Cannibals and Kings

by Marvin Harris

  From Brazil to the Great Plains, American Indian societies ritually dispatched human victims in order to achieve certain kinds of benefits. Virtually every element of Aztec ritual was foreshadowed in the beliefs and practices of band and village peoples. Even the preoccupation with the surgical removal of the heart had its precedents. The Iroquois, for example, vied with each other for the privilege of eating the heart of a brave prisoner so that they could acquire some of his courage. Everywhere, male prisoners were the chief victims. Before being killed, they were made to run a gauntlet, or were beaten, stoned, burned, mutilated, or subjected to other forms of torture and abuse. Sometimes they were tied to stakes and given a club with which to defend themselves against their tormentors. Occasionally one or two prisoners were kept for extended periods and provided with good food and concubines.

  The ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war among band and village peoples was usually followed by the eating of all or part of the victim’s body. Thanks to the eyewitness accounts provided by Hans Städen, a German sailor who was shipwrecked on the coast of Brazil early in the sixteenth century, we have a vivid idea of how one group, the Tupinamba, combined ritual sacrifice with cannibalism.

  On the day of the sacrifice the prisoner of war, trussed around the waist, was dragged into the plaza. He was surrounded by women who insulted and abused him, but he was allowed to give vent to his feelings by throwing fruits or broken pieces of pottery at them. Meanwhile old women painted black and red and wearing necklaces of human teeth brought out ornamented vases in which the victim’s blood and entrails would be cooked. The ceremonial club that would be used to kill him was passed back and forth among the men in order to “acquire the power to catch a prisoner in the future.” The actual executioner wore a long feather cloak and was followed by relatives singing and beating drums. The executioner and the prisoner derided each other. Enough liberty was allowed the prisoner so that he could dodge the blows, and sometimes a club was put in his hands for protecting himself without being able to strike back. When at last his skull was shattered, everyone “shouted and whistled.” If the prisoner had been given a wife during his period of captivity, she was expected to shed tears over his body before joining in the feast that followed. Now the old women “rushed to drink the warm blood,” and children dipped their hands into it. “Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it.”

  The body was cut into quarters and barbecued while “the old women who were most eager for human flesh” licked the grease dripping from the sticks that formed the grill. Ten thousand miles to the north, about two centuries later, Jesuit missionaries witnessed a similar ritual among the Hurons of Canada. The victim was an Iroquois man who had been captured along with several other companions while they were fishing on Lake Ontario. The Huron chief in charge of the ritual explained that the Sun and the God of War would be pleased by what they were about to do. It was important not to kill the victim before daybreak, so at first they should only burn his legs. Also, they ought not to have sexual intercourse during the night. The prisoner, his hands bound, alternately shrieking with pain and singing a song of defiance learned as a child for just this occasion, was brought indoors, where he was set upon by a crowd armed with brands of burning bark. As he reeled from one end of the room to the other, some people seized his hands, “breaking the bones thereof by sheer force; others pierced his ears with sticks they left in them.” Whenever he seemed ready to expire, the chief intervened “and ordered them to cease tormenting him, saying it was important that he should see daylight.” At dawn he was taken outside and forced to climb onto a platform built on a wooden scaffold so that the entire village could watch what was happening to him—the scaffold making do as a sacrificial platform in the absence of flat-topped pyramids reared for such purposes by the Mesoamerican states. Four men now took over the task of tormenting the captive. They burned his eyes, applied red-hot hatchets to his shoulders, and thrust burning brands down his throat and into his rectum. When it was apparent that he was about to die, one of the executioners “cut off a foot, another a hand, and almost at the same time a third severed the head from the shoulders, throwing it into the crowd where someone caught it” to carry to the chief, who later made “a feast therewith.” The same day a feast was also made of the victim’s trunk, and on their way home the missionaries encountered a man “who was carrying upon a skewer one of his half-roasted hands.”

  Let me pause here for a moment to discuss interpretations of these rituals which attribute them to innate human impulses. I am especially concerned with elaborate theories offered in the Freudian tradition which claim that torture, sacrifice, and cannibalism are intelligible as expressions of instincts for love and for aggression. Eli Sagan, for example, has recently argued that cannibalism is “the most fundamental form of human aggression” since it involves a compromise between loving the victim in the form of eating him and killing him because he frustrates you. Purportedly, this explains why the victims are sometimes treated with great kindness before their torture begins—the executioners are simply reenacting their love-hate relationship with their fathers. What this approach fails to make clear is that the torture, sacrifice, and eating of prisoners of war cannot take place without prisoners of war, and prisoners of war cannot be captured unless there are wars. I pointed out earlier that theories tracing warfare to pan-human instincts are useless for explaining variations in the intensity and style of inter-group conflict and that they are dangerously misleading because they imply that war is inevitable. Attempts to understand why prisoners are sometimes pampered, then tortured, sacrificed, and eaten in terms of conflicting universal instincts of love and hate are useless and dangerous for the same reason. Prisoners are not always pampered, tortured, sacrificed, and eaten, and any theory purporting to explain why this complex occurs must also be able to explain why it also does not occur. Since the activities in question are part of the process of armed conflict, their explanation must be sought first and foremost in military costs and benefits—in variables which reflect the size, political status, armament technology, and logistics of the combatants. The taking of prisoners, for example, is itself an act which depends on the capacity of a raiding party to avoid counterattacks and ambushes on its return home while encumbered with reluctant enemy captives. When the raiding party is small, and when it must travel considerable distances through regions where the enemy can retaliate before safe territory is reached, the taking of prisoners may be forgone entirely. Under such circumstances only pieces of the enemy can be brought back to validate the body count essential for establishing a claim on the social and material rewards reserved for excellence and bravery in combat. From this we get the widespread custom of bringing back heads, scalps, fingers, and other body parts in lieu of the whole live captive.

  Once the prisoner has been brought back to the village, the treatment he can expect is determined largely by the capacity of his hosts to absorb and regulate servile labor, the decisive difference being that between pre- and post-state political systems. When prisoners are few and far between, their temporary treatment as honored guests is not surprising. Whatever deep psychological ambivalences may exist in the minds of the captors, the prisoner is a valuable possession—one for whom his hosts have literally risked their lives. Yet there is usually no way to absorb him into the group; since he can’t be sent back to the enemy, he must be killed. And torture has its own gruesome economy. If to be tortured is, as we say, to die a thousand deaths, then to torture one poor captive is to kill a thousand enemies. Torture is also a spectacle—an entertainment—which has been time-tested for audience approval down through the ages. I have no intention of asserting that it is part of human nature to enjoy seeing people bruised, burned, and dismembered. But it is part of human nature to pay rapt attention to unusual sights and sounds such as blood spurting from wounds and loud shrieking and howling. (And even then, many of us turn away in horror.)

  The point
once again is not that we instinctively enjoy watching another person suffer but that we have the capacity to learn to enjoy it. The realization of that capacity was important for societies such as the Tupinamba and Huron. These were societies that had to teach their youths to be remorselessly brutal toward their enemies on the battlefield. Such lessons are more readily learned when you realize that the enemy will do unto you what you have done to him should you fall into his hands. Add to the prisoner’s value his living body, standing to warriors in training as cadavers to doctors in training. Next we come to the rituals of the killing—sacrifice to please the gods, executioners with their sacred equipment, abstention from sexual intercourse. To understand all this is to understand that warfare in band and village societies is ritual murder, regardless of whether the enemy is killed on the battle-field or at home. Before leaving for battle, the warriors paint and decorate themselves, invoke the ancestors, take hallucinogenic drugs to contact tutelary spirits, and strengthen their weapons with magical spells. Enemies slain on the field of battle are “sacrifices” in the sense that their deaths are said to please the ancestors or the war gods, just as the ancestors or the war gods are said to be pleased by the torture and death of a prisoner. Finally, there is the question of cannibalism—a question which, when asked, in itself reveals a profound misunderstanding on the part of the asker. People can learn to like or dislike the taste of human flesh, just as they can learn to be amused or horrified by torture. Obviously, there are many circumstances under which an acquired taste for human flesh can be integrated into the motivational system that inspires human societies to go to war. Moreover, to eat the enemy is literally to derive strength from his annihilation. What has to be explained, therefore, is why cultures that have no scruples about killing enemies should ever refrain from eating them. But that is a puzzle we are not yet ready to face.

  If this digression into military cost-accounting as an explanation for the torture-sacrifice-cannibalism complex seems a bit too mechanical, let me point out that I do not deny the existence of ambivalent psychological motivations such as those engendered by the Oedipal situation in militaristic male-supremacist societies. I expect warfare to produce contradictory emotions and to mean many different things simultaneously to the participants. And I do not deny that cannibalism may express both affection and hatred toward the victim. What I definitely reject is the view that specific patterns of intergroup aggression can be explained by vague and contradictory psychic elements boldly abstracted from the specific ecological and reproductive pressures that induced people to make war in the first place.

  Returning to the Aztecs, we can see that the unique contribution of their religion was not the introduction of human sacrifice but its elaboration along certain destructive pathways. Most notably, the Aztecs transformed human sacrifice from an occasional by-product of luck on the battlefield to a routine in which not a day went by when someone was not spread-eagled on the altars of the great temples such as Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. And sacrifices also took place at dozens of lesser temples ranging down to what might be called neighborhood chapels. One such neighborhood facility—a low, circular, flat-topped structure about twenty feet in diameter was excavated during the construction of Mexico City’s subway. It now stands, preserved behind glass, at one of the busiest stations. For the less-than-total enlightenment of the crowds of commuters who pass it every day, an accompanying plaque notes only that the ancient Mexicans were “very religious.”

  Since the Aztec armies were thousands of times bigger than those of the Huron or the Tupinamba, they could capture thousands of prisoners in a single battle. In addition to daily sacrifices of small numbers of prisoners and slaves at major and minor shrines, then, mass sacrifices involving hundreds and thousands of victims could be carried out to commemorate special events. The Spanish chroniclers were told, for example, that at the dedication in 1487 of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlán four lines of prisoners stretching for two miles each were sacrificed by a team of executioners who worked night and day for four days. Allotting two minutes per sacrifice, the demographer and historian Sherburne Cook estimated that the number of victims associated with that single event was 14,100. The scale of these rituals could be dismissed as exaggerations were it not for the encounters of Bemal Díaz and Andrés de Tapia with methodically racked and hence easily counted rows of human skulls in the plazas of the Aztec cities. Diaz writes that in the plaza of Xocotlan

  there were piles of human skulls so regularly arranged that one could count them, and I estimated them at more than a hundred thousand.

  I repeat again there were more than one hundred thousand of them.

  Of his encounter with the great skull rack in the center of Tenochtitlán, Tapia wrote:

  The poles were separated from each other by a little less than a vara [approximately a yard’s length], and were crowded with cross sticks from top to bottom, and on each cross stick there were five skulls impaled through the temples: and the writer and a certain Gonzalo de Umbría, counted the cross sticks and multiplying by five heads per cross stick from pole to pole, as I said, we found that there were 136 thousand heads.

  But that was not all. Tapia also describes two tall towers made entirely out of skulls held together by lime in which there was an uncountable number of crania and jaws.

  Traditional explanations of the vast scale of this slaughter depict the Aztecs as people obsessed with the idea that their gods needed to drink human blood and who piously proceeded, therefore, to wage warfare in order to fulfill their sacred duty. In the words of Jacques Soustelle:

  Where then were more victims to come from? For they were essential to provide the gods with their nourishment.… Where could one find the precious blood without which the sun and the whole frame of the universe was condemned to annihilation? It was essential to remain in a state of war.… War was not merely a political instrument: it was above all a religious rite, a war of holiness.

  But holy wars among states are a dime a dozen. The Jews, the Christians, the Moslems, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Romans—all went to war to please their gods or carry out god’s will. Only the Aztecs felt it was saintly to go to war in order to supply vast numbers of human sacrifices. And while all of the other archaic and not so archaic states engaged in butchery and mass atrocities, none of them did so on the pretext that the heavenly rulers had an uncontrollable desire to drink human blood. (As we shall see, it is no accident that the gods of many Old World states drank mead or ambrosia, ate honeydew, or expressed no concern at all about where their next meal was coming from.) So intent were the Aztecs on bringing back prisoners to be sacrificed that they would frequently refrain from pressing a military advantage for fear that they would kill too many enemy troops before terms of surrender could be arranged. This tactic cost them dearly in their engagements with Cortés’ troops, who from the Aztec point of view seemed to be irrationally intent upon killing everyone in sight.

  Sherburne Cook was the first modern anthropologist to disavow a sentimentalist approach to the puzzle of Aztec sacrifice: “However powerful, no purely religious urge can maintain itself successfully for any material period of time counter to fundamental economic resistance.” Cook proposed that Aztec war and sacrifice were part of a system for regulating population growth. He calculated that the combined effect of combat deaths and sacrifices produced an annual elevation of 25 percent in the death rate. Since “the population was reaching the maximum consistent with the means of subsistence … the effect of warfare and sacrifice would have been very effective in checking an undue increase in numbers.” This theory was an improvement over its predecessors, but it is clearly defective at its central point. The Aztecs could not have controlled the population of the Valley of Mexico by warfare and human sacrifice. Since almost all the combat deaths and sacrificed victims were males, the 25 percent rise in death rates refers only to males and could easily be matched by a 25 percent rise in the birth rate. If the Aztecs
were systemically intent upon cutting back on the rate of population growth, they would have concentrated on sacrificing maidens instead of grown men. Moreover, even if the function of their sacrifices was population control, why didn’t the Aztecs simply kill their enemies during battle as imperial armies in other parts of the world have always found it expedient to do? Cook’s explanation fails to get at the particularity of the Mesoamerican practice—to explain why the slaughter had to be carried out on top of a pyramid instead of on the battlefield.

  Conventional descriptions of the Aztec ritual of sacrifice end with the victim’s body tumbling down the pyramid. Blinded by the image of a still-beating heart held aloft in the hands of the priest, one can easily forget to ask what happened to the body when it came to rest at the bottom of the steps. Michael Harner of The New School has pursued this question with greater intelligence and courage than anyone else. Throughout the rest of this chapter I shall draw heavily upon his work. He alone deserves the credit for solving the riddle of Aztec sacrifice.

  As Harner points out, there really is no mystery concerning what happened to the bodies since all the eyewitness accounts are in fundamental agreement. Anyone with a knowledge of how Tupinamba, the Huron, and other village societies disposed of their sacrificial victims should be able to come to the same conclusion: the victims were eaten. Bernardino De Sahagún’s description leaves little room for doubt:

  After having torn their hearts from them and poured the blood into a gourd vessel, which the master of the slain man himself received, they started the body rolling down the pyramid steps. It came to rest upon a small square below. There some old men, whom they called Quaquacuiltin, laid hold of it and carried it to their tribal temple, where they dismembered it and divided it up in order to eat it

  De Sahagún makes the same points repeatedly: