Like many other philosophers, deceived by appearances, Schelling fancies savage and dreadful that which is pure, mischievous that which is preservative, and calamitous that which is benign.
The flow of Destruction is as natural and as needful as the flow of water. No human ingenuity can destroy the Immolation of Man, nor prevent the shedding of blood — and why should it?
Majestic Nature continues on her tragic way serenely, caring naught for the wails of the agonized and panic-stricken nor the protests of defeat; but smiling sadly, proudly (yet somewhat disdainfully in her passing stride) at the victor’s fierce Hurrah. She loves the writhing of sword-blades — the rending of tradition, the crunching of bones, and the flap of shredded shot-torn banners, streaming out savagely (in the night, in the day), over the battle-weary, the mangled dying and the swollen dead. Christs may come and Christs may go, but Cæsar lives for ever.
Deep, permanent, and abiding is the elemental antagonism between the Sociology of “the Man of Nazareth” and the imprescriptible Laws of the Universe. They are as fire and water to each other — irreconcilable. Indeed our planetary system itself shall melt with fervent heat ere the Galilean’s philosophy can conquer.
No human being can ever hope to attain “the perfectibility that is in Christ.” So long as we remain animals, we shall be dominated by animal wants and animal passions and animal rivalries.
Undoubtedly the Messiah ideal is unattainable, hopeless, and especially so upon its reformatory side. However the world loves to be deceived by some ghastly delusion and that is the reason perhaps, that it has taken to its bosom this rustic fable; this Gospel of Ineffectuality — this Evangel of Darkness — this Dream of an Israelite slave. “When the Assyrians and after them the Medes and Persians” writes Tacitus, “were masters of the Oriental world, the Jews of all nations, then held in subjection, were deemed the most contemptible.” Christ was a pariah Jew.
Among virile conquering tribes, the Ideal Man is ever the all-daring Jove, the splendid Apollo, the self-reliant Achilles, or the Constructive Genius. It is only in centuries of dotage — in ages of cankersome down-going and nervous disease, that the Model Man becomes a Christ. The Model Man of out forefathers was Odin, a War Lord, but our Ideal Man is a weeping, horsewhipped Jew.[13] A Jew for a God!
The deities of the Greeks and Vikings, Goths and Romans, were all (originally) mighty-men-of-valor, or virile women of surpassing beauty, afterwards held up (before their warlike posterity) as splendid examples of natural nobility, conscious power, daring courage, shrewdness, sexual vigor and boundless strength of character. The gods and heroes of antiquity spent their vital force in the destruction of monsters, in the seizure of new hunting-grounds, in the slaughtering of tyrants and in the breeding of unconquerable sons.
But Christ! the God of Christendom! the Divine Exemplar! ‘that Majestic Figure!’ What godlike deed did he ever do? What unconquerable sons did he beget?
If the “first principles of Christianity” should, by an unforeseen miracle triumph in the elemental conflict that is approaching, assuredly the Anglo-Saxon is played-out, his days numbered, his dominion ended, his sepulchre prepared. Multitudinous multiplication of Unfit Millions (broods of strumous semi-idiots) must then proceed through dreary, barren, brain-paralyzing centuries, winding up perhaps in a blast of pestilential plague — a Black Death.
The “dead and alive” conditions of the “Celestial” Empire will then be applied to this Western World and under the thin disguise of “Advancement,” “Progress” and “Civilization,” an atmosphere of excruciating torture must be artificially created, hostile to all but degenerative forces as in China. In the name of “goodness,” “righteousness,” and “morality,” Woe shall be poured out upon our Seed, as it has already been poured out on the rotten Swarms of the Orient.
Congenital enfeeblement of body, together with organic degeneracy of mind, must then go on and on, at an ever accelerating ratio, until our posterity may end (as Darwin imagined we began) by becoming chattering apes, without sense enough to light a fire, crack a cocoanut or swing by their tails.
Behold the modern man! this “heir of all the ages — in the foremost ranks of time!” His sight, taste, smell and hearing are all notoriously defective. He can harness thunderbolts, but the unerring instinct of a carrier-pigeon is beyond him. His brain has become an over-heated thinking engine, but he may not read the DAILY MORNING LIAR — without spectacles. He “understands” more things (or thinks he does) but if suddenly removed from his artificial environment, he would perish as helplessly as the Babes-in-the-Wood. He can gauge sound-waves; photograph broken bones; construct gigantic iron monsters; whisper across miles of copper wire; but when the pointer-dog sniffs the hidden pheasant from afar off, this erudite Bundle-of-Nerves looks on in blank amazement. The fact is that the civilized man is gradually “losing his senses.” If he continues to “progress” at the existing rate, in a comparatively little while, he will have no smell, no sight, no hearing.
“Direr visions worse foreboding
Glare upon me through the gloom!
Europe’s smoke-cloud sinks, corroding
On the land, in noisome fume;…
…Showering down like rain of ashes,
On the Cities of God’s doom…
…Bustling smug, a pigmy pack,
Plucks its prey from ores embraces;
Walks with crooked soul and back:
Glares like dwarfs with greedy eyes,
For the golden glittering lies.”[14]
It is good for a degraded people to be utterly consumed.
4
In the department of Natural History, it is axiomatic that all kinds of living beings, from protozoa to man; subsist and propagate, through and by the destruction of feebler competitors, belonging to the same species or to kindred species.
Thus the big fish eat the little fish — the big trees (by absorbing and monopolizing the nutriment) “eat up” the little trees — the strong animals eat the weak animals and so on — ad infinitum.
Man is no exception. Conquering and masterful nations have ever been ravenous devourers of flesh-food; and most of them have also been man-eaters. The slaughter-houses of Christendom reek with the dying effluvia of millions and millions of butchered brutes; that man — the King of Animals — may day by day eat flesh, drink blood and gnaw bones.
Even cannibalism is not extinct in far lands, nor quite unknown in the centers of our proudest civilizations. With the first great revolutionary cataclysm, its revival upon a gigantic scale is not an improbability.
During the eleventh century, man’s flesh was cooked, sold and eaten in England, and Englishmen may again revert to anthropophagy, if ever their imported food supplies should be suddenly and entirely cut off; either by convulsions of nature or acts of war. Ship-wrecked crews have repeatedly saved themselves by casting lots and devouring some of their number: and shipwrecked nations (loaded up to the hatches with seething cargos of festering useless nondescripts), may yet be driven to do the same.
Innumerable are the folk-lore legends, relating to ancient and modern man-eaters. Formal human sacrifices upon the Alters of Idols are quite common. In Mexico and Ancient Britain, prelates butchered their victims (generally young virgins) in public, amid the acclaim of musical instruments, the chanting of beautiful liturgies, and the hosanna shouts of the mob.
The modern prelate does not employ the rude smoking gully-knife, but uses other weapons, ten times more keen and more destructive. For every human sacrifice ‘offered-up’ in olden times, millions are offered now.
5
Professor Huxley pictorially describes an African butcher’s shop, where human steaks, roasts and sirloins, were systematically retailed.
Josephus tells us of mothers who ate their own infants during the last siege of Jerusalem, and in many later sieges human flesh has been consumed.
Oriental traditions record of King Richard Lion Heart, that once upon a time when presiding at
a feast of moslem heads, he remarked with grim matter-of-factness ‘one roast Saracen made good entertainment for nine or ten of my good Christian men.’ An English Crusading rhymer is even proud of this —
“King Richard shall warrant,
There is no flesh so nourissant,
Unto an English Man;
partridge, plover, heron, ne swan,
Cow, ne ox, sheep, ne swine,
As the (roast) head of a Sarazan.”
Very intelligent New Zealand aboriginals may still be found, who describe with much apparent gusto, how (in comparatively recent dates) they satiated their ravenous hunger, by banqueting all night upon the grilled flesh of foemen they had tomahawked during the day. Neither is it uncommon to hear tattooed old veterans, tell how war-captives were penned up like cattle and fattened upon each other, until required for the tribal oven (formed of red-hot stones, paved into an oval hollow in the ground): — how then the fattest were selected one by one, taken out, systematically bled, disemboweled and hung up by the heels on neighboring trees; just as sheep, swine, and cattle are exposed for sale, in our own abattoirs and meat-markets. The Maoris also have a tradition, that if a man kills and eats his enemy, he by doing so, absorbs all the dead man’s vitality, strength, and courage.
In the nascent Colony of New Zealand, missionaries, soldiers, whalers and pioneers were often cooked and eaten; but by a general consensus of epicurean opinion the ‘Pakeha’s’ flesh was voted bad form, principally because it was ‘too tough and too salty.’
During the War on Secession, Northern infantry-men accidentally imprisoned in a Virginian mine, devoured each other one at a time; the last man (John Ewing) dying of hunger, and leaving a written record of the facts, sealed up in a flask.
The story of Sawny Bean is well known, and the classical legends of the Cyclops, the Giants, the Phalaris Bull, the Moloch holocausts and Homer’s Polyphemus.
Anthropophagy has been practiced in Australia, both by whites and blackfellows. In New Guinea and portions of Africa, man-eating is quite an ordinary custom to this hour. Marcus Clarke describes how Gabbet, an English-born Botany Bay convict, induced his prison comrades to escape with him (into the bush), in order that he might have a holiday and a feast, picking their succulent bones and sucking out the marrow thereof.
All over continental Europe there is a popular superstition that Jew Rabbis steal and murder Christian infants and maidens, in order to use the blood on the door-lintels, at Passover and other ceremonials.
A similar charge was brought against the early Christians, and even proved in the Imperial Law Courts, if we are to judge by the verdicts.
Human fat is regularly retailed in modern drug stores and human heads are even now a marketable commodity in the South Seas. There are also mystic brotherhoods in our midst, whose initiates pledge fidelity, and obligate themselves to life-long secrecy, by drinking blood out of a skull, over emblems of violent death — with daggers pointed at their throats.
The foundation stones of many famous buildings, palaces, castles, temples, and monuments, have been emblematically laid upon the living body of a man — the Kremlin for example.
Is not the Communion Service allegorical anthropophagy? Is it not a pious periodical cannibal feast in more ways than one? Does not the wine symbolize human blood, and the wafers typify human flesh?
Metaphorically considered, every trading Christian State is a meat market, wherein the flesh, bones, and blood not only of men, but of women and little children are bought and sold daily — “offered up” nominally for the “Love of God” really for the Love of Dollars.
Atrocities of the most revolting description are of daily, hourly occurrence, not only in Turkey and Siam, but in New York and Chicago; not only in Cuba and Port Arthur, but in London, Madrid, and Paris; not only in Mashonaland, and on the Congo, but in St. Petersburg and Berlin. Men, women, and little children are being everywhere starved slowly to the grave, worked till they fall down, driven insane by legislation, and even tortured to death, inch by inch.
Great financial corporations (backed by the State) directed mostly by Hebrews, literally coin Great Empires into golden dividends: and upon the share lists of mortgage banks and man-devouring institutions generally, may be found the names of bishops, popes, preachers, generals, governors, statesmen — and other human Carnivores by the thousand. He who doubts should look up the official share registers, and behold the long rows of adorable names belonging to High Priests, Philanthropists and Rulers, appearing thereon.
Cannibalism was practiced in Ancient Greece at the period of highest culture. Herodotus describes Asian feasts where man’s flesh was the chief dish: and down to the Thirteenth Century the Tibetans were in the habit of making their parents into broth.
There are confraternaties still in existence, into which no one is ever admitted until he has killed a man. Among the Dyaks (as among our own ancestors) a youth is never considered a full-grown person capable of founding a home until he has slain at least one enemy in battle. The Thugs of India (a religious sect) brought the science of holy murder, by strategic violence, to such a pitch of perfection that they have never been surpassed — not even by Grant or Moltke.
The Kinderawas of India, make a regular practice of eating all their diseased, useless, senile, and decrepit relations: just as packs of wolves fall upon any of their number that is seriously wounded in foray.
In portions of Sumatra, law-breakers are neither imprisoned nor electrocuted, but actually carved up and eaten alive — piece by piece. The Capanagugas of South America make of their own stomachs the sepulchre of their dead relatives. A funeral with them is a banquet — the collation being a corpse. The Terra Del Fuegans throttle and eat all very old women.
The Monbuttas of Central Africa carry on aggressive wars to capture flesh food. They also dry human flitches in the sun and smoke them for export.
During the Tae Ping rebellion, Chinese soldiers (under General Gordon) were in the habit of cutting out and devouring the hearts of their dead enemies (on the battle-field) like the Maoris and Britons.
Mistresses were specially kept by opulent ancient Peruvians, to breed sucklings — for the table. When these women became too old for child-bearing, they were likewise cast into the pot, as useless encumbrances. In 1782 more than forty gypsies were executed in Austria, upon a proved charge of cannibalism. The case of the herdsman Goldsmidt, must not be forgotten; not the gruesome London legends, regarding sausages being manufactured out of dead cats, dead dogs, dead paupers, and murdered sailors.
The Ancient Scandinavians, Teutons, Celts, (vide St. Jerome), Sythians, Mongols, Sarmatians, Canaanites, Goths, and Huns were all anthropophagy.
Indeed the detailed facts of how men have tortured each other for pleasure, revenge, or profit, would fill 10, 000 volumes. No man in his lifetime could read or comprehend all the horrors that have been perpetrated say in the Tower of London, the Paris Bastille, the Spanish Inquisition, the Rhine Castle Dungeons, by the Bridge of Sighs, the Bosphorous, or in the prison-hells of Chicago, Newgate, Mazas, Siberia, Sing Sing, New Caledonia, Botany Bay or Van Dieman’s Land. The cold-blooded cruelty of man to man, surpasses anything that poet-cranks could conceive of, as happening in hell.
Cannibalism undoubtedly originated amid over-crowded populations in some pre-historic age. Among moderns (civilized and savage) it merely exists as a survival of social conditions which have long since passed away. At some former era of the world’s profoundly mysterious history, men-animals increased in swarming myriads as they are doing now; until at last on the surface of the soil there was scarcely standing room for all. Then the air became laden with the reeking effluvia of their strumous bodies, leprosy, poisoning the wells and rivers, and transforming Babylons into charnel houses and tombs. The rearing of tame cattle for food in such an environment, probably became too expensive and cumbersome. Perhaps even the cattle would also be swept away by some blight or rinderpest. Under such horrible circumstances, survivors mig
ht from necessity resort to anthropophagy. Gradually the new habit would grow upon them and become a settled custom.
The segmental fragments of pre-historic civilizations are — the Cannibal Savages of to-day — the savages that we are displacing, pushing aside in order that we may enslave them and repeat over again the same weary old round of growth, power and decay.
Shiploads of dead soldiers, dug out of old battle-fields, possess a regular commercial value. They are imported into England, to be chemically treated and manufactured into fertilizers for enriching exhausted wheat fields. Human hair commands a steady sale, and “cadavers” may be bought for dissection, in any great city for a dollar, C.O.D.
The tanning of human skins for glove-making and book-binding (Meudon!) is an old established industry.
The transfusion of blood from animals into human veins, and from healthy humans into unhealthy ones (for a price), is regularly practiced by medical men. The grafting of flesh, bone, and skin, has also been successfully performed.
American sheriffs and detectives hunt down tramps and criminals with specially trained bloodhounds, just as Russians hunt wolves, and sheepfarmers hunt coyotes and dingos. It is nowise unusual for Negros to be first captured, then chained to a stake, flayed alive, soaked in kerosene, and burnt to death amid exultant shrieks of corybantic delight.
Roman Senators fattened their lampreys and eels upon the drowned bodies of old worn out slaves, and patrician maids and matrons (with uplifted thumb) sent many a gladiator to kingdom come. For innate cruelty of deed, no animal can surpass woman.
In Mohammedan Europe, boys are unsexed by the lancet, that they may thereafter be more safely employed as harem-attendants and in Christian Europe “eunuchs are made and trained and priced, to sing the praise of a risen Christ.”
Young girls are nightly bought and sold for currency, like horses and hogs, at the street corners: and upon the profits of licensed polyandry “pillars of the church” become millionaires. Even the salaries of fulminating evangelists are paid out of Rahab’s rent.
Might Is Right Page 9