We shall begin, therefore, with a brief look at cannibalism, its nature as a taboo and as a myth, its main varieties, and a few representative contexts in which it has been found. Cannibalism (which we are schooled to think of as unthinkable and therefore barbarous behaviour) is never in fact meaningless, automatic, or free from etiquette. Indeed, it has no doubt usually been hedged about with more solemnity and consciousness than have everyday meals: eating other people can seldom, perhaps never, have been ordinary. It evokes care and clarity, and gives rise to categorizations and limits, at all times. In other words, a cannibal repast, being a social custom, is no more lacking in table manners than is any other kind of meal. It is one of the suppositions underlying this book that no society exists without manners, and specifically without rules that govern eating behaviour. Table manners are politeness where food is concerned. They comprise the ritual movements which each culture chooses as those most appropriate to handle the mightiest of necessities, the most potent of symbols, the medium through which we repeatedly express our relationships with each other. Culture has to impose itself upon natural instinct and inclination—but it invariably sets out to do so. It is the nature of human beings not to be able to leave nature alone.
THE ARTIFICIAL CANNIBAL
While Christopher Columbus was temporarily shipwrecked off the island called by the Spanish Hispaniola (now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in December 1492, he was regaled by the Arawaks living on the island with stories about the terrible Caribs. These were natives originally of Brazil, who had left their home for the Guianas, then set out from there in their long canoes, each hollowed from the trunk of a single tree and carrying a hundred men, to conquer the islands which are now called Caribbean, after them. By about one hundred years before Columbus arrived, the Caribs had conquered the inhabitants in all the eastern Caribbean islands and dominated the entire region.
An Arawak chief on Hispaniola invited Columbus to a feast of cassava and sweet potatoes (which the Arawaks called batatas: it is the origin of our word “potatoes”). They gave him in addition “some masks with eyes and large ears of gold and other beautiful objects which they wore around their necks. [The chief] then complained about the Caribs, who captured his people and took them away to be eaten, but he was greatly cheered when the Admiral comforted him by showing him our weapons and promising to defend him with them.” The fear of the Arawaks impressed Columbus, and what he subsequently found out about the Caribs—whether or not he accurately interpreted what he was told—did nothing to mollify him. In Cuba he heard the dialect form of the word “Carib” as Caniba, and in Spanish the adjective canibal was derived from this. The word anthropophagi (Greek for “man-eaters”) was now mostly withdrawn from circulation and replaced by cannibals in the languages of Europe.
When Shakespeare created Caliban in The Tempest (1611), he made him the embodiment of the bestial aspects of humankind. Begotten of the devil upon the Algerian witch Sycorax, yet worshipping a Patagonian god, Caliban is also humanity in its primitive, “uncultured” state. (Not being European, he could roam from North Africa to South America without changing the main point that he was from “out there,” beyond the boundaries of “the civilized.”) Shakespeare’s monster does not eat human flesh, but the idea of cannibalism attaches to him nevertheless, for the poet has given him a name derived from “cannibal,” another deformation of the word “Carib”: Caliban. Being a “thing of darkness,” Caliban poetically and appropriately has cannibalism imputed to him through his name.
The very idea of people eating each other is so abhorrent to us that we usually prefer not to think about it. Cannibalism is to us massively taboo, and forbidden with far greater success than is incest. Freud pointed out, as Montaigne had before him, that it is curious we should feel so badly about eating people, when we frequently kill them and often sense only gratification for having done so. The reason derives from the way in which most human beings have categorized their experience. If you can classify people as enemies you may feel you can kill them with justice; but people are not food, and let us keep that straight. Anthropologists interested in the purely utilitarian aspects of human behaviour have also pointed out that human flesh is simply not very economical as a source of protein: human beings are the most dangerous animals a hunter could face, and in any case eating one another has to have limits or the social group would necessarily dwindle. No, other people are better taken as allies, or even as necessary evils, than as nutrients.
Just because cannibalism has been so very successfully rendered taboo, it has always been one of the major “effects” a writer can rely on when he or she reaches for some fully fledged enormity, an atrocity to make our skins crawl. For thousands of years cannibalism has seemed to us to be everything that civilization is not—which is why Homer’s hero Odysseus, in search of home, city, order, and seemliness, must meet and vanquish such creatures as the cannibal Cyclops. Cannibalism is a symbol in our culture of total confusion: a lack of morality, law, and structure; it stands for what is brutish, utterly inhuman. The idea is that, unlike cannibals, we are upright, orderly, enlightened, and generally superior. But what we might use for symbolic purposes as an embodiment of structureless confusion has nevertheless a basis in clear cold fact: cannibal societies have existed since time immemorial. As social beings, however, cannibals must inevitably have manners. Whatever we might think to the contrary, rules and regulations always govern cannibal society and cannibal behaviour.
It was suggested by W. Arens in 1979 that there never has been any such thing as deliberate cannibalism, unprovoked by a threat of starvation; that cannibalism is merely a literary device and a libel against races we wish to cast as “other” than ourselves. The Spanish, according to this theory, made up the man-eating of the Aztec; Hans Staden, who was kept by a South American tribe as a possible future cannibal victim during the sixteenth century, and who lived to describe what he had seen, was accused of simply fabricating the entire horrific story; other reports of cannibalistic behaviour were similarly disbelieved. The theory caused a useful flurry of research, examination, discovery, and controversy. The result has been to make it clear that the sources we have cannot be discounted. This rather attractive idea—that people have never really eaten each other—has had to be abandoned. We can be sure that cannibalism has been practised in Africa south of the Sahara, in Oceania, America North, Central, and South, in northern Europe, and in the ancient Mediterranean region.
Specialists in Neolithic archaeology have on a number of occasions claimed that the broken bones and cracked skulls discovered at several sites prove that our Stone Age ancestors relished human brains and sucked bone marrow when they could get at it. If they did this, they may well have eaten human flesh also. A recent find has rendered some of the best-preserved and most meticulously gathered data in support of the argument for early cannibalism so far: at a six-thousand-year-old site at Fontbrégoua, near Nice, there were bones from many butchered animals, including sheep, goats, boar, and deer. All had been routinely slaughtered, the finders say, and the bones broken to extract marrow, then unceremoniously discarded. Human bones were found among the animal ones; they had been treated in exactly the same fashion as the others. Three human adults, two children, and one person of undetermined age had almost certainly been eaten. The remaining seven or eight other human skeletons showed less certain signs of having been gnawed by other people.
We are all aware, of course, that in times of desperate hunger people are sometimes driven to eat dead companions in order to save their own lives. If there has been no actual killing of one member of the party in order to provide food for the others, and if the eating has been done with reverence for the solemnity and dire necessity of the action, then even modern people find such an emergency measure understandable and forgivable. Indeed, we emphasize the singularity of these occurrences with such fervour that we are probably underscoring for ourselves a fundamental law for our culture: that such acts cou
ld never become normal. Eating human flesh under extreme duress and treating it as an act which would never otherwise be countenanced is not what I mean here by “cannibalism.” True cannibalism is publicly approved by the society which practises it, and is at least potentially a repeated, and usually a ritual, act.
What little we know of the ideas and attitudes of cannibals suggests that they might have done shocking things according to our system of rules, but they did not behave with merely random brutish greed. Hunger was doubtless often a driving force behind the practice; excellent arguments have been made that cannibalism can arise as a society’s response to a lack of protein. But descriptions of cannibals usually insist that they surrounded the eating of human flesh with carefully prescribed ritual. The great Aztec state, for example, fought wars to provide itself with prisoners, who were eventually eaten. Estimates of the number of victims put to death and consumed annually when the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century (estimates made from Spanish sources, but also inferred from archaeological remains such as skull-racks) range from 15,000 to 250,000; the figures are highly uncertain, but everyone agrees that the numbers were huge. All these thousands of prisoners of war were taken, it is suggested, in order to feast the Aztec elite and also to reward soldiers who distinguished themselves in capturing human “meat.”
The argument is that, because the Aztec had never managed to domesticate large animals which they could eat, they hungered for meat, and the desire of some of them was met by killing enemies for food. (The only large animals the Aztec had domesticated—they had killed off all the wild game except that to be found at the edges of their empire—were turkeys and dogs. They bred dogs whose flesh was not too muscular and therefore edible, but these required fattening on meat themselves; and turkeys had to be fed with precious grain.) Other, smaller societies have consumed much less spectacularly large numbers of people—whether the latter were their enemies or their own kind—for similar “biological” reasons. Where food is concerned, hunger must always play its role. But we should not be so carried away by our modern pride in practicality and in our demythologizing skills that we deliberately ignore what accounts we have of actual Aztec behaviour. We can still see the magnificent stepped pyramids they built for the performance of human sacrifices to the Sun, patron of warriors. The Sun God demanded human hearts to feed him; without these, he would pale and die, darkness would cover the earth, and chaos and death would rule as they had before time began.
In 1521, sixty-two Spanish soldiers, captured in war by the Aztec, were led in procession to one of the temple-pyramids of the capital, Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City. As Aztec prisoners of war, they were to be violently killed and their beating hearts offered to the god. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in the army of Cortés, describes the scene: “Again there was sounded the dismal drum of Huichilobos and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them all was terrifying, and we all looked towards the lofty Cue [temple-pyramid] where they were being sounded, and saw that our comrades whom they had captured when they defeated Cortés were being carried by force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed. When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in chilmole.”
Fray Bernardino de Sahagun described another sacrifice as follows: “One at a time they stretched them out on the sacrificial stone. Then they delivered them into the hands of six offering priests; they stretched them out upon their backs; they cut open their breasts with a wide-bladed flint knife. And they named the hearts of the captives ‘precious eagle-cactus fruit.’ They raised them in dedication to the sun, Xippilli, Quauhtleuanitl. They offered it to him; they nourished him …”
Each heart was “dehusked” from its enveloping body like a corn cob from its sheath; it was then pressed to the stone statue of the god and dropped into a temple vessel. Cutting out the heart by severing the vena cava and the aorta would produce an enormous outpouring of blood; into this one of the officiating priests inserted a straw, sucked some of it up, and ritually splashed it over the victim’s body. The heart fed the Sun, conceived as eagle energy and as voracious jaguar; the blood quenched the thirst of the earth and produced fertility. The body was then heaved gently (the adverb recurs in the different descriptions) over the edge of the pyramid’s top and fell down the steep steps to men waiting below. The falling blood red bodies of sacrificed victims were said to imitate the sun setting in the west. But to the watching Spanish the scene partook of nightmare: “Afterwards they rolled them over; they bounced them down. They came breaking to pieces; they came head over heels; they each came headfirst, they came turning over. Thus they reached the terrace at the base of the pyramid.”
The head of each was cut from the body and taken to a rack, to be displayed in another part of the temple complex, which to Spanish eyes was a “plaza.” There in serried rows the heads rotted in the heat, the stench, and the flies, till only skulls were left. “I remember that in the plaza where some of their oratories stood 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 that there were more than one hundred thousand of them. And in another part of the plaza there were so many piles of dead men’s thigh bones that one could not count them; there was also a large number of skulls strung between beams of wood, and three priests who had charge of these bones and skulls were guarding them. We had occasion to see many such things later on as we penetrated into the country, for the same custom was observed in all the towns …”
What exactly happened in the end to the bodies we do not know, except that the limbs and some other portions were shared out among the rulers (one thigh from each corpse was offered to Moctezuma himself), their elite entourage, and the actual captors of the prisoners. The flesh was cooked with peppers and tomatoes, and served up upon bowls of maize, the universal sacred staple of the Aztec. Mexican archaeologists have found, elsewhere in Mexico City, many headless human rib-cages. A different group of people had presumably eaten the rest of the bodies—minus the hearts, of course.
The Aztec cared intensely how they ate people and also whom they ate, when, and where. Every gesture of the sacrifice was laid down as ritual: architecture, costumes, sacred weapons, and utensils were carefully prescribed and prepared. People were allowed to eat only the portions of meat assigned to them by their status. In fact the Aztec were terrified by the idea of human sacrifice carried out in chaotic disorder; it could only mean darkness (the failure of the power of the Sun), and destruction: the gods would become violent and brutish themselves, descend to earth, and eat people just as indiscriminately and with as little regard for protocol and etiquette as people had shown earlier. There were a thousand meanings and emotions associated with the sacrifice, besides the wish to eat and enjoy. Eating people was hedged about with ceremony and elaborate care; what they saw as neatness and propriety governed every gesture.
The same can be said of many other cannibal societies, even though we cannot forget that we have never been able fully to interrogate and learn from a real ritual cannibal about what he or she actually felt and knew of the gestures and meanings employed. The Aztec case is unique in its scope and intricacy, and also because this was the only imperialist state we know of, with a large p
opulation, fully to institutionalize cannibalism. Being so complex, Aztec practice included many attitudes that are found only in part in much smaller cannibal groups.
There are two main types of simple cannibal society: those who eat their own people, especially their relatives; and those who eat only enemies, foreign to their tribe. These two broad categories cover a great variety of behaviour and belief—even given the fact that we know about very few cannibal societies compared with the many that must have existed in the past. “Endo”-cannibals (who eat their own) have been described as “cemeteries for their dead.” They may believe, for instance, that a sort of life essence inhabits every human body, that this essence flows via most social activities, including those to do with sex and food, through the community. Members of a tribe can, and indeed must, “take in” the life essence of a dead fellow tribesman by eating him after he has died a natural death. Failure to eat a dead parent might mean poor health, or barrenness, or weak children, since the life essence has not been “topped up” properly by the living members of the tribe. This kind of cannibalism is felt directly to influence plant and animal fertility as well.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 2