CULTURE IS KING: ORIGINS OF THE WESTERN CANNIBALISM TABOO
Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush you squalling thing, I say.
Peace this moment, peace or maybe,
Bonaparte will pass this way.
And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you,
And he’ll beat you all to pap,
And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel snap, snap, snap
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
THE WORD ‘TABOO’ has a Polynesian origin, and the English explorer and navigator Captain James Cook reported that its use by the South Sea islanders related to the prohibition of an array of behaviours – from eating certain foods to coming into physical contact with tribal leaders. Unfortunately for Cook, the first official link between the terms ‘taboo’ and ‘cannibalism’ may have been based on his crew’s initial though evidently mistaken fear that Cook himself had been cannibalised.
On 14 February 1779, after what turned out to be a serious misunderstanding, Cook was clubbed to death by Hawaiian islanders, who then cooked and deboned his body before divvying it out to local chiefs as a way of incorporating him into their aristocracy. Since it was only right that Cook’s own people got their share of the body, a charred section of it was returned to Lieutenant James King, who asked the Hawaiians if they had eaten the rest of it. According to King, ‘They immediately shewed as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us.’ So while the islanders had murdered, cooked and filleted the explorer, they hadn’t eaten him, though the latter point is often misrepresented in accounts of the incident.
In 1975, historian Reay Tannahill wrote Flesh and Blood, the first scholarly study of cannibalism for the general public. Tannahill proposed that Judaeo-Christian customs related to the treatment of the dead contributed to the strongly held belief that eating people was wrong. Specifically, she referred to the ‘belief that a man needed his body after death, so that his soul might be reunited with it on Judgement Day’. Since cannibalism involved dismemberment, it was no surprise that these practices induced in Christians and Jews alike ‘an unprecedented and almost pathological horror’.
Decades later, others, including journalist and author Maggie Kilgore, addressed questions related to the prevalence of cannibalism taboos. They suggested that in addition to wanting the bodies of the dead to stick around intact until Judgement Day, our picky rituals concerning what foods could or couldn’t be eaten (the most famous of which is probably the Jewish ban on eating pork) were just as important when it came to explaining our revulsion at the thought of consuming other humans.
To Kilgore, the term ‘you are what you eat’ is a reflection of the importance of food as a ‘symbolic system used to define personal, national and even sexual differences’. By this logic, she maintains, outsiders and foreigners are often defined in terms of how and, especially, what they eat, and denounced on the grounds that they either have disgusting table manners or eat disgusting things. For example, the derogatory term ‘frogs’ for French people is based on their consumption of frogs’ legs – something the British (who coined the term) would presumably never do. Likewise, calling someone a cannibal becomes a means of using dietary practices (whether real or imagined) to define a particular culture as savage or primitive.
Of course, this leads to the question of whether cannibalism might be more common or more readily accepted in cultures that don’t hold similar beliefs about the afterlife or whose adherents follow diets with fewer religious restrictions. First, though, let’s investigate how the Western cannibalism taboo became so widespread.
IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, the first mention of something akin to cannibalism in Western literature occurs in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, which dates from approximately the eighth century bce. On an island stopover, the adventurer Odysseus and his men enter the cave of Polyphemus, a Cyclops. Luckily, the giant is out tending his flock, so the Greeks make themselves at home, lighting a fire, eating some of his cheese and trying to decide what else they can steal. The party ends abruptly when Polyphemus returns home and blocks their exit with an enormous stone. Odysseus tries to bluff his way out, bragging about the city he recently sacked. He also tells Polyphemus to be extremely careful, since he and his pals are under the protection of the gods. The Cyclops, however, is somewhat less than impressed. According to Odysseus:
Lurching up, he lunged out with his hands towards my men and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground he knocked them dead like pups – their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor – and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap, devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!
After washing down the gruesome meal with milk, the giant falls asleep. The next day, Polyphemus consumes two more of the Greeks for breakfast and another pair for supper, and although Odysseus feels that the jury is still out on his intimidation ploy, his men suggest that he come up with an alternative plan. Soon after, our hero talks the Cyclops into drinking some wine he and his men had brought, claiming they’d intended to present it to him as a gift – before he started eating everybody, that is. After downing three bowlfuls, Polyphemus falls down drunk, ‘as wine came spurting, flooding up from his gullet with chunks of human flesh …’
Skirting bits of their partially digested crewmates, the vengeance-minded Greeks reveal an oar-sized piece of wood they had previously sharpened and buried under the sheep dung littering the cave floor. After heating the tip, Odysseus and four mates use it as a battering ram, slamming the point home and poking out the snoozing Cyclops’ eye. The following morning, after the blinded Cyclops rolls away the stone to let out his flock, Odysseus and his men make their escape – hanging beneath the bodies of the giant’s sheep.
In Theogony, Homer’s fellow poet Hesiod recounts the tale of Cronos, the Father of the Gods, who learns from his parents (Heaven and Earth) that his own son will one day overthrow him. To prevent this, Cronos eats his first four children, but the youngest, Zeus, is spared when the children’s mother hands her husband a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes instead of baby Zeus.
According to classicist Mary Knight, the tale of Cronos suggests an early religious connection with the taboo on eating people, since Zeus would not do to his offspring what his father tried to do to him. She commented, ‘The story may thus support cannibalism as a part of the ancient Greek view of a “primitive” past vs. the “civilised” present. Greeks came to see themselves as different, calling all non-Greeks “savages” – people who may have continued eating people.’
Although Polyphemus and Cronos were mythical characters (and not quite humans exactly), this may not have been the case with some of the man-eaters described by another Ancient Greek, Herodotus (c.484–425 bce). In his Histories, he wrote that the Persian King Darius asked some Greeks what it would take for them to eat their dead fathers. ‘No price in the world,’ they cried. Next, Darius summoned several Callatians, who lived in India and ‘who eat their dead fathers’. Darius asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers upon a pyre, the preferred funerary method of the Greeks. ‘Don’t mention such horrors!’ they shouted.
Herodotus (writing as Darius) then demonstrated a degree of understanding that would have made modern anthropologists proud. ‘These are matters of settled custom,’ he wrote, before paraphrasing the lyric poet Pindar, ‘And custom is King of all.’ In other words, society defines what is right and what is wrong. It’s worth noting, though, that Herodotus himself strongly disapproved of the practice – and so may have had a hand in spreading the idea that it was a pretty repugnant act, thus helping to propagate a mindset that cannibalism was unacceptable. As such, his combination of history and myth offers important clues about the spread of the cannibal taboo.
Herodotus was also the first writer to document the practice of drawing lots during crises, with the person holding the short straw killed and eaten by his starving comrades. According to the historian, during King Cambyses’ expedition to Ethiopia, his men ran out of provisions, and after slaughtering and consuming their pack animals they were reduced to eating grass. Herodotus describes how when they came to the desert, ‘some of them did something dreadful’. They cast lots, resulting in one out of ten men being killed and eaten. After learning of this, Cambyses reportedly abandoned the campaign.
The Father of History also wrote extensively about the Scythians, horse-riding barbarian nomads living in the area north of the Black Sea. Among their many strange customs, the Scythians enjoyed smoking marijuana and eating their enemies. Additionally, like Ed Gein, the model for the fictional characters Norman Bates and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, Scythian warriors also found some unique uses for human skin and body parts, using severed hands for arrow quivers and carrying around human skins stretched upon frames.
In what may be Herodotus’ most influential tale of cannibalism, he recounted the story of Astyages, the last king of the Median Empire. One night, the king awakens from a particularly bad nightmare in which his daughter Mandane ‘[made] water so greatly that she filled all his city’, eventually flooding all of Asia. Several years later, as Mandane is carrying her first child, the king has another bad dream. In this one, an enormous vine grows out of ‘his daughter’s privy parts’ until all of Asia falls under its mighty shade. The Magi are asked to interpret and they attempt to put their king at ease by telling him that Mandane will give birth to a son and that the boy will one day destroy Astyages’ empire. Astyages sends his favourite general, Harpagus, to find Mandane and kill her child. Harpagus, however, refuses to spill innocent blood and instead hands the baby to a herdsman and his wife – the latter has just given birth to a stillborn son. The quick-thinking general departs with the body of the dead child, which he delivers to the king.
Ten years later, Mandane’s son and his sheep-herding foster-father are granted an audience with King Astyages, who, while talking to the boy, recognises the family resemblance. After some quick calculations, the king realises what his general has done. Astyages sends the boy off with servants, then questions the herdsman, who quickly confesses. Harpagus is summoned and, seeing the herdsman, he attempts to weasel out of the predicament, admitting that he couldn’t bring himself to kill the boy. He then tells the king that he did what anyone in his situation would have done – he ordered the herdsman to murder the child.
King Astyages then tells Harpagus: ‘No problem, I felt bad about asking you to kill my grandson anyway,’ or words to that effect. The general lets out a huge sigh of relief but, before he can relax, the King follows up with an invitation to come to dinner with his son to celebrate. Relieved, Harpagus returns home and instructs his son to head over to the banquet immediately.
According to Herodotus, this is what happened next:
When Harpagus’ son came to Astyages, the king cut his throat and chopped him limb from limb, and some of him he roasted and some he stewed … When it was dinner hour and the other guests had come, then for those other guests and for Astyages himself there were set tables full of mutton, but, before Harpagus, the flesh of his own son, all save for the head and extremities of the hands and feet; these were kept separate, covered up in a basket.
After the meal, the general is asked by Astyages whether he liked the feast, only then to be shown the open basket containing his son’s uneaten body parts.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it has appeared in several versions since the time of Herodotus. Most notably, William Shakespeare co-opted it for The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. In the Bard’s most violent play, Titus, a Roman general, engages in an increasingly gory running battle with his arch enemy, Tamora, the Queen of the Goths. Late in the play, and after his daughter has been raped and mutilated by Tamora’s two sons, Titus exacts his revenge. He kills the siblings and has their bodies baked in a pie, which he serves at a banquet to the queen and her husband, Saturninus. After Titus reveals his secret ingredient, things go haywire when Titus kills Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus, and Titus’s son kills Saturninus.1
It’s also possible that Shakespeare may have derived inspiration from Seneca’s first-century Roman tragedy Thyestes, in which the title character not only tricks his twin brother, Atreus, out of the throne of Mycenae but also takes his sister-in-law as a lover. Thyestes continues by chiding Atreus that he can have the throne back as soon as the sun moves backward in the sky. Zeus however, overhears the taunt and ‘drives the day back against its dawning’, and Thyestes is forced to surrender the throne. Atreus, though, isn’t done with his sibling and after learning of his wife’s infidelity he invites Thyestes to a reconciliatory banquet. As part of the preparations, Atreus murders Thyestes’ two sons from the forbidden relationship and serves them to their unsuspecting father. At dinner’s end, Atreus presents Thyestes with the hands and heads of his slain children on a platter, hence the term Thyestian Feast, defined as one at which human flesh is served.
In short, from the ancient Greeks to William Shakespeare, and in stories written across a span of 2,500 years, cannibalism was depicted as either the ultimate act of revenge or the gruesome work of gods, monsters and savages. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the taboo firmly established, the threat of cannibalism would reach a new audience and serve a new purpose – as a way to terrorise children into behaving.
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (born in 1785 and 1786, respectively) were German academics who collected oral folk tales during the early 1800s. They did so by interviewing peasants, servants, the middle classes and aristocrats, and they published hundreds of fairy tales between 1812 and 1818. In the parade of new editions that followed, the brothers changed, added and subtracted stories, depending on their reception. Like the ancient Greek and Roman myths, the original fairy tales depicted violence, desire, heartbreak and fear. They also portrayed the all-too-common hardships of their own time – famine and the abandonment of children by destitute parents. The language was often scatological and, as such, many of the revisions were carried out so as to make them a little more child-friendly.
As the Grimms sanitised these tales for a much younger readership, themes were also modified. But rather than moulding them into the bedtime stories familiar to modern readers, the brothers transformed them into cautionary tales, many of which ended badly for those children who chose not to obey their parents. On one level at least, fairy tales can be seen as literary relics from a time when terror was an accepted educational tool. Grimm’s fairy tales were tools employed by parents to socialise children, to increase their moral standing and to frighten them into obeying the directives of their elders.
The Grimm brothers were preceded as writers by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a French writer whose 1697 Histoires ou contes du temps passé, provided readers with what may have been the earliest written collection of fairy tales. His most famous book, subtitled Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oie (Tales of Mother Goose) contained eight stories, including ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Puss in Boots’, and its public reception elevated the fairy tale into a new literary genre. Perrault’s fairy tales often contained a heavy dose of cannibalism. For example, most children and adults will recall that the wicked queen in ‘Snow White’ wanted the title character killed. Less familiar, perhaps, is that in the original tale the queen orders a huntsman not only to murder Snow White but also to return with her liver and lungs as proof that the deed had been done. Taking pity on the innocent beauty, the hunter slays a boar instead and brings the queen the entrails. Then, in a scene Disney somehow omitted, the misled monarch cooks up the offal in a stew, which she eats, thinking she has seen the last of Snow White.
An equally disturbing revelation is found in the source material for the Perrault fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. In the original French peasant tale from the tenth century, as translated by Paul Larue and reported by scholar Jack Zipes, instead of gobbling down the old woman whole (so that she can later emerge Jonah-like from his bisected belly), the wolf murders the old woman and cuts her up – storing pieces of her in the cupboard, along with a bottle of her blood. When Red Riding Hood arrives, the creature directs her to the cabinet, saying, ‘Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf.’ After unknowingly eating her own grandmother and drinking her blood, Red strips and the wolf tosses her clothes into the fire. She then gets into bed with the hirsute granny and soon after, escapes by convincing the creature that she needs to go outside for a wee.
In Perrault’s ‘Hop o’ My Thumb’, seven young brothers, led by Little Thumb, the smallest but smartest sibling, are abandoned in the forest by their destitute parents in a time of great famine. A kindly woman, who turns out to be the wife of a cruel ogre who eats little children, eventually takes in the lost kiddies. In the nick of time, she hides them under a bed as her giant husband returns, but soon he smells ‘fresh meat’ and drags the children out from their hiding place. Even as the kids fall to their knees, begging for mercy, the ogre is already ‘devouring them in his mind’.
The story ends badly for the ogre who, thanks to Little Thumb, slits the throats of his own seven daughters by mistake. Adding to the ogre’s misery, Little Thumb manages not only to steal his magic boots but also to con Mrs Ogre out of all of their money. One moral of this story is that you should not knife anyone in a darkened room where your kids are sleeping. Another appears to be that child-eating cannibals don’t live happily ever after.
The Brothers Grimm revisited a similar plot in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, which also detailed the abandonment of the young and the threat of cannibalism. The story begins with a concise and vivid portrayal of famine (‘great scarcity fell on the land’) but in the Grimm’s tale, rather than an ogre’s wife, a kindly old woman takes in the lost brother and sister. The hag, however, quickly reveals both her true identity and her intentions after she locks Hansel in the stable. ‘When he is fat I will eat him,’ she cackles, and later, ‘Let Hansel be fat or lean, tomorrow I will kill him and cook him.’
Other fairy-tale writers also employed cannibalism to dramatic effect, most notably Englishman Benjamin Tabart (1776–1833) in his 1807 story ‘The History of Jack and the Beanstalk’. Tabart, like Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, based his tale on older oral tellings of the story. Although the tale existed in many versions, it is Tabart’s that would become definitive.
In his rendition, Jack is ‘indolent, careless, and extravagant’ and his actions bring his mother to ‘beggary and ruin’. Trading in the family’s milk cow to a stranger for a handful of seeds seems like a typical move for this lame incarnation of Jack but, of course, things get interesting when his mother tosses the seeds away and an enormous beanstalk shoots up just outside their cottage. Climbing the ladder-like stem, Jack meets a curiously tall woman and asks her for some breakfast. ‘It’s breakfast you’ll be if you don’t move off from here,’ she tells him. ‘My man is an ogre and there’s nothing he likes better than boiled boys on toast.’ But Jack is starving and, ignoring the danger, he convinces the wife to bring him back to her place for a bite. Soon enough, though, the ground is rumbling and Jack barely has time to jump into the oven before the giant bursts in, reciting the famous lines:
Fee-fi-fo fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll have his bones to grind my bread.
Unimpressed, his wife tells him that he’s probably dreaming, ‘Or perhaps you smell scraps of the little boy you liked so much for yesterday’s dinner.’ Satisfied, the ogre has his breakfast before settling down for a nap. Jack, showing just how thankful he is to have been spared, promptly steals not only the couple’s gold and a harp that plays itself but also a goose that lays golden eggs. Next, after somehow hauling all of this loot down, Jack shows off his logging skills by cutting down the beanstalk just in time to send the ogre plummeting to his death.
In Joseph Jacob’s revised epilogue, a ‘good fairy’ shows up and informs everyone that the giant had actually stolen the gold from Jack’s late father. With the theft and killing justified, ‘Jack and his mother became very rich, and he married a great princess, and they lived happily ever after.’
In story after story, the Grimms, Perrault and other fabulists piled on scenes of cannibalism or, at the very least, its threat, reinforcing the idea, for readers of all ages, that cannibalism was the stuff of nightmares and naughty children.
BEYOND THE HISTORIANS, playwrights, poets and compilers of fairy tales, there were others who contributed to our culturally ingrained ideas about cannibalism. Three of the most influential were the writer Daniel Defoe, Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer and the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud.
Born in London in 1660 as Daniel Foe, Daniel Defoe eventually changed his name in an effort to conceal his lower-class origins. It was a childhood during which he survived not only London’s Great Plague in 1665 but also the Great Fire the following year. After abandoning a troubled career as a businessman, Defoe began writing books, pamphlets and poems – many of them with a political bent. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1791, was his most famous work and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a worldwide phenomenon.
The plot of Robinson Crusoe follows the decades-long adventures of the shipwrecked title character as he struggles to survive on a tropical island, possibly based on Tobago in the Caribbean. After establishing a relatively comfortable life for himself, Crusoe knows that the most serious threat to his safety comes from the man-eating savages who frequent the island. These wretches, the reader is informed, battled each other in canoes with the victors killing and eating their prisoners Carib-style. This grim predilection for murder and the consumption of human flesh is spelled out in sensational detail when the castaway comes upon the remains of a cannibal feast on the beach.
I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies; and particularly I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth … where I supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their human feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures.
After spewing his lunch (the suitable response of any civilised Englishman), Crusoe hurries back to his side of the island and his ‘castle’, where, for the next two years he fixates about ‘the wretched, inhuman custom of their devouring and eating one another up’. Crusoe fantasises gruesome plans for revenge, including one in which he sets off explosives under the cannibal cooking pit and another in which he blows off their heads from a sniper’s nest. While brooding over his own obsession, Crusoe begins to doubt whether the savages actually knew that they were committing horrendous crimes. In what might seem to the modern reader a rare instance of eighteenth-century clarity on the topic of Columbus and those who followed him, Crusoe wonders whether killing the cannibals would ‘justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people’.
Initially, the fictional castaway decides to steer clear of the savages but he winds up killing one of them while rescuing Friday – a cooking-pot escapee, who is himself a cannibal. Once the main party of man-eaters departs, Crusoe and Friday return to the scene of the cannibal feast: ‘The place was covered with human bones, the ground dyed with their blood, and great pieces of flesh left here and there, half eaten, mangled, and scorched … All the tokens of the triumphant feast they had been making there, after a victory over their enemies.’
After piling up the body parts and setting them ablaze, Crusoe observes that Friday ‘still had a hankering stomach after some of the flesh’, and he lets the savage know in no uncertain terms that death awaits should he give in to his cravings. Friday quickly gets his own point across (presumably via gestures, given that the two men don’t share a common language) that he ‘would never eat man’s flesh any more’.
Years later, Crusoe and Friday come upon another cannibal banquet, and this time the next course appears to be Bearded White Castaway. At this point, all of Crusoe’s previously developed ideas about non-involvement in local customs are put to the test. After downing a few shots of rum, the castaway and his sidekick (‘now a good Christian’) wade in, and ‘Let fly … in the name of God,’ slaughtering seventeen or eighteen of the twenty-one man-eaters, with guns, swords and a hatchet.
Robinson Crusoe had a major impact on readers all over the world. According to University of Sorbonne professor of literature Frank Lestringant, ‘Defoe’s work is an effective contribution to the black legend of the Cannibals. It represents the normal English attitude towards them throughout the ages of discovery and colonisation.’ In short, cannibalism was an abomination and cannibals were to be avoided, since God would ultimately sort out their fate. But if that didn’t work, anyone who practised man-eating could be enslaved or killed by any method no matter how cruel or gruesome it might appear.
In 1890, James Frazer produced The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, a massive, globe-spanning, comparative work on mythology and religion. Much of this material was accompanied by a hefty dose of archaeological support and Frazer’s enormously popular compendium of rites, practices and religions greatly influenced the emerging discipline of anthropology. Throughout his magnum opus, Frazer discussed the practice of cannibalism, and other barbarous customs. He also advised his readers not to be fooled into ‘judging the savage by the standard of European civilisation’.
Frazer pointed to several African tribes whose religious rites included ‘the custom of tearing in pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw … Thus the flesh and blood of dead men are commonly eaten and drunk to inspire bravery, wisdom, or other qualities for which the men themselves were remarkable.’ According to Frazer, this type of cannibalism also took place among the mountain tribes of south-eastern Africa, the Theddora and Ngarigo tribes of south-eastern Australia, the Kamilaroi of New South Wales, the Dyaks of Sarawak, the Tolaalki of Central Celebes, the Italones and Efugao of the Philippines, the Kai of German New Guinea, the Kimbunda of western Africa and the Zulus of southern Africa.
During the first half of the twentieth century, The Golden Bough influenced an array of major authors including Joseph Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. Frazer’s work also became an enormously popular resource for the budding anthropologists who were beginning to trek into some of the most remote regions on the planet. Although each subsequent generation found flaws in Frazer’s work or had to modify certain aspects of it, there is little doubt that his stance on the prevalence of cannibalism among indigenous people coloured the mindset of many. As a result, when such groups were encountered they were assumed to be savages whose behavioural repertoire would likely encompass all manner of strange rites, including cannibalism. Contributing to this attitude was perhaps the most well known of these new anthropologists, Margaret Mead. She was famously quoted about some of the Pacific islanders she was studying, ‘The natives are superficially agreeable but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth.’
Anthropologists were not the only professionals talking about cannibalism and the primitive mind. For Freud, it denoted a pre-cultural stage of human development. In Totem and Taboo, Freud borrowed Darwin’s concept of a patriarchal horde, where a single mature male ruled over a harem of females. Immature males (‘the brothers’), who were forbidden to mate, also belonged to this primitive social group. Freud assumed that these fellows would be quite grumpy and, as such, he proposed that they were hot to initiate some revision of the prehistoric status quo. They did so by killing their father, thus putting an end to the patriarchal horde. ‘Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him’ – each of the sons acquiring a measure of their father’s strength. In order to commemorate the event, the brothers organised a totem feast, which Freud described as ‘mankind’s earliest festival’. This, though, was no ordinary party, since it marked the beginning of social organisation, moral restrictions and religion. Once cannibalism and its partner incest were abandoned, the group in question would be firmly on the road to civilisation – echoing the sentiment of early explorers and missionaries as they encountered indigenous cultures.
Freud also went on to say that taboos (cannibalism included) represent forbidden actions for which there exist strong and unconscious predispositions – primitive urges buried deep within each of us. From a zoological perspective, these ‘primitive urges’ can be seen as further evidence that we humans are, to paraphrase Stephen J. Gould, a part of nature, not apart from nature.
We are also, however, a lineage that has diverged greatly during our long evolution – and the more recently added or modified sections of our genetic code have seen us evolve away from the behaviour of spiders, mantises and fish (though less so from our fellow mammals). Of course, a significant part of that divergence is that humans are cultural creatures. As such, for some of us the very underpinnings of our Western culture, starting with our literature, dictate that unless we are placed into extreme circumstances, certain practices, like cannibalism, are forbidden. But what about cultures where those taboos were never established?
Footnote
1 An alternative source for Shakespeare’s cannibal scene may have been the Roman poet Ovid (43–17 or 18 bce), who also lifted Herodotus’ story of Astyages for parts of his own lyric poem, Metamorphoses.