Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine From the Renaissance to the Victorians

by Richard Sugg

  We owe the above account to the anthropologist Beth A. Conklin.7 Conklin carried out initial fieldwork among the South American Wari’ in the 1980s, some twenty years after the tribe had been forced to abandon its ancient, cannibalistic funeral practices by the interference of government officials and Christian missionaries. Accordingly, she never witnessed the original ceremonies, instead gathering details from older tribe members.

  As well as providing accounts of what occurred at Wari’ funerals, the informants also explained why. There were three fundamental reasons. First, the cannibalism was compassionate: the body was eaten because the dead person’s spirit wished this to happen. No mourner ever wanted to eat human flesh in any kind of purely animal, appetitive way. Indeed, as we have just seen, they at times forced down putrid flesh simply because they felt that they must satisfy the spirit of the dead. Secondly, the Wari’ were horrified at the notion of imprisoning a corpse in cold, dank earth – something which they considered to be polluting. They suffered genuine distress when forced to adopt this alien, essentially taboo practice, and may well have found it quite as revolting as a Londoner would to eat their dead mother or father. Thirdly, the body was eaten in order to soften the trauma of bereavement. As one Wari’ man, Jimon Maram, told Conklin: ‘“when the others ate the body, we did not think longingly about the ones who died; we were not so sad”’.8

  Maram’s explanation reminds us how much funeral rites can vary across time or continents. Where most of us are in many ways trying to increase the distance between ourselves and a dead friend or relative, the Wari’ were quite literally closing that distance. And cannibalistic funeral rituals also seem to have varied considerably. As Conklin points out, most South American tribes probably did not engage in this practice at all. Those which did might consume bones, rather than flesh, grinding them down into a powder which could be mixed into honey or drinks. One obvious universal feature of such ceremonies is that they are thoroughly consensual; all those involved, including the deceased as living person or as spirit, agree not simply that the corpse may be eaten, but that it must be. This general agreement offers a knotty problem to opponents of cannibalism (at least, that is, if they are intelligent or thoughtful.) The prohibition imposed in the 1960s was a typically Christian attack on what is often called ‘victimless crime’ (compare, most notably, religious attitudes to sex, and particularly to homosexuality). Interestingly, it was just this vexed issue of consent which made the recent trial of Armin Meiwes such a complicated legal affair. As readers may recall, in March 2001, Meiwes killed and ate a fellow German, Bernd Jürgen Brandes, who willingly agreed to the whole arrangement, conscientiously taking a day off work and making his will before he kept the appointment.9

  While the psychology of the Meiwes–Brandes case was clearly very complex, sexual desire of some kind was evidently a strong element. By contrast, tribal cannibalism was an intensely solemn and religious affair. (It lacked the selfishness, we might say, of either lust or greed.) Hence the carefully observed nuances of ritual involved: the firewood bundle must be ornately decorated; the wood itself must come from the village houses, ‘leaving the thatched roofs sagging in tangible evidence of death’s violation’. The seriousness of all these details was underlined when one Wari’ man complained to Conklin that both missionaries and anthropologists were overly obsessed with the tribe’s cannibalism, and thus neglected other elements of the mourning rites: ‘“eating was not all that we did! We cried, we sang, we burned the house, we burned all their things … Write about all of this, not just the eating!”’10 This criticism might well be likened to that of a Christian, who found that a bemused observer of the High Mass was obsessed only with the participants eating and drinking their God.

  Funerary cannibalism was often closely tied to the spirit world. The Wari’ themselves ate the corpse to please the spirit of the dead; they did not believe that the flesh contained any spiritual potency at all. But other tribes seem to have believed that they were indeed eating the souls of their deceased. They were quite literally ‘incorporating’ (re-embodying) the vital principle of the dead, in order that it should not be lost to the community.11 Compare the South American Yanomami, as studied in the late twentieth century: ‘“when a child dies they consume it so thoroughly, even pulverizing the bones and drinking them down in plantain soup, that there is nothing left”’. (In a pre-industrial environment, pulverising an entire skeleton was probably much more difficult than digging a grave, and this alone gives some idea of the importance attached to such a practice.) Similarly, in the 1970s the Guiaca people of the upper Orinoco would cremate bodies, grind the half-burned bones, and mix these into plantain soup to be drunk, being ‘“very careful not to spill any of it”’.12

  Given how strange such rituals may be to us, it is useful to offer another broad comparison. It has been claimed that – perhaps partly because of a history of unusually common famine cannibalism – China has evolved a particularly strong tradition of medicinal cannibalism. A medical compendium of 1578 cites thirty-five different human body parts or substances as remedies, and includes ‘nail, hair, skin, milk, urine, urine sediments, gall, placenta and … flesh’.13 These cures look relatively bland, however, when we come to the treatments known as ‘ko ku’ and ‘ko kan’. Drawing on the work of the Chinese scholar Yu Chun-Fang, Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes show that ‘ko ku’ was rooted in traditions of filial piety, deriving from the Tang Dynasty of the seventh to tenth century AD. Most reported cases of this practice in fact involved not a blood relation, but the daughter-in-law of an aged and sick man or woman. ‘Typically, the devoted daughter-in-law would tie her arm or thigh very tightly with a piece of clothing’. Using a sharp knife, she would then ‘quickly slice off a piece from her upper arm or upper thigh’. After this the flesh would be mixed with soup or gruel, and (according to folklore) a miraculous recovery would follow. An incidence of ko ku was recorded as late as 1987 – by which time, admittedly, the practice was no longer an accepted custom.14

  In the unlikely event that you are ever asked to offer ko ku or ko kan to your ailing mother- or father-in-law, you would be well advised to choose the former. The latter involves not just self-mutilation of one’s arm or thigh, but the self-accomplished removal of one’s own liver. Incredible as this might seem, there are innumerable accounts of the practice, with the latest occurring as recently as the nineteenth century. Moreover: as Korn, Radice and Hawes rightly emphasise, surviving descriptions can be horribly convincing by their very detail:

  after bathing and worshipping, he took up the knife and aimed at the place where his liver and lung were located. Blood gushed out after one cut. The ribcage was exposed after the second cut. After the third and fourth cuts there was a resounding sound, and after the sixth cut the heart leaped out. Following the heart he groped for the lung and after the lung he groped for the liver. By then he nearly fainted because of the extreme pain. After a moment’s rest he called his wife and told her quickly to cook the liver to serve his mother [probably a piece of liver, although the text didn’t indicate so]. Not knowing what it really was, the mother ate it happily and soon became well.15

  In many cases this was not wholly consensual, given the ignorance of the recipient (although, as this was a quite widespread tradition, one might imagine that the elderly would come to expect a very special kind of soup during times of illness). But it is surely hard to equate such behaviour with stereotyped negative images of the savage cannibal. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine a more striking instance of human courage and filial devotion. Modern organ donation, for example, seems rather like cutting off a lock of hair by comparison.

  European Awareness

  The contemporaries of Elizabeth I or John Milton clearly knew nothing about Chinese cannibalism. As regards the Americas, most were evidently far more interested in the warlike, supposedly savage cannibal (whose subjects were thought to be very reluctant supper guests) than in consensual man-eating. But litera
te Europeans were aware of the existence of funerary cannibalism. They had heard the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (living in the middle of the fifth century BC) tell of the Essedones. This Scythian people, straddling the borders of Europe and Asia, were supposed to mix the flesh of a dead father with that of a sheep. This was served at a funeral banquet, while his skull was framed in gold and brought out once a year, at a festival held in the dead man’s honour.16 Some centuries later, the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) embroidered this account, claiming that the skulls were not merely ornamental, but were also used as drinking bowls (presumably at the annual memorials).17

  A similar tale concerned the Calatians (or Calantians), a people living in Asia Minor at the time of the Persian Emperor Darius (522–486 BC).18 As the bishop Jeremy Taylor observes in 1660, Darius had ‘asked the Indians upon what conditions they would be induced to burn the bodies of their fathers, and not to eat them’. The Calatians ‘desired him not to speak to them of any such horrid impiety as to burn their fathers’ carcasses, and to deny to them the honour of a natural burial in the bowels of their dear children’.19 Note the crucial phrase here: ‘a natural burial’ … This powerful horror of cremation already recalls the Wari’ taboo concerning burial. And the resemblance grows when Taylor himself explains that ‘custom is the genius or spirit of a man’s actions … Custom is as nature’. As Conklin notes, when asked why they ate their dead, the Wari’ would most frequently respond, ‘thus was our custom’.20 One commentator of 1665 describes endo-cannibalism as ‘absolutely inhumane’.21 But neither Taylor, nor the Scot, David Person, writing in 1635 of this form of ‘honourable sepulchre’, appear at all condemnatory.22

  Were Renaissance Europeans also aware of endo-cannibalism in the newly discovered Americas? If they wanted to know, they had certainly stumbled on the right continents in 1492. Endo-cannibalism seems to have been more common in South America than in any other region (with Conklin noting reliably documented cases in Peru, Paraguay and southern Venezuela). The French writer André Thevet observed Brazilian cannibalism personally, when living there in the later sixteenth century. Thevet noted that the Tapuia people ‘ate their own dead relatives to spare them the indignity of rotting in the earth’.23 Again, this statement very closely echoes the attitude to burial found among the Wari’ just a few decades ago. Thevet’s remark, however, occurs in a work which was not published. His other writings, which were well known, tended to dwell on cases of violent, aggressive cannibalism.24

  A few years later, in 1595, that great Renaissance adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, made his own pioneering journey down the Orinoco River in search of the fabled mountains of gold in El Dorado. In his account of the expedition, Raleigh tells of the people called the Arwacas, dwelling south of the Orinoco, who at their funerals, ‘do … beat the bones of their Lords into powder’, after which ‘their wives and friends drink it all in their several sorts of drinks’.25 It is difficult to detect any trace of hostility or revulsion in this plain statement. (Admittedly, Raleigh seems to have been unusually open-minded in his attitude to the Amazonian tribes he encountered, and often talks with respect or admiration of their vigour and nobility of bearing.26)

  A particularly striking case of consensual cannibalism occurred in New England in 1675. A letter sent from the colony to London in November tells of how a native Indian was executed by the colonists. While the condemned man was as yet ‘half alive and half dead, there came an Indian, a friend of his, and with his knife made a hole in his breast to his heart, and sucked out his heart’s blood. Being asked his reason therefore, his answer was: “ … me be stronger as I was before, me be so strong as he and me too [i.e. as two men], he be very strong man before he die”’.27 The Indian’s response gives a particularly clear sense of one feature of tribal or magical cannibalism. Like Ficino, or those doctors and apothecaries using blood to restore the aged, this man believed that the most basic stuff of life could be sucked out of one human body and absorbed by another.

  Occasionally, the contemporaries of Shakespeare could observe this kind of practice very close to home. As we have seen, Anglo-Irish relations were often far from easy around this time. In 1577, the poet Edmund Spenser watched the Irish rebel, Murrogh O’Brien, hung, drawn and quartered at Limerick. And he also saw ‘an old woman which was his foster mother take up his head while he was quartered and sucked up all the blood running thereout, saying that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped her face, and breast … crying and shrieking out most terrible’.28

  Aggressive Cannibalism

  3 August 1492. The sun is rising over the European continent. From the harbour of Palos de Frontera in Spain, an enterprising Italian, Christopher Columbus, has just begun one of the most momentous voyages of history. Down in Rome, Innocent VIII, the alleged medical vampire of Infessura’s reports, has been dead little more than a week. Meanwhile, over in an area which will presently receive the name of Brazil, a war party of the Tupinamba is re-entering its home village, following just one of its numerous conflicts with a neighbouring tribe. The procession is headed by a bold-looking, even haughty man, decorated with feathers from thigh to shoulder. He and the accompanying warriors have just paid a solemn visit to the cemetery outside the village, honouring the tribe’s dead ancestors. The plumed man is taken to the house of a recently dead tribe’s member, and given the bow and arrows of the deceased. He is also given the dead man’s widow by way of a wife. He feasts on the finest meats available. Weeks pass. Columbus sails on. In Rome, the new pope, Alexander VI, is busy instating two of his ‘nephews’ as cardinals. The honoured warrior goes fishing and hunting with the other men of the tribe. He assists in its farming, and enjoys the company of his adopted wife. In April of 1493 they have a child. The man wears a necklace of shells, and at each new moon, one of the shells is removed.

  In May, Alexander VI draws a line on a new world map. With breathtaking arrogance, this notorious stroke of the papal pen grants American territories on the west of it to Spain, and those on the east to Portugal. (Learning that most of the Portuguese territories happen to be mere expanses of seawater, the sharp-witted reader will rightly guess that Alexander himself was Spanish.) By this stage, the situation of the plumed man has shifted dramatically. He is surrounded by a vast formal assembly, comprising the entire tribe. The last of the shells around his neck has vanished. He is tightly bound with cords, held by two men some distance away. As they watch him, tribal elders gulp down millet beer in great quantities. The prisoner defies his captors with a volley of aggressive taunts. He is unafraid; they will suffer in their turn. Suddenly, two simultaneous actions seal his fate. In front of him one man lights a specially prepared fire. Beside him another raises a club. It swings down. Dead at the first stroke, the victim collapses just as the dry flames leap into the air. In a few hours’ time, nothing remains of him but a cleanly picked skeleton. Every one of the vast gathering (numbering perhaps thousands) has had at least a tiny fragment of his flesh or organs. Women have consumed his entrails and his genitals. The child born to him by his new wife has also been eaten.

  We have just witnessed a religious ceremony performed by the Brazilian Tupinamba. It was originally recorded by Thevet in the 1560s, and has been reproduced here from Frank Lestringant’s invaluable study of cannibalism.29 Despite appearances, the plumed man was not a Tupinamba leader. He may in a strange sense be described as an honoured guest. But he was also very definitely a prisoner of war. On his first entry to the village, and through all the long months which followed, he was in fact a captive. Why, then, was he allowed such a remarkable degree of freedom? As we saw, he entered the tribe at a very specific point, taking both the weapons and the widow of a recently dead man. And it does indeed seem that his chief role was to fill the gap left by the deceased. This, of course, does not easily explain the oddly prolonged captivity, and the way in which he engaged so thoroughly in all the activities of the host tribe.

  One vital w
ord helps us to pull these disparate scraps of the puzzle together: incorporation. As Lestringant has pointed out, the prisoner was, in every sense, incorporated into the tribe. He not only replaced the dead man in certain obvious ways, but was progressively absorbed into the community by leading its normal life and contributing to it, both practically and socially. Finally, he was quite literally incorporated into the tribe during the cannibalistic feast in which all participated.30 As Lestringant further notes, among the Guarani of Paraguay this comprehensive ingestion was so important that even suckling infants would have a small amount of cannibal broth put into their mouths.31

  We are now able to see both how and why this whole affair was organised. It was so systematic, patient, precise, and eminently social just because it was so meaningful for those involved. That impression is confirmed by a slightly earlier contemporary account. In 1550 the German adventurer Hans Staden was captured by the Tupinamba whilst hiring out his services as a gunner to the Portuguese. Although held for nine months by the tribe, Staden had the luck to survive his ordeal, and later wrote about it, sketching in numerous details about the ritual cannibalism of the Tupinamba in the process. Their prisoners would be deliberately mocked and beaten by women and children, in a way evidently designed to maximise a male warrior’s sense of shame and dishonour.32 There were ritual paintings and dances, and even the club which struck down the sacrificial victim was very carefully designed and painted.33