mary Knight at her office in the American Museum of Natural History. “The tale of Cronos suggests an early religious connection with the taboo on eating people,” she said, “since Zeus would not do to his offspring what his father tried to do to him.” Echoing what Maggie Kilgore wrote about how eating can be used as a way to reinforce cultural differences, Knight continued. “The story may thus support cannibalism as a part of the ancient Greek view of a ‘primitive’ past vs. the ‘civilized’ present. Greeks came to see themselves as different, calling all non-Greeks ‘savages’—people who may have continued eating people.”
Although Polyphemus and Cronos were fictional characters, and not exactly card-carrying humans (which might upset cannibalism purists), this may not have been the case with some of the man-eaters described by another Ancient Greek, Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE). In his masterpiece, The Histories, the man often referred to as the Father of History wrote that the Persian king Darius asked some Greeks what it would take for them to eat their dead fathers.
“No price in the world,” they cried (presumably in unison). Next, Darius summoned several Callatians, who lived in India and “who eat their dead fathers.” Darius asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers upon a pyre, the preferred funerary method of the Greeks. “Don’t mention such horrors!” they shouted.
Herodotus (writing as Darius) then demonstrated a degree of understanding that would have made modern anthropologists proud. “These are matters of settled custom,” he wrote, before paraphrasing the lyric poet Pindar, “And custom is King of all.” In other words, society defines what is right and what is wrong.
But while some of Herodotus’s writings certainly reinforced the idea that “Culture is King,” at the same time his tales also portrayed cannibalism as a sensational and utterly repugnant act, thus helping to propagate a mindset that cannibalism was bad behavior. As such, his combination of history and myth offers important clues about the spread of the cannibal taboo.
Herodotus was also the first writer to document the practice of drawing lots during crises, with the person holding the short straw killed and eaten by his starving comrades. According to the historian, during King Cambyses’s expedition to Ethiopia, his men ran out of provisions, and after slaughtering and consuming their pack animals, they were reduced to munching on grass. Herodotus describes how when they came to the desert, “some of them did something dreadful.” They cast lots with one out of ten men killed and eaten by his comrades. After learning of this, Cambyses reportedly abandoned the campaign.
The Father of History also wrote extensively about the Scythians, horse-riding barbarian nomads living in the area north of the Black Sea. According to Herodotus, among their many strange customs, the Scythians enjoyed smoking marijuana and eating their enemies. Additionally, like Ed Gein, the model for the fictional characters Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs), Scythian warriors also found some unique uses for human skin and body parts, using severed hands for arrow quivers and carrying around human skins stretched upon frames.
In what may be Herodotus’s most influential cannibal-related story, he recounted the tale of Astyages, the last king of the Median Empire. One night, the king awakens from a particularly bad nightmare in which his daughter Mandane “[made] water so greatly that she filled all his city,” eventually flooding all of Asia. Several years later, as Mandane is carrying her first child, the king has another bad dream. In this one, an enormous vine grows out of “his daughter’s privy parts” until all of previously-urine-soaked Asia falls under its mighty shade. The Magi are asked to interpret and they attempt to put their king at ease by telling him that Mandane will give birth to a son and that the boy will one day destroy Astyages’s empire.
Since there are apparently no pruning shears big enough for this gardening job, Astyages sends his favorite general, Harpagus, to find Mandane and kill her child. Harpagus, however, refuses to spill innocent blood and instead hands the newborn off to a herdsman and his wife—the latter (by coincidence) has just given birth to a stillborn son. Predictably, the quick-thinking general departs with the body of the dead child, which he delivers to the king.
Ten years later, Mandane’s son and his sheep-herding foster dad are granted an audience with King Astyages, who while talking to the boy recognizes the family resemblance. After some quick back-calculations, the king realizes what his formerly favorite general has done. Astyages sends the boy off with servants, then questions the herdsman, who quickly fesses up to the entire ruse. Harpagus is summoned, and seeing the herdsman, he attempts to weasel out of the predicament, admitting that he felt bad about killing the boy. Harpagus then tells the king that he did what anyone in his predicament would have done—he ordered the herdsman to murder the infant.
King Astyages, who may have also been famous for his poker face, then tells Harpagus something along the lines of, “Hey, no problem, I felt bad about asking you to kill my grandson anyway.” The general presumably lets out a huge sigh of relief, but before he can get too relaxed, the King follows up. “Oh, and by the way,” he adds (although, once again, probably not in those exact words), “why don’t you and your son come to dinner tonight so we can all celebrate together?” Relieved, Harpagus returns home and instructs his son to head over to the banquet immediately. The boy responds with the ancient Persian equivalent of “You got it, Dad,” and leaves for the party.
According to Herodotus, this is what happened next:
When Harpagus’s son came to Astyages, the king cut his throat and chopped him limb from limb, and some of him he roasted and some he stewed. . . . When it was dinner hour and the other guests had come, then for those other guests and for Astyages himself there were set tables full of mutton, but, before Harpages, the flesh of his own son, all save for the head and extremities of the hands and feet; these were kept separate, covered up in a basket.
When the meal is done, Astyages asks the general how he liked the feast and although Harpagus initially gives it the big thumbs up, the party ends on a sour note once the king has his general open the basket containing his son’s uneaten body parts.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it has appeared in several versions since the time of Herodotus. Most notably, William Shakespeare co-opted it for the filial cannibalism scene in The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. In the Bard’s most violent and arguably most maligned play, Titus, a Roman general, engages in an increasingly gory running battle with his archenemy, Tamora, the queen of the Goths. Late in the play, and after his daughter has been raped and mutilated by Tamora’s two sons, Titus exacts his revenge. He kills the siblings and has their bodies baked in a pie, which he serves at a banquet to the queen and her husband, Saturninus. After Titus reveals his secret ingredient, everyone’s plans for a quiet meal get tweaked a bit when Titus kills Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus, and Titus’s son kills Saturninus.28
It is also possible that Shakespeare may have gotten his cannibal inspiration from Seneca’s 1st century Roman tragedy, Thyestes, in which the title character not only tricks his twin brother, Atreus, out of the throne of Mycenea, but also takes his sister-in-law as a lover. Thyestes continues his bad behavior by chiding Atreus that he can have the throne back as soon as the sun moves backward in the sky. Zeus however, overhears the taunt and “drives the day back against its dawning.” Before you can say “banished,” Thyestes is forced to surrender the throne. Atreus, though, isn’t done with his slimy sibling, and after learning of his wife’s infidelity, he invites Thyestes to a reconciliatory banquet. As part of the party prep, Atreus murders Thyestes’s two sons from the forbidden relationship and serves them to their unsuspecting dad (who has obviously not been keeping up with his readings of Herodotus). At dinner’s end, Atreus presents Thyestes with the hands and heads of his slain children on a platter, forever defining the term Thyestian Feast as one at which human flesh is served.
In short, from the Ancient Greeks to William Shakespeare, and in stories written across a span of 2,500 years, cannibalism was depicted as either the ultimate act of revenge or the gruesome work of gods, monsters, and savages (a.k.a. non-Christians and anyone living in the vicinity of some gold). By the 17th and 18th centuries, with the taboo firmly established, the threat of cannibalism would reach a new audience and serve a new purpose—as a way to terrorize children into behaving.
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (born in 1785 and 1786 respectively) were German academics who collected oral folk tales during the early 1800s. They did so by interviewing peasants, servants, middle-class types, and aristocrats, and they published hundreds of fairy tales in the years between 1812 and 1818. In the parade of new editions that followed, the brothers changed, added, and subtracted stories, depending on how well they had been received previously. Like the ancient Greek and Roman myths, the original fairy tales depicted violence, desire, heartbreak, and fear. They also portrayed the all-too-common hardships of their own time, especially famine and the abandonment of children by destitute parents. The language
was often scatological and, as such, many of the updates the authors initiated reflected the fact that the originals were definitely not kid-friendly.
As the Grimms sanitized these tales for publication, and for a much younger readership, themes were also modified. But rather than molding them into the bedtime stories familiar to modern readers, the brothers transformed them into cautionary tales, many of which ended badly for children who chose not to obey their parents. On one level at least, fairy tales can be seen as literary relics from a time when terror was an accepted educational tool. Bearing almost no resemblance to the politically correct stories written today for kids, the original Grimm’s fairy tales were tools employed by parents to socialize children, to increase their moral standing, and to frighten them into obeying the directives of their elders.
The Grimm brothers were preceded as writers by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a Frenchman whose 1697 Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, provided readers with what may have been the earliest written collection of fairy tales. His most famous book, subtitled Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose) contained eight stories, including Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, and its reception by the public elevated the fairy tale into a new literary genre. As it would be with the Grimm stories, Perrault’s fairy tales often contained a heavy dose of cannibalism. For example, most children and adults will recall that the wicked queen in Snow White wanted the title character killed. Less familiar, perhaps, is that in the original tale, the queen not only orders a huntsman to murder Snow White but to return with her liver and lungs as proof that the deed had been done. Taking pity on the innocent beauty (Harpagus style), the hunter slays a boar instead and brings the queen a Snow White–sized portion of porcine organ meat. Then, in a scene that somehow wound up on the cutting room floor at the Disney studios, the misled monarch cooks up the offal in a stew, which she eats, thinking perhaps that except for an unfortunate gravy stain, she has seen the last of Snow White.