by Richard Sugg
By 1736 we cannot automatically assume that the surgeon could make use of the entire body. It is therefore possible that he paid half a guinea just for the fat (as the wife’s remark implies), and that this quite high price matches the relative scarcity of human fat in an era when it was nevertheless still in high demand. In 1764, for example, Domenico Cotugno’s Treatise on the Nervous Sciatica describes human fat as ‘a thing whose scarcity will recommend it’ (presumably to the patient).238 And just four years after the Rushall incident there occurred a peculiar London murder. One Saturday morning in early June 1740 a man’s body was discovered in an uninhabited house in Sword-bearer’s Alley (‘commonly called the Devil’s Nursery’), in Chiswell Street. The man had apparently been murdered about a fortnight before. His head was separated from his body, and the body itself had been ripped from the throat to the lower belly, so that his entrails were hanging out. The flayed carcass of a dog (supposed to be that of the victim) was also found in the sack.239 Why had the body been mutilated in this way? Severing the head was of course an obvious and traditional way to disguise its identity. But the laceration of the trunk looks far more like the work of someone who wanted to extract human fat quickly, before selling it on to a suitable buyer.
The first Vampires
A final word remains to be said about those medicines which could be taken from the living body. For some, these could include hair, nails, lice, sperm, saliva, milk, sweat, tapeworms, stones, urine, and excrement (much more of which in chapter five). But evidently the most popular fluid was blood. A number of physicians clearly considered this to be effective against many conditions besides epilepsy. We have heard Boyle commending it for asthma, acute fevers, pleurisy, consumption, hysteria, convulsions, certain types of headache, palsy, ‘incipient apoplexies’, distempers and jaundice; and it was also an antidote against certain poisons.240 Some decades earlier Fludd had stated: ‘man’s blood and bones do contain an admirable deal of volatile salt, in which there is so excellent a balsamic disposition, that it doth … appease dolours of the gout, and intolerable aches’; it ‘cureth wounds, healeth such as are affected with the mother and falling-sickness’, whilst ‘experience hath made manifest, that the volatile salt and oil of the blood, is an excellent cordial’.
Notably, Fludd attributes these discoveries to those ‘who have applied themselves unto the art of distilling’.241 For those who may have been repelled by the drinking of hot blood at the scaffold, the various distillations of blood (produced since at least the thirteenth century) offered a very different form of medicine. Occasionally, we find someone recommending both versions, as when Ficino (himself the son of a doctor) proposed that the elderly should suck blood ‘the way leeches do, an ounce or two from a vein on the left arm barely opened’. He adds, too, that ‘good doctors try, with human blood distilled in fire, to restore those whom old age has eaten away’.242 Around two centuries later, Moise Charas asserts, ‘I am not of their opinion, that the blood of man, gulped down warm as it runs out of the veins, is a specific remedy against the epilepsy’ – a statement which could refer either to the blood sales of the scaffold, or to the more private bloodsucking advocated by Ficino. Although Charas denounces such a ‘cruel beverage’ as both unethical and medically useless, he too believes that blood is a valid medicine if it is first painstakingly distilled by a chemist – finding it effective against diseases of the brain, for purifying the blood, and (aptly) for improving circulation. He also cites van Helmont’s opinion, ‘that the use of it cures persons that are grown in years’.243
There may also have been a relatively general habit of bloodsucking in France among the elderly. In 1777 one Thomas Mortimer claimed that, ‘towards the close of the fifteenth century, an idle opinion prevailed, that the declining strength and vigour of old people might be repaired by transfusing the blood of young persons’.244 He adds that some ‘drank the warm blood of young persons’ and that the practice was suppressed in France after ‘some of the principal nobility … turned raving mad’ as a result.245 Mortimer does not say exactly when this practice was stamped out; but if there is any truth in his claims (which certainly match the late fifteenth-century arguments of Ficino) then it is telling that the chief culprits were ‘the nobility’ – people who could no doubt easily afford to pay healthy young men to stab their veins and let out youthful blood.
All in all, the basic question as regards medical vampirism was not: should you do it? but rather, how should you do it? Despite his opposition to the ‘cruel beverage’ taken directly from the body, Charas was quite happy to specify blood from ‘healthy young men’ (without red hair, in this case) for chemical processing. Boyle, similarly, was able to obtain not just fresh blood, but that of quite definite physical types. On the whole, it seems that, in an age of habitual bloodletting, this was usually one of the easier substances to get hold of. In barbers’ shops jars of blood could sometimes be seen advertising phlebotomy, and its familiarity is encoded in the seemingly proverbial phrase, ‘every man’s blood in a basin looks of one colour’.246 One potential problem in this area was that those undergoing bloodletting would often themselves be sick. Ficino seems to recognise this when he proposes that the donor should be someone ‘whose blood is excellent but perhaps a little excessive’. Here blood is let merely to remove superfluity. In such cases, the ‘blood donor’ may well have been happy to have had blood drawn for free by those taking it for medical use.
This inference assumes that the practitioner was himself drawing the blood, rather than relying on a separate surgeon. Although phrasing is not conclusive, Irvine and Schroeder do seem to imply as much, with the latter stating, ‘take the blood of a healthful young man drawn from a vein in May’, and again, ‘take man’s blood, while it is hot’.247 Irvine writes: ‘take therefore the blood of a sound young man, drawn in the spring (there are every where fools enow) as much as thou canst get’. What are we to make of this intriguing parenthetical aside? At very least, it seems clear that Irvine himself felt such fluid to be easily available (and the contemptuous tone may even imply that his donors were indeed paying him, rather than vice versa). The Paracelsian physician Daniel Border makes it quite clear that he simply uses the barbers as a routine supplier, and also that he can easily choose a very precise type of donor: ‘take the blood of a young sanguine man and choleric man at the barbers’ shops as thou mayest have it, and namely of such men as use good wines’.248 Boyle at one point remarks that ‘because it is difficult to get the blood of healthy men, and perhaps not so safe to use that of unsound persons’ he has been accordingly experimenting with certain types of animal blood.249 But elsewhere he routinely specifies the blood of both healthy men and women without further comment.250 His reference to supply problems may reflect the large number of trials he undertook, and the correspondingly large volumes of blood required. Certainly his sometime partner, Locke, had registered no such difficulties when he wrote in his notebook, ‘“human blood from a living body 2 lbs. Let it congeal … ”’.251
On the whole, it seems that for much of the early modern era, people were likely to welcome rather than fear the sensation of a hollow arm. (One thing which probably commended bloodletting to the empirically minded was just that one did definitely feel different afterwards).252 In a world as sharply unequal as this, some healthy young men must have been tempted by payment (as they are even now, in the case of pharmaceutical drug trials). It was financial incentive, after all, which allowed Jean-Baptiste Denis – physician to Louis XIV – to secure a volunteer for a comprehensive (and daunting) experiment in blood transfusion in 1667.253 On a broader ethical note, we find the Dutch physician H.M. Herwig referring quite plainly to ‘those things that may be taken away without any hurt or prejudice, as the seed, blood and stone’.254 In the present day, donation of the first two substances is indeed routine and virtuous (and in some cases is paid). Comfortable as most are with modern blood transfusion, early modern habits again present us with an uncertain ethical qu
estion: should one person’s lifeblood be another person’s health tonic? How much urgency is required to legitimise the transfer of blood? Some might respond that blood donors had more choice than the slaughtered inhabitants of Ireland or South America, or the casualties of warfare. Marxists might respond that the starkly poor have few choices, and many of them hard ones.
We have now established in some detail that medicinal cannibalism was attractive to patients of all social classes, as well as to physicians, apothecaries, and a variety of financially motivated intermediaries, from merchants to executioners. Indeed, so many types of people seem to have been involved in this phenomenon that it must have been quite hard, circa 1650, to remain unaware of its existence. In the following chapter we turn to forms of cannibalism traditionally associated with the tribes of the New World. What did the eating of human flesh mean, not only to the Europeans who so often (and so hypocritically) condemned it, but to those engaged in it, in the thinly charted regions of Canada and Brazil?
4
The Other Cannibals
Man-Eaters of the New World
In an age which prides itself on challenging taboos, cannibalism retains a remarkably potent charge of horror. It is the ultimate form of violence or dominance, the most extreme possible aggravation of corporeal terrorism. Even at the habitual, everyday level of seemingly casual speech, certain basic fears or fantasies about anthropophagy seem to be revealed: an experience or a personality, for example, might be ‘all-consuming’ or ‘devouring’. As these examples suggest, cannibalism can be seen as an especially severe form of invasion. If someone steps into our personal space, stares too long or too aggressively at us, or even simply addresses us in an unacceptable way, we register their behaviour as invasive. Fundamental boundaries are being violated. Cannibalism shifts this kind of attack into a whole new dimension. The boundary line is not simply crossed, but utterly annihilated, as two individuals are collapsed together by the act of consumption.
Given the enduring, arguably mythic power of cannibalism in the human imagination, we need to realise at once that there is some well-documented reality behind the myths and the slurs. Anthropologists have often been uneasy about identifying cannibalistic communities, because of the long-standing use of ‘cannibal’ as a convenient propaganda weapon. Once labelled in this way, and effectively dehumanised, tribal peoples in the Americas, Africa and Australasia could be ‘legitimately’ civilised, colonised, or outrightly destroyed. There is little doubt that cannibalism was both a political tool and a dangerously unstable fantasy in the minds of European Christians during the decades that followed Christopher Columbus’ momentous landing. Cannibals were deliberately invented or imagined without justification. But they did exist. The (perhaps well-meaning) attempt of the anthropologist William Arens, in 1979, to deny that cannibalism had ever taken place as a general custom has now been substantially discredited.1 For some years, accumulated evidence from archaeological finds, from historians, and from anthropologists, has put this basic question beyond all doubt.
One especially compelling reason for accepting the reality of habitual, communal cannibalism is the sheer wealth of complex detail found in so many accounts. In numerous different cultures, the eating of human beings was quite as densely ritualistic, quite as religiously solemn as any Catholic Mass. Cannibalism was anything but senseless violence. Indeed, as Beth A. Conklin in particular has emphasised, it was often the absolute opposite of violence, functioning as an intensely compassionate mourning ritual for one’s dead kin.2
Perhaps the most basic division in the realm of man-eating is that between ritual and famine cannibalism. The first is highly meaningful for those who practise it. The second kind is usually seen as a desperate last resort, imposed by extreme circumstances. The cannibalism of the psychopathic killer, although highly specialised in its own right (and almost always eminently antisocial) can be allied with ritual anthropophagy more easily than with cases of famine.3
Like corpse medicine, ritual cannibalism is emphatically not a question of hunger or of food. Accordingly, it is ritual forms of man-eating which will concern us here. Ritual cannibalism itself splits into two broadly distinct forms. Exo-cannibalism (from the Greek for ‘outside’) is emphatically directed against outsiders. It is a deliberately terrifying and appalling aggravation of tribal warfare. By extension, such assaults on alien communities usually help to define the acceptable, legitimate identity of the aggressors. If exo-cannibalism is very much a question of ‘us and them’, the variety known as ‘endo-cannibalism’ is by contrast a purely internal matter (‘endo’ is Greek for ‘inside’). It is usually a kind of funeral rite, and is entirely consensual. A dying person will expect to be eaten after death, and will indeed want this to happen. Similarly, the relatives who consume the deceased will feel not merely that the custom is acceptable and natural, but that it has immense religious and social importance.
If we look closely at these tribal practices we can begin to see just what it was that European society opposed and attacked so vigorously in the eras of Columbus, Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Milton. A second aim is perhaps more important. As well as emphasising the reality of cannibalism – dissolving its heavy mythic aura – we will also be able to see a number of striking parallels to the practice in Old World society. For all their very different forms of technology, dress and language, the London or Rome of the sixteenth century were in many ways quite as fiercely tribal as the isolated world of the Tupinamba Indians. In terms of social identity, violence, and religion, the Old World and the New had far more in common than any pope or archbishop would have cared to admit. Let us begin with the least familiar form of cannibalism: the funeral rites in which communities ate their own relatives or tribe members.
The New World Cannibal
Funerary Cannibalism
[A]s I took the lid off of the box, a fine spray of his ashes blew out onto the table. I couldn’t just brush him off, so I wiped my finger over it and snorted the residue. Ashes to ashes, father to son … John Humphrys on prime-time radio was heard to ask, ‘Do you think Keith Richards has gone too far this time?’ … There were also articles saying this is a perfectly normal thing, it goes back to ancient times, the ingestion of your ancestor. So there were two schools of thought.4
It is 1964. In London, the streets of Soho are bright with Carnaby Street fashions. Cafés (and the very few nightclubs then grudgingly tolerated by the police) pulse to the accelerated beat of amphetamines and amplified rock music. Parents, the BBC, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are all near-hysterical about the threat to society posed by that drug-crazed, sexually liberated, guitar-wielding monster, the teenager. They cannot understand what Mick Jagger is singing, and so assume that it must be something very nasty indeed.5 Meanwhile, over in Brazil, somewhere between the mountain range known as the Serra dos Pacaas Novos and the Madeira River adjacent to Bolivia, the tribal people called the Wari’ are preparing for the funeral of a recently deceased man.6
It is late afternoon. The corpse lies on a mat, naked and bloated. It has been painted with stripes of red annatto, and is already suffering the effects of rigor mortis. Three men form a triangle around it. One holds its legs straight; opposite, behind the head, another bears a mat. The third man, at the apex of the triangle, now moves in, lowers a bamboo arrow tip, and makes a vertical cut along the abdominal area. Pungent gases flood out of the body, which collapses back to something like its normal dimensions. The mat bearer waves his mat like a fan in order to try and dissipate the overwhelming stench of death and putrefaction.
Vibrating around this central scene, a crescendo of human wailing marks the separation of the body from its kin, aiming also to frighten evil spirits away from the corpse. Dusk is now hovering in the air. Separate body parts are washed and placed on a nearby roasting rack. Beneath it the bundle of firewood has been carefully decorated with the feathers of vultures and scarlet macaws. Genitals and intestines are burned in the fire. The heart and liv
er, which cook most quickly, are wrapped in leaves. Occasionally a distraught relative will attempt to throw themself onto the blaze, being prevented only by a guard specially appointed to stand by the fire.
Presently a male official cuts up the heart and liver, and blood relatives begin to eat them. They do this slowly and very respectfully. Later, other flesh is eaten with corn bread. In a familiar ritual, non-related tribe members are begged to join in with the eating. They at first refuse, and finally give way after repeated pleading from the deceased’s kin. It is important for mourners’ hands not to touch the flesh, and so thin splinters of wood are used as cutlery. As the dead man is a tribal elder, mourning has been prolonged. His flesh is particularly putrid, and no amount of cooking can disguise this. From time to time, participants will leave the gathering in order to vomit. Nevertheless, no one will refuse to eat. Those tribe members who are not intended to consume flesh cry continually around the central mourners while the ceremony proceeds. By the time that the body has been eaten it is nearly dawn. The prevailing chill and semi-darkness are soon dissipated as the house of the dead man is set alight and ritually burned to ashes. Back in London, parents tremble over the latest tabloid editorial, wondering if the rock-mad teenager really will ‘devour the very heart of our society’ or simply consume themself in the heat of their own wild dancing.