by Tahir Shah
Tahirshah.com
Also by Tahir Shah:
Essays
The Legacy of Arab Science
Cannibalism: It’s Just Meat
The Kumbh Mela: Greatest Show on Earth
Books
Casablanca Blues
Eye Spy
Scorpion Soup
Timbuctoo
Travels With Myself
In Arabian Nights
The Caliph’s House
House of the Tiger King
In Search of King Solomon’s Mines
Trail of Feathers
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Beyond the Devil’s Teeth
Table of Contents
Also by Tahir Shah
Cannibalism: It’s Just Meat
Title Page
Copyright Page
Cannibalism: It’s Just Meat
The Kumbh Mela: Greatest Show on Earth
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Kumbh Mela: Greatest Show on Earth
The Legacy of Arab Science
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Legacy of Arab Science
Tahirshah.com
CANNIBALISM: IT’S JUST MEAT
An Essay
TAHIR SHAH
SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING
MMXIII
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Cannibalism: It’s Just Meat
TAHIR SHAH
Secretum Mundi Publishing
3rd Floor, 36 Langham Street, London W1W 7AP, United Kingdom
http://www.secretum-mundi.com/
[email protected]
Cover design by www.designbliss.nl
First published
Secretum Mundi edition, 2013
978-1-78301-133-9
© TAHIR SHAH
Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalog record for this title is available from the British Library.
Visit the author’s website at: http://www.tahirshah.com/
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Cannibalism: It’s Just Meat
The protagonist of the novel I have just written is a surgeon who develops a secret delight in eating human eyes. The more of them he devours, the more he begins to realize that human flesh – and eyes in particular – are a kind of manna sent from Heaven. And what’s more, he comes to understand that, when eaten, eye tissue has an astonishing and ameliorating effect on the human psyche. He doesn’t understand why we’re not all scoffing down our friends and neighbours – as research suggests our ancient ancestors probably did.
Last night, while sitting in bed, I read my wife a random passage from the work, which is called Eye Spy. The main character had just sucked out a drug addict’s eyes in Paris. Clasping hands to her cheeks, my wife let out a shrill scream and then exclaimed:
‘You can’t publish that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because people will be horrified.’
‘Who will?’
‘Everyone will,’ she said.
Cannibalism has been described as the last taboo, and is the one that seems to shock the masses more than anything else. It’s right up there with incest, cold-blooded murder and human sacrifice. In researching my novel, I have done a great deal of background reading on the subject, and have found myself wondering constantly why we regard it with such disdain – after all dead people are just meat, aren’t they?
I think the answer lies in the way our society has structured itself around great monolithic pillars of right and wrong. An advanced culture has to lay down certain ground rules, without which a kind of disintegration begins to occur or, rather, without which advancement can’t take place. It may seem like obvious stuff, but I’d argue that it isn’t obvious at all.
As I see it, thinking that cannibalism is wrong is a hugely sophisticated idea, one that took millennia to become ingrained in human civilization. After all, most animals are quite happy to eat their own kind. I found a list of almost two thousand species online that regularly gulp down their spouses, their young, or those around them. With the exception of apes perhaps, the animal kingdom doesn’t have anything the majority of us would regard as real civilization. And so, I suppose we can draw a baseline under our society and say, ‘We are civilized because we don’t eat people’.
The same can’t be said for a great many of the generations which came before us. There’s no doubt at all that ancient man ate his fellow men in a great many places and circumstances.
I’ll come to that in a moment.
But all the more interesting is that cannibalism was, it seems, a tolerated taboo across almost all societies until relatively recent times. It’s a subject that is nailed to the bedrock of our world, infused within our cultures through folklore and religion. There are plentiful examples of blood-gorging cannibalistic deities, for instance, whose actions provide cautionary tales for mankind.
The Greek Myths are an entertainment often poised on the edge of acceptability, as much as they are a body of folklore. Their shock value makes them compulsive reading. But however depraved the taboo-shattering tales are, the Classical Myths are always tempered with a kind of righteousness. The bad guy (or I should say – the bad deity) usually comes a cropper on the grand scale of things, and he’s taught a lesson that’s passed down to us all.
The Greek god Kronos was an example of a deity seemingly unfazed by the thought of eating his fellow kind. Fearful that his own children would usurp him, he gobbled up five of them in a row. Kronos was married to his own sister (itself an example of incest being rather less taboo than cannibalism), and she conspired to hide their sixth child – Zeus – in fear that he would be gobbled up, too.
In his wisdom, the young deity fed his father an emetic, which caused him to regurgitate Zeus’ siblings. Happily, and rather amazingly, they all survived unharmed.
Another strange cannibalistic tale from the Greek Myths concerns Pelops. He was killed and stewed up by his father, Tantalus, who fed the meat to the gods in an elaborate banquet. Having caught on to what was set before them, the deities didn’t touch the meal, none except for Demeter who ate part of the boy’s cooked shoulder. On Zeus’ orders, the flesh and bones were boiled up once again and, the shoulder having been recreated from ivory, the boy was somehow cooked back into his original form. Tantalus (from whose name we get the word tantalize) was punished by being made to stand in a pool of pristine water, with the branches of a fruit tree hanging over him. Whenever he stooped down to drink, the water receded, and whenever he reached up for the fruit, the branches rose up into the air.
For all their rip-roaring action and intrigue, the Classics are in a realm of their own, one adrift on a sea of fantasy. They fall under the same umbrella as Hansel and Gretel (if you recall, the witch in the story ate little boys), and Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. But the most memorable thing among recent cannibalistic phenomena was undoubtedly Dr. Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs fame.
Lecter sends shivers down our collective spines for the way h
e preys on the audience’s raw fear, while operating with savvy and audacious method. The genius of the story is, of course, using a cannibal to catch a cannibal. This, coupled with the fact that Lecter was a connoisseur of high culture, made him a devastatingly irresistible anti-hero.
Coming back to reality, there’s no shortage of evidence that our ancient ancestors ate each other. Archaeologists and anthropologists have pinpointed examples on a global scale of primitive humans feasting on their fellow men. Despite appreciating the attention they attract for suggesting cannibalism existed at sites uncovered at their digs, archaeologists usually have a hard time in deciding what kind of man-eating actually went on. Did our ancestors really chomp away at their dead on a daily basis, or was it a practice they indulged in only during famine and during occasional bouts of warring?
The answer is probably more of the latter than the former. Even then, the main evidence is based on finding bones that have been scraped clean of their flesh with flint tools – such as the remains of Peking Man from 500,000 years ago, discovered outside modern Beijing.
In addition to eating the meat on a human carcass, it’s certain judging from remains that ancient man delighted in extracting marrow from the long human leg bones. The delicacy would have provided a great source of protein. As for the question whether there were human communities that dined exclusively on their own flesh, it’s very unlikely.
The reason is intriguing, and is to do with the weight of meat on a lean human frame. Our ancestors were hunters and so they weren’t obese, but trimmed down to the point of continual hunger. Even then, a family group would have required several adults a week to satisfy their calorific needs. If they had lived exclusively on human meat, it would have led to the decimation of communities as large as their own within a very short time.
The thing that fascinates me though is the squeamishness with which we regard cannibalism in the modern Occidental world. This is totally at odds with attitudes throughout history in Europe and beyond. I would say that stories like Hansel and Gretel are part of an older culture, one in which cannibalism was an accepted way to behave.
During the Crusades for example, it seems that people-eating was relatively widespread. This was certainly a result of starvation, but also a curious way of shaming the foe. Eating the enemy was the ultimate act of humiliation. One delicacy that crops up during the Crusades is ‘curried hand of Saracen’. The hand muscles would have provided not only protein, but a good level of taste as well. Consuming an enemy’s hand would have been a kind of Statement of Conquest as much as it was a ready meal.
During the Middle Ages, Europe was brought to its knees time and again by famine and plague. In such times of social and economic upheaval, devouring victims was a natural way to survive, but even so it seems to have been a diet of last resort.
My thinking that cannibalism wasn’t nearly so frowned upon as it is today, is borne out by the fact that many thousands of Egyptian mummies were sold as medicine between medieval and Victorian times. Preserved in bitumen, the mummies were powdered, then formulated into an entire pharmacopoeia all of their own. Eventually though, the bizarre treatment lost its shine because murdered Egyptian children and slaves were discovered to have been shipped westward having just been mummified.
The obsession with mummies’ curative powers is one that preoccupied both West and East for centuries. Sceptics may question whether this is the real thing, but I’d say that eating preserved bodies in any form is as cannibalistic as anything else. And there’s an example that I just can’t get out of my head. It’s known as ‘mellification’, and involves the preservation of a body – in honey.
The practice supposedly occurred during the Middle Ages in Arabia and, in its the truest form, it’s quite remarkable. People were encouraged to donate their bodies while still alive so that others (I assume family members) could benefit from a rare elixir created from them.
The individual would be encouraged to eat nothing but honey. With nothing else entering their alimentary canal, it was said that their sweat and excrement were strangely honey-like, and that they died quite soon. When they were dead, the corpse was placed in a stone coffin, itself filled with honey. It was supposedly left for a century or more before being opened. Eventually, the coffin would be unsealed, its human contents now having turned into a kind of preserved confection. This would be broken up and sold by weight as a remedy for all manner of ills.
It was only with the Age of Exploration that Europe – cloistered away from the farthest reaches of the world in its own isolation – really began to experience the kind of cannibalism their own ancient ancestors must have known. All of a sudden, travellers searching for new realms to plunder, came face to face with the grand taboos of human culture – human sacrifice and cannibalism among them.
Almost every so-called ‘primitive’ society seemed nonchalant about cannibalism. Native peoples just about everywhere were found to be feasting eagerly on human flesh. Indeed, it must have been more a question of who didn’t eat people, than who did. A great many of the European trailblazers themselves disappeared, devoured in distant climes by cheery tribesmen.
It’s easy to imagine the titillation and the horror with which sailors’ tales entertained European society. The more brutal and seemingly depraved, the more delight there must have been. It’s likely that in many cases the cannibalistic stories were hammed up, but I think it’s probable that a great many were recorded as they happened.
We get our word ‘cannibal’ from the Spanish name for the Carib people of the West Indies, who had a long and proud history of consuming enemies slain or captured in battle. This extended of course to early European adventurers, such as the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. He was killed at Guadeloupe in the year 1528, and was eaten in a stew.
It’s difficult to say how much of the legend relating to the Carib Indians is hysterical supposition, and how much is based on cold hard fact. My own thinking is that, however barbaric the Carib people might have been, they were hardly more ruthless than the Spanish Conquistadors who had arrived to slaughter them. Naturally, the Spanish filled many books with the misdeeds of the peoples they had encountered, while hardly making mention of their own extraordinary barbarities (such as feeding their victims with their own testicles).
What is certain is that on the American mainland – north and south – a great many cultures regarded cannibalism as an essential backbone of animistic culture. And, in sheer scale their people-eating endeavours must have far exceeded anything going on over in the Caribbean.
At the time of Columbus, South America was awash with tribes engaging in people-eating. The practice appears to have been so widespread that it was almost ubiquitous.
My favourite reliable account of Latin American cannibalism was recorded in the pages of a sixteenth-century book written by Hans Staden, a German soldier and adventurer. He voyaged into Brazil in 1549, where he was shipwrecked and marched into the jungle by the Tupinambá Indians. The tribe planned to eat him, but kept him in a cage to fatten him up first. But when Staden cured their chief of illness, the tribe spared his life, albeit reluctantly.
After many trials and tribulations, Staden escaped, and made his way back to Europe, where his tale of the cannibalistic traditions of his former captors became an international best-seller of the time. During his long captivity, Staden was fed what he described as a ‘delicious soup’, served up in a cauldron. While helping himself to more, he realized there were human skulls at the bottom of the pot. He recognized the individuals he was eating from their cooked faces. They had been his friends.
To the north, in what’s now Mexico, Aztec society was practising cannibalism on a grand scale as well as that other shameful taboo – human sacrifice. Their elaborate rituals entailed thousands of people being sacrificed each year, offerings that formed part of a strict devotional system. Historians have suggested that the Aztecs were in a constant state of war because of the sheer number of victims needed
by their priesthood.
When Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico on his quest for gold, he was dismayed to find cages packed with people who were going to be slaughtered in the name of ritualistic food. He recorded first-hand accounts of them having their hearts cut out while still alive, and their bodies thrown to the populace – once the precious internal organs had been chopped out by the priests.
Recent excavations in Colorado have suggested that the Pueblo Indians engaged in cannibalism too, probably as part of ritualistic sacrifice – I imagine similar in nature to that of the Aztecs.
But the idea of North Americans – past or present – eating each other is a touchy subject. I can’t quite understand why.
After all, it seems likely that more human societies through history have dabbled in cannibalism than have not. But we’re still all appalled by the thought of it.
As the Age of Exploration pushed the boundaries of discovery ever farther, cannibals were discovered across the Pacific and in the distant reaches of the Antipodes. And with all the voyages there were plenty of shipwrecks.
In such cases there was sometimes no choice but to draw straws and serve up one of the crew. This form of cannibalism – in the name of survival – is in a class of its own. I’d argue that in normal circumstances the shock-horror value would be rather minimal. But it was somehow amplified by the fact that those eaten, and those doing the eating, were usually ordinary people just like us. The question is always – ‘In the same circumstances what would you do?’
The most famous case of murder to provide meat for survivors came to court in 1884. It involved four survivors of an English yacht, the Mignonette, being stranded in a lifeboat 1,600 miles from the Cape of Good Hope. Having fallen unconscious, the cabin boy was killed by the others, who then ate part of his body. They were picked up a few days later, and two of the men were eventually found guilty of murder.