by Richard Sugg
For many Europeans cannibalism seems to have acted like a kind of imaginative black hole. It sucked in a variety of other transgressions or taboos and formed the boundary marker of a realm into which good Christians dare not enter. At this point the ordinary laws of society broke down so radically that one could only keep back at a safe distance, terrified and secretly fascinated, faintly sensing the pulse of unstable energy given off from within. Cannibalism was sufficiently dense and potent to take on a rhetorical life of its own. It encompassed murderers, witches, traitors and regicides – even, occasionally, moneylenders, or oppressive creditors, the latter being held, memorably, to boast that they would ‘make dice from the bones’ of their imprisoned debtors.58 If Shylock’s seemingly irrational hunger for the heart of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is now the most famous example of such Christian paranoia, it was by no means the only one.
Savage Europe
The Violence of Social Hierarchy
At this point we need to consider one of the most important ironies in the European image of the cannibal. As I suggested at the outset, the Old World and the New had far more in common than the former would like to admit. First: if we define tribalism as a social system which obsessively values a set of pervasive, intricate and minutely subtle rules, then there were many tribal features in European life. These could be found across and within distinct classes, at times involving bewilderingly detailed laws and codes. Secondly: at certain moments the underlying class antagonisms of these tribal, quasi-feudal worlds could produce some memorable instances of exo-cannibalism.
In Hungary in 1514, after the defeat of a serious popular uprising, the notoriously oppressive Hungarian nobility decided to make an example of the rebellion’s leader, George Dósza:
while they had an iron throne and crown made for Dósza, his imprisoned footsoldiers were not given anything to eat for two weeks. Many perished. But some were still alive, half-mad with hunger when, on July 20 1514, our nobles instructed the gypsy executioners to make a big fire under the iron throne until it was white-hot. They had the white-hot iron crown for the Peasant King ready also. Then they placed our leader on the white-hot iron throne, put the white-hot iron crown on his head and forced his soldiers to eat his roasted flesh.59
Fabulous as this account may seem, it yet shares certain features with other well-documented modes of execution or cannibalistic terrorism. It has been claimed, for example, that the use of a white-hot (or at least red-hot) crown was a known mode of capital punishment during the Renaissance.60
Elsewhere, personal (rather than state) violence seems to have been at its very worst among the rich and titled – those who had the greatest stake in the obsessive tribal laws of the day. So, in Renaissance Italy, we find aristocratic revenge feuds erupting into a savagery that might appear sharply opposed to the surviving beauties of Rome or Florence. Piero Camporesi tells of a case in which one Andrea Orsi was ‘dragged three times round the square by a horse’ – a tactic still occasionally used (now by cars) in cases of racial murder in North America. Other victims of these Italian feuds were castrated, or had their severed penises thrust into their mouths. One man was reduced to a skeleton in the course of just a single sustained assault. And it is here that the tribal violence of the Old World most obviously begins to blur into that of the New. For, as Camporesi further explains, in one attack a disentrailed heart is bitten, while in another, ‘“lucky was the man who might grind the entrails between his teeth”’. Finally, after gnawing Orsi’s intestines his enemies proceeded to ‘“cut him up into small pieces to remove his fat because he was young, being probably twenty-eight years of age, tall and slim in build”’. If Camporesi is right in assuming that the fat would be sold to doctors to cure ‘nervous ailments’ then we here witness not just gestures at cannibalism (grinding between the teeth) but a direct link between violence and the cannibalism of European medicine.61
Come the eighteenth century, the etiquette of Versailles seems to have involved more distinctions amongst the courtly initiate than Britain now acknowledges across all social classes.62 Small wonder that, once this obscenely unjust society broke down, its violence should at times foreshadow the exo-cannibalism of 1960s China. In September 1789 the English press tells of a ‘brave young officer’, Monsieur De Belzunce, recently murdered in ‘an excess of blind fury’ at Caen. Various of his attackers are said to have been arrested, including a number of people, ‘chiefly women … who ate his flesh and drank his blood’.63 Recalling this in the nineteenth century, François-René de Chateaubriand wrote of how the crowd at Caen ‘had their fill of slaughter and ate the heart of Monsieur de Belzunce’. In the light of more well-documented incidents, this claim is not improbable (and Chateaubriand’s editor confirms that Belzunce’s body was indeed ‘torn apart’ by his attackers).64
In August 1791 the aristocrat Guillin de Montet, a figure who seems to have been justly hated by the common people of Lyons, was killed when his castle was stormed and burned. A local butcher then cut up his body, and at least two people either ate or chewed parts of it. Reporting this in September 1792, the London Evening Mail presents De Montet as devoured entirely, claiming also that his attackers ‘drank his blood’.65 Whilst these details may have been invented, the scholar Paolo Viola has verified the occurrence of cannibalism through legal records of the affair.66 A few weeks later, the Evening Mail insisted that the French had ‘made pies of the flesh of the Swiss troops murdered on the 2nd of September’. A reliable eyewitness had confirmed this, adding that ‘some of the mob drank their blood out of a can, and declared it was the best wine they had ever tasted’.67
The Violence of Religion
Typically, the tribal violence of the Renaissance (as opposed to the late eighteenth century) tended to be religious rather than overtly political. No cannibal tribe ever displayed more intolerance toward its neighbouring enemies than the two chief factions of Christianity toward one another. At the broadest level of religious politics, Protestant–Catholic relations in the mid-sixteenth century mirror the psychology of exo-cannibalism with uncanny precision. The implicit message of cannibal violence was this: we deny your identity; we deny your reality as human beings; and we will prove this by the way in which we treat you.68
In Europe such treatment often stretched the imaginable limits of violence. And, just occasionally, it also ran to outright cannibalism. In his famously enlightened essay of 1580, ‘On Cannibals’, the remarkable French thinker Michel de Montaigne argued that the cannibalism of the New World was in fact less horrific than the religious savagery of the Old. There was, Montaigne insisted, ‘more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead’. Montaigne first glosses this by implying that victims of religious hatred have been effectively devoured by their torturers and executioners. He then adds that ‘we have not only read, but lately seen’ people roasted by degrees, and ‘bit and worried by dogs and swine’. This was done while the victim was ‘in perfect sense’ – that is, alive and conscious – and indeed performed ‘not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies, but neighbours, and fellow citizens, and which is worse, under colour of piety and religion’.69
Although Montaigne gives no further detail of these atrocities, it is clear that he refers to the Wars of Religion. Moreover, Lestringant informs us of a specific incident which closely echoes Montaigne’s claims. The witness was Jean de Léry, a French traveller who had lived for some time with the Tupinamba in Brazil. If Léry was at first relieved to be home, he may soon have felt differently. Around the time of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Léry saw a French Protestant executed by Catholics in Auxerre. Just as with the class hatred of the revolutionary Chinese students, mere killing was not enough to exhaust the profound hostility aroused by this heretic. He was not only ritually executed, but also had his heart ‘plucked out, chopped in pieces, auctioned off, cooked on a grill and finally eaten with much enjoyment’.70 In this extraordinary incident even the detail of the ‘auctioning’ seems to o
ffer a distorted echo of New World ritual, both drawing out the whole process of cannibalism, and replacing a familiar habit of the Tupinamba or Iroquois with the accepted system of European monetary values. The victim is at once literally devoured by his enemies, and impersonally consumed in a process of exchange, effectively commodified into a piece of property.
In April 1655 the Protestants of the Piedmontese valleys were massacred by Catholic troops. At a glance, reports of associated atrocities can appear mythical. Yet these stories were substantiated by a high-ranking French soldier, Monsieur du Petit Bourg. In a lengthy English account, the clergyman Samuel Clarke tells of soldiers eating boiled human brains; tricking their comrades into consuming ‘tripe’ (in fact the breasts and genitals of one of the Protestant victims); and roasting a young girl alive on a pike. In this latter case, the flesh proved too poorly roasted to eat. But the soldiers who killed ‘Daniel Cardon of Roccappiata’ readily ate his brains, records Clarke, after ‘frying them in a pan’; and having taken out his heart, would have fried this also, had they not been ‘frighted by some of the poor peoples’ troops … coming that way’.71
In making comparisons, it is easy to push them too far. Finally, we have to preserve the differences between cultures as well as drawing out similarities. Habitual cannibalism of a ritual kind was not practised in the Old World. And yet, certain shrewd contemporary thinkers admitted that the parallels were indeed strong. Perhaps still more discomforting was the feeling of shrewder observers that, if New World tribes were at times more savagely transgressive, they yet remained utopias of social justice by comparison with London, Paris and Madrid. Such contrasts were underlined with memorable irony when missionaries brought a small party of Tupinamba tribesmen to France in 1562. Already bewildered by the reigning monarch, the then twelve-year-old Charles IX, the Tupinamba were probably also struck by the general devastation of their host city: Rouen had, after all, just been forcibly wrested from Protestant soldiers by royal armies. But most of all, the Brazilians were ‘taken aback by the juxtaposition of rich and poor, and wondered how the latter “could endure such injustice without taking the others by the throat and setting fire to their houses”’.72
Meanwhile, a form of cannibalism was being practised all across Europe. It was supported by patients, physicians, apothecaries and merchants. How was this possible? Given how heavily tabooed cannibalism was for Europeans and how they treated many native peoples (in the Americas and elsewhere), the stance of the Old World, around 1600 or 1700, must rank as one of the biggest, most impressive acts of hypocrisy in world history. We have already begun to close the gap between the supposedly ‘civilised’ realms of Florence, Madrid, Wittenberg and London, and the nominally savage worlds of Peru or Brazil. Another piece in the puzzle facing us can be fitted into place if we now look more closely at European attitudes to New World cannibalism.
The Raw and the Cooked
The distinction between ‘the raw and the cooked’ was first coined by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.73 The opposition is one which can work literally (raw food versus cooked food) and symbolically. In the second case, another way of seeing the idea is this: the raw is associated with nature, and the cooked with culture. Given that this last word is often used rather loosely, referring to what is broadly ‘high culture’, it is useful to appreciate that Lévi-Strauss had a far more democratic idea of ‘culture’. In one sense, Lévi-Strauss’s culture is simply all the things which humans do with the raw materials of nature. Here, the definition given by the composer and musician Brian Eno offers us a fairly snappy formula. Culture, for Eno, ‘is everything we do which we don’t have to do’. We need to eat, but not nouvelle cuisine. We need to dress, but not in designer clothes.74 Culture puts a distance between us and nature. Certain animals probably have more culture than we might at first suspect; but it still seems fair to say that on the whole it is a distinctively human thing.
There again: once we have stopped deferring to familiar cultural hierarchies (Shakespeare is better than Woody Allen, Bach is better than the Beatles) we are likely to start noticing that culture is nothing if not arbitrary. We do it this way, they do it that way. Even within modern Europe, for example, an English person visiting Greece can be surprised at a number of basic differences: not least the fact that, when another car flashes its headlights at a narrow bridge it doesn’t mean ‘come through’, but rather, ‘Wait – I’m coming through’. How does this relate to Old World and New World relations? We can well imagine that European Christians could be tempted to take the attitude of the frustrated English motorist (or the frustrated Greek motorist in England). The strange cultural habits of the New World are not just different and interesting. Rather, they are in the end different and wrong. In many cases, Shakespeare’s contemporaries evidently did take this stance. The grim tales of European inhumanity post-Columbus already show us where such an attitude could lead. Once you start denying someone’s humanity, then it becomes much easier to do all sorts of bad things to them. To put this another way: if culture is a distinctively human thing, and yet highly varied across different human groups and eras, then it can sometimes be all too easy to deny that a particular group has culture. In the same breath, the observer has then necessarily begun to deny their humanity.
In reality, of course, ritual cannibalism, is clearly, emphatically unnecessary from a practical, animal, merely nutritional viewpoint. And it is, therefore, eminently cultural. Some recent authors indeed go so far as to state that, in Fiji, ‘the origin of cannibalism was … the origin of culture’.75 The point becomes still clearer if we contrast ritual and famine cannibalism. For much of history the latter has been a grim, if sporadic reality, and one not merely limited to shipwrecks or plane crashes. In an Italian famine of 450 AD parents supposedly ate their children.76 In a Restoration sermon William Barton recalled the English famine of 1316, when ‘men did eat one another, and thieves newly brought into the jail were torn in pieces and eaten half alive, by them that had been longer in’.77 In 1594, during the siege of Paris by Henri IV, an emergency famine committee agreed that bread should be made from bones from the charnel house of the Holy Innocents. (It was available by mid-August, but those eating it apparently died).78 In 1641 the preacher Stephen Marshall laments the horrors of the Thirty Years War then still in progress, claiming that in Germany, ‘a field of blood’, people again ate their dead children in sheer desperation.79 On one occasion, moreover, in late 1636, in the village of Steinhaus near Hornebach, a woman allegedly lured a girl of twelve and a boy of five into her house, ‘killed them both, and devoured them with her neighbour’. In Heidelberg around this time men were said to ‘have digged out of the graves dead bodies, and … eaten them’, while one woman ‘was found dead, having a man’s head roasted by her, and the rib of a man in her mouth’.80 In Picardy during this conflict, the Jesuit G.S. Menochio saw ‘“several inhabitants”’ so crazed with hunger that they ‘“ate their own arms and hands and died in despair”’.81 In 1761, in what was then still the cannibal territory of Canada, three Anglo-Americans were killed by Indians ‘in revenge for an Indian boy that the famished trio had killed and eaten’.82
Nothing could have been more grimly, brutally necessary than famine cannibalism. It was the triumph of nature over culture. It had no particular meaning, and in warfare it was more generally the product of social chaos and disintegration – an archetypal case of the extremes brought about by the excesses of ‘civilised’ societies. (The 1594 incident, for example, occurred during conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the same country.) Clearly, this was very much ‘raw cannibalism’.
And it was in fact too raw for even the most hardened New World traveller to swallow. Lestringant tells of how Léry – that veteran of cannibal society – adjusted himself to the man-eating of the Tupinamba, but came down to earth (again) with a vicious bump on returning to Europe. With Protestant–Catholic wars now raging across the continent, the French town of Sancerre suffered a
n especially prolonged siege in 1573. In one starving family, a small girl died. Soon after, the elderly grandmother persuaded the child’s parents to eat her. The grandmother was later condemned and executed. Having seen a good deal of cannibalism in Brazil, Léry found himself confronted with the dead girl’s butchered carcass. At this point, his whole body made its own judgement. For him, this was very different from the meaningful rituals of the Tupinamba, and he spontaneously vomited at the sight.83
Famine cannibalism was not the only type which one might contrast with that of the carefully systematic Tupinamba or Huron. Those Christians who wished to familiarise the Americans tended to divide potentially redeemable tribes from those who were allegedly beyond help or salvation. This was sometimes practically convenient, for purposes of trade. Its ideological convenience lay in the way that ‘good Americans’ could then be rescued from especially warlike or cannibal neighbours. But European observers went further. New World cannibalism itself was internally divided. The cooked version, as we have seen, was well regulated, controlled, and culturally meaningful.