by Richard Sugg
The same kind of respect for detail and order could be seen in broadly similar cannibalistic ceremonies, practised many miles north of the Tupinamba by tribes such as the Iroquois and Huron, in what would later become the Canadian province of Ontario. These tribes, observed with some care by Jesuit missionaries during the seventeenth century, also sacrificed and ate prisoners of war. As Peggy Reeves Sanday has shown, their fate was often far less easy than that of the Tupinambas’ victim. The prisoner would be horribly tortured by his captors. Yet, at the same time, he too was being carefully ‘incorporated’. Even as they tortured him, the Huron would refer to their victim as ‘uncle’. Moreover, as Sanday points out, some prisoners of war ‘were allowed to live and assume the rights and duties of the family members lost in war … In a fundamental sense it did not matter whether the victim was allowed to live or was tortured to death, because in either case the victim was physically incorporated into the community’.34
The social and religious character of the ritual is evident from the way that the aggressive participants might at one stage be ‘“howling at the tops of their voices … their eyes flashing with rage and fury”’, while at another the watching Jesuits ‘were struck by the fact that’ the torturers’ faces clearly expressed ‘gentleness and humanity’ toward their tormented captive.35 Equally, the ceremony was very carefully controlled and prolonged, with the victim being intermittently revived so that he should not die before the appointed time. Despite suffering pain and exhaustion seemingly beyond the limits of human endurance, he himself would essentially co-operate in the whole proceeding because he shared certain basic religious beliefs with his tormentors. He must, for example, show extraordinary courage, knowing as he did that, at the conclusion of the tortures at daybreak, he was being watched by the sun god. The Iroquois, similarly, prized his valour because in eating him (and in particular his heart) they would gain his strength and courage.36
In such rituals qualities which we might see as at least partially abstract (strength and courage) can be transferred and physically absorbed – recycled within a kind of spiritual ecology. In the case of Fijian cannibals this notion was remarkably precise. They ‘believed that the spirit of a body clung to a corpse for four days after death. Sacrificing and eating the body annihilated the spirit and prevented it from ascending to the spirit world and becoming a source of power and guidance to your enemies’.37 Similarly, for the Orokaiva of the Pacific, cannibal victims were ‘intended to compensate for the spirit of an Orokaiva man’ killed during intertribal conflict.38
For certain cannibal tribes (including the Brazlian Wari’), it was possible to tyrannise one’s enemies ‘body and soul’ in an entirely literal way. We find, then, that the religious side of aggressive cannibalism has a very precise focus. Once more, to eat the body is to eat the soul. But there is one further, crucial aspect of hostile cannibalism which we have not yet explored in detail. A wealth of evidence from different periods and different communities (including, as we will see, Renaissance Europe itself) shows that these practices were motivated by a fundamental antagonism towards outsiders. The degree of hostility involved here is so extreme that it is certainly tempting to use the word hatred. But, given the highly controlled, systematic nature of the Tupinamba, Iroquois and Huron sacrifices, it certainly cannot always be said that this involves wild or unthinking rage. It is very far from the behaviour of animals.39 Rather, for the Tupinamba, the highly alien qualities of the outsider-victim mean that he must be treated very carefully. His oddly prolonged captivity and his inclusion in ordinary life reflect the difficulty of successfully absorbing someone who is initially very alien to the group he enters.
Hostility to alien communities is so fundamental just because it is vital to a tribe’s sense of identity. To really know who you are, you must be vigorously aware of who you are not. This kind of oppositional identity is one of the chief sources of violence throughout history. Christians vs Jews; Catholic vs Protestant; white vs black; east vs west; sunnis against shias … The billions of lives that have been claimed by these tragic divisions have been murders founded not simply on practical competition for resources, but on fiercely ideological schisms. Thevet, the sixteenth-century Frenchman who observed the Tupinamba at first hand, gives a slightly skewed version of such psychology when he says that, despite abundance of natural goods, American tribes continually kill and devour one another due to ‘a desire of vengeance’. This, he asserts, they have ‘without any other reason or cause, but even like brute beasts, that cannot agree one with another by no honest means’. As tribesmen supposedly told him, ‘they have been always their mortal enemies … say they … we have eaten your parents, also we will eat you, with many other threatenings … The greatest vengeance that these wild men use, and that seemeth to them most cruel, is to eat their enemies’.40
Thevet’s account of aggressive cannibalism is slightly distorting. It over-emphasises the irrationality of aggressive cannibalism (‘like brute beasts’), and gives no thought to its religious dimension. (Animals do not eat one another for psychological reasons.) But the simple statement ‘they have always been [our] mortal enemies’ has a familiar ring. Why did the Wari’ eat their dead? ‘Thus was our custom’. It was always this way. This seemed natural and inevitable to those involved in it. And many anthropologists would probably agree that this kind of fiercely narrow-minded attitude to outsiders is indeed very common among small, closed, isolated communities – whether the Tupinamba of the fifteenth century, or an Oxford college in the twentieth. We will see in a few moments how such antagonism could flourish all too vigorously among the supposedly civilised Europeans of Christendom. In our own era cannibalism has been credibly recorded as a deliberate aggravation of violence in Liberia and Rwanda. In the latter case, the extremes of hatred hardly need emphasising: in 1994, perhaps as many as 500,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by extremist Hutus, in an ethnic conflict which had a fundamentally tribal basis. Let us briefly examine one other remarkable case of aggressive cannibalism before we turn to the question of European attitudes to the New World.
Some time in the later 1960s, not long after the end of Wari’ cannibalism, and while the Beatles and the Stones were gaining an even more terrifying grip on the heart of ‘all that we hold dear’ in Western civilisation, China was in the throes of its own Cultural Revolution – something which went far beyond music, sex and drugs. Here the ideology was that of communism, and the source of hatred derived from notions of class. All across the country, ‘class enemies’ were being denounced and often slaughtered. But, as the authors of Cannibal rightly note, this was a time when ‘just killing the class enemy was not enough to express class hatred’. At a school in Wuxuan Province, students turned against their teachers. The Head of the Chinese Department, Wu Shufang, was condemned as a class enemy and beaten to death. Another teacher was forced to cut out Shufang’s liver, which was cooked in strips over a fire in the school yard. Before long the cannibalism had spread, until ‘“the school yard was full of the smell of students cooking their teachers”’. In another incident a young man was attacked and tortured because he was the son of an ex-landlord. While still just alive, he was bound to a telegraph pole and taken down to the river. The attackers cut open his stomach and removed his liver; the cavity was still so hot that they had to pour river water in to cool it. Once again, the ‘liver of the landlord’s son made a revolutionary feast for the villagers involved’. In all, some 10,000 people are thought to have taken part in cannibalism in these episodes, with up to 100 victims being eaten.41 These fiercely guarded internal secrets were revealed by Zheng Yi, a former Red Guard member, now in permanent exile as a result.42
These episodes show that, while aggressive cannibalism almost invariably stems from violent antagonism to alien groups, such hatred does not have to be religious or even typically tribal in nature. Moreover, while for the Tupinamba cannibalism was an age-old custom, here the powerful boundary lines between opposing groups had been drawn
only quite recently. The ‘class enemy’ was a relatively new outsider. This novelty may lead us to wonder if such attacks were not motivated simply by a desire to preserve revolutionary identity, but to actively recreate and reassert it in a highly tangible way. Sometimes, those who are most insecure about their identities can seek to defend them with the greatest ferocity.43
We have now gone a considerable way toward demythicising the legendary spectre of the cannibal. Without necessarily wanting to practise exo-cannibalism ourselves, we can begin to recognise that some degree of hostility to others is present in all of us. At certain moments, even if only unconsciously, all of us will probably feel a sense of bewilderment or anger toward alien people or groups whose behaviour is in some ways unacceptable or incomprehensible. Such divisions criss-cross every society like a kind of tense psychological grid, more or less visible, more or less vibrant, at certain flashpoints of conflict. Muslims and Christians; Socialists and Tories; young and old; men and women; drivers and cyclists; rival football supporters … I myself am occasionally aware that I have had this kind of attitude toward George Bush and the strange assemblage of creatures who once voted him back into power. I did not want to eat them (I am a vegetarian, and mindful of my health) but I did have considerable difficulty in persuading myself that they were quite real – that they were complex, three-dimensional beings who believed in themselves quite as vigorously as I do. Having acknowledged this, we may perhaps be less surprised at the often ferociously maintained divisions and antipathies of Renaissance Europe – a realm in which the psychology of the cannibal was in fact dimly recognisable.
The Cannibal in Europe
If by some strange chance we happened to have lost all purely factual records on early European contacts with the Americas, we would still be able to form a very clear idea of what the cannibal meant to the Christians of the Old World. Fascinating as he was, the cannibal made his home in numerous other forms of literature. Time and again this mythical demon flashes its teeth in moments of literary polemic. Whenever a writer or preacher wishes to conjure up the worst excesses of human behaviour, the word ‘cannibal’ is hurled like a kind of verbal hand grenade, producing an effect which is not always precise, but which certainly never lacks force. The cannibal is associated, either literally or metaphorically, with incest, witchcraft and the most lurid extremes of cruelty, violence or murder.44 Even when used purely in isolation, the mere word itself must, in the time of Shakespeare and Milton, have had an impact which future generations could never quite appreciate. For, while the Renaissance had for some time known of those classical ‘anthropophagi’ such as the Essedones, the man-eater of the New World was to be honoured with a brand new name. ‘Cannibal’ was derived from ‘Carib’. In native American languages, the letters l, n and r interchange across different dialects: hence it was perhaps only by a slight chance that English came to speak of the ‘Caribbean’ rather than ‘Cannibean’ islands (and hence, perhaps, Shakespeare’s ‘Caliban’).45 For various reasons the Caribbean in particular was thought to be the home of especially savage peoples. And so, in the earliest published accounts of this brave new world in the mid-sixteenth century, the very word ‘cannibal’ was peculiarly fused with these strange unexpected continents, almost as if it were a distinct species of flora, thriving only in the exotic rich soils of the Americas.46
Those mere three syllables, then, must for some time have had a special sonic and social vibration (perhaps not unlike the effect of the word ‘punk’ in seventies Britain). True, some European men may have had a grudging admiration for the sheer masculine skill and courage of warlike cannibal tribes (as the Spanish chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, pointed out, ‘caribe signifies “brave and daring”’).47 But on the whole, the cannibal’s status was emphatically negative. Nor was he redeemed by the company he kept. In a court sermon of 10 March 1634, the bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, heaps together ‘bloody Turks, man-eating cannibals’, and ‘mongrel Troglodites feeding upon buried carcasses’ – throwing in for good measure those notorious Patavians who were supposed to habitually prostitute their own daughters. A few years before, in 1631, the preacher William Twisse had attacked the supposedly heretical notion that Christ died for all humanity, rather than for Christians alone, demanding rhetorically, ‘even for Turks and Saracens, for Tartars and cannibals, not one of them excepted?’48 In 1661, some twelve years after Charles I had been executed by Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, the Royalist John Gauden fuses religious, political and ethnic prejudices when he denounces the regicides as those ‘ravening wolves’ and eulogises his dead sovereign: ‘this was the man, this the Christian, this the King, this the Saint, this the martyr, whom these Judases have betrayed, these Jews destroyed, these cannibals devoured’.49
Occasionally this negative association would appear as part of a kind of grudging complement. In 1674 Aunt Glegg’s beloved Richard Baxter attacked a Catholic idolatry which outdid ‘even cannibals and the most barbarous nations upon earth’.50 In 1609, just four years after the Catholic plot to blow up both James I and the Houses of Parliament, the Lancashire minister William Leigh asserted that this infamous scheme had backfired not only because of its failure, but equally in terms of public relations: ‘for instead of blowing up us, they have blown up themselves, and their religion … being blotted with one of the horriblest treasons … such as God and nature could never brook to be amongst the cruellest cannibals, Turks, or Scythians … ‘.51 Similarly, the preacher John Scott claimed that the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a villainy so foul and monstrous’ that ‘had the most barbarous cannibal in America been hired to act it’, even he ‘could not but have relented’.52
Needless to say, rhetoric of this kind was a pretty backhanded complement. The writer relied on the shared assumption that to be worse than a cannibal was a very bad thing indeed. Just now and then, the man-eater would be briefly allowed into the company of legitimate human beings. In 1599, for example, the poet Sir John Davies insisted that not only the Christians, Turks and Jews, but even ‘the cannibal and tartar’ recognised the immortality of the soul.53 Still more surprisingly, in 1643 Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, New England) lamented that his neighbours, ‘the Mauquaûogs, or men-eaters’ favoured ‘a delicious monstrous dish of the head and brains of their enemies’; yet still believed that this was ‘yet … no bar against God’s call, and their repentance’.54
Clearly, however, Williams’s attitude was an unusually charitable one. On the whole cannibals were deeply taboo for the Old World. Not only that, but at times they acted as a kind of magnet for some equally powerful taboos. In 1688 we hear of the Chirihuana, a Peruvian people who sought to outdo even the archetypal man-eaters of the Caribbean. Besides devouring their enemies, this nation exhibited a similar rapacity toward its own kin: ‘they went naked, and promiscuously used coition without regard either to sisters, daughters or mothers’. Interestingly, the Spanish author retailing this claim briefly glances at the magical or religious significance of Chirihuana practices. Hearing that the tribe would cut the throats of their enemies and drink their blood, we find ourselves in familiar psychological territory. This is not merely savage terrorism, but that common tribal desire to consume an essence or quality (a spirit, strength, courage). Again, we are told of how the Chirihuana ate not just their enemies, but also ‘the flesh … of their own people, when they died’; after which, ‘they lamented over their bones’, which were carefully arranged and then ‘buried … in rocks, or caves, and the hollow of trees’. We can quickly recognise this as funerary, consensual cannibalism. The Spanish author of 1688, however, blurs the practice in with the tribe’s other ‘barbaric’ habits, automatically assuming that his readers will share his own revulsion. Moving on to recount how the Chirihuana stubbornly resisted all outside attempts at moral improvement, he tells of the thwarted Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo, forced to abandon the region in despair. Carried in a litter by Spaniards and Indians, Toledo departed wit
h the Chirihuana shouting ‘curses and reproaches, saying, “throw down that old woman from her basket, that we may eat her alive”’.55
Perhaps surprisingly, there was yet one more cannibal horror which might claim to rival murder, witchcraft, incest or blood-drinking. In 1494 French armies celebrated their successful conquest of Naples in the city’s brothels. Shortly afterwards, they returned to France carrying not just plunder and glory, but a peculiarly terrible new disease. In following decades and centuries, syphilis, or the pox, had an impact on Europe which can be justifiably compared to that of AIDs. Syphilis was terminal, hereditary, and disfiguring. Victims (among the more famous were William Davenant and Pope Julius II) were branded with painful sores and scars – hence ‘pox’, as in ‘pock-marked’. If they were lucky, they lost only their hair. The disease could also devour their hands and feet, as well as their noses. Syphilis was the more horrific because of its novelty and its uncertain origins. It is an old joke that it was known as ‘the French, Italian, or English disease’ depending on one’s nationality. But it was probably no accident that people were always determined to foist the cause of this sexual plague on outsiders, in a kind of negative tribute to the terror and incomprehension which it inspired.