The protagonist of the novel I have just written is a surgeon who develops a secret delight in eating human eyes. The more of them he devours, the more he begins to realize that human flesh – and eyes in particular – are a kind of manna sent from Heaven. And what’s more, he comes to understand that, when eaten, eye tissue has an astonishing and ameliorating effect on the human psyche. He doesn’t understand why we’re not all scoffing down our friends and neighbours – as research suggests our ancient ancestors probably did.
Last night, while sitting in bed, I read my wife a random passage from the work, which is called Eye Spy. The main character had just sucked out a drug addict’s eyes in Paris. Clasping hands to her cheeks, my wife let out a shrill scream and then exclaimed:
‘You can’t publish that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because people will be horrified.’
‘Who will?’
‘Everyone will,’ she said.
Cannibalism has been described as the last taboo, and is the one that seems to shock the masses more than anything else. It’s right up there with incest, cold-blooded murder and human sacrifice. In researching my novel, I have done a great deal of background reading on the subject, and have found myself wondering constantly why we regard it with such disdain – after all dead people are just meat, aren’t they?
I think the answer lies in the way our society has structured itself around great monolithic pillars of right and wrong. An advanced culture has to lay down certain ground rules, without which a kind of disintegration begins to occur or, rather, without which advancement can’t take place. It may seem like obvious stuff, but I’d argue that it isn’t obvious at all.
As I see it, thinking that cannibalism is wrong is a hugely sophisticated idea, one that took millennia to become ingrained in human civilization. After all, most animals are quite happy to eat their own kind. I found a list of almost two thousand species online that regularly gulp down their spouses, their young, or those around them. With the exception of apes perhaps, the animal kingdom doesn’t have anything the majority of us would regard as real civilization. And so, I suppose we can draw a baseline under our society and say, ‘We are civilized because we don’t eat people’.
The same can’t be said for a great many of the generations which came before us. There’s no doubt at all that ancient man ate his fellow men in a great many places and circumstances.
I’ll come to that in a moment.
But all the more interesting is that cannibalism was, it seems, a tolerated taboo across almost all societies until relatively recent times. It’s a subject that is nailed to the bedrock of our world, infused within our cultures through folklore and religion. There are plentiful examples of blood-gorging cannibalistic deities, for instance, whose actions provide cautionary tales for mankind.
The Greek Myths are an entertainment often poised on the edge of acceptability, as much as they are a body of folklore. Their shock value makes them compulsive reading. But however depraved the taboo-shattering tales are, the Classical Myths are always tempered with a kind of righteousness. The bad guy (or I should say – the bad deity) usually comes a cropper on the grand scale of things, and he’s taught a lesson that’s passed down to us all.
The Greek god Kronos was an example of a deity seemingly unfazed by the thought of eating his fellow kind. Fearful that his own children would usurp him, he gobbled up five of them in a row. Kronos was married to his own sister (itself an example of incest being rather less taboo than cannibalism), and she conspired to hide their sixth child – Zeus – in fear that he would be gobbled up, too.
In his wisdom, the young deity fed his father an emetic, which caused him to regurgitate Zeus’ siblings. Happily, and rather amazingly, they all survived unharmed.
Another strange cannibalistic tale from the Greek Myths concerns Pelops. He was killed and stewed up by his father, Tantalus, who fed the meat to the gods in an elaborate banquet. Having caught on to what was set before them, the deities didn’t touch the meal, none except for Demeter who ate part of the boy’s cooked shoulder. On Zeus’ orders, the flesh and bones were boiled up once again and, the shoulder having been recreated from ivory, the boy was somehow cooked back into his original form. Tantalus (from whose name we get the word tantalize) was punished by being made to stand in a pool of pristine water, with the branches of a fruit tree hanging over him. Whenever he stooped down to drink, the water receded, and whenever he reached up for the fruit, the branches rose up into the air.
For all their rip-roaring action and intrigue, the Classics are in a realm of their own, one adrift on a sea of fantasy. They fall under the same umbrella as Hansel and Gretel (if you recall, the witch in the story ate little boys), and Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. But the most memorable thing among recent cannibalistic phenomena was undoubtedly Dr. Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs fame.
Lecter sends shivers down our collective spines for the way he preys on the audience’s raw fear, while operating with savvy and audacious method. The genius of the story is, of course, using a cannibal to catch a cannibal. This, coupled with the fact that Lecter was a connoisseur of high culture, made him a devastatingly irresistible anti-hero.
Coming back to reality, there’s no shortage of evidence that our ancient ancestors ate each other. Archaeologists and anthropologists have pinpointed examples on a global scale of primitive humans feasting on their fellow men. Despite appreciating the attention they attract for suggesting cannibalism existed at sites uncovered at their digs, archaeologists usually have a hard time in deciding what kind of man-eating actually went on. Did our ancestors really chomp away at their dead on a daily basis, or was it a practice they indulged in only during famine and during occasional bouts of warring?
The answer is probably more of the latter than the former. Even then, the main evidence is based on finding bones that have been scraped clean of their flesh with flint tools – such as the remains of Peking Man from 500,000 years ago, discovered outside modern Beijing.
In addition to eating the meat on a human carcass, it’s certain judging from remains that ancient man delighted in extracting marrow from the long human leg bones. The delicacy would have provided a great source of protein. As for the question whether there were human communities that dined exclusively on their own flesh, it’s very unlikely.
The reason is intriguing, and is to do with the weight of meat on a lean human frame. Our ancestors were hunters and so they weren’t obese, but trimmed down to the point of continual hunger. Even then, a family group would have required several adults a week to satisfy their calorific needs. If they had lived exclusively on human meat, it would have led to the decimation of communities as large as their own within a very short time.
The thing that fascinates me though is the squeamishness with which we regard cannibalism in the modern Occidental world. This is totally at odds with attitudes throughout history in Europe and beyond. I would say that stories like Hansel and Gretel are part of an older culture, one in which cannibalism was an accepted way to behave.
During the Crusades for example, it seems that people-eating was relatively widespread. This was certainly a result of starvation, but also a curious way of shaming the foe. Eating the enemy was the ultimate act of humiliation. One delicacy that crops up during the Crusades is ‘curried hand of Saracen’. The hand muscles would have provided not only protein, but a good level of taste as well. Consuming an enemy’s hand would have been a kind of Statement of Conquest as much as it was a ready meal.
During the Middle Ages, Europe was brought to its knees time and again by famine and plague. In such times of social and economic upheaval, devouring victims was a natural way to survive, but even so it seems to have been a diet of last resort.
My thinking that cannibalism wasn’t nearly so frowned upon as it is today, is borne out by the fact that many thousands of Egyptian mummies were sold as medicine between medieval and Victorian times. Preserved in bitumen, the mummies were powdered, then formulated into an entire pharmacopoeia all of their own. Eventually though, the bizarre treatment lost its shine because murdered Egyptian children and slaves were discovered to have been shipped westward having just been mummified.
The obsession with mummies’ curative powers is one that preoccupied both West and East for centuries. Sceptics may question whether this is the real thing, but I’d say that eating preserved bodies in any form is as cannibalistic as anything else. And there’s an example that I just can’t get out of my head. It’s known as ‘mellification’, and involves the preservation of a body – in honey.
The practice supposedly occurred during the Middle Ages in Arabia and, in its the truest form, it’s quite remarkable. People were encouraged to donate their bodies while still alive so that others (I assume family members) could benefit from a rare elixir created from them.
The individual would be encouraged to eat nothing but honey. With nothing else entering their alimentary canal, it was said that their sweat and excrement were strangely honey-like, and that they died quite soon. When they were dead, the corpse was placed in a stone coffin, itself filled with honey. It was supposedly left for a century or more before being opened. Eventually, the coffin would be unsealed, its human contents now having turned into a kind of preserved confection. This would be broken up and sold by weight as a remedy for all manner of ills.
It was only with the Age of Exploration that Europe – cloistered away from the farthest reaches of the world in its own isolation – really began to experience the kind of cannibalism their own ancient ancestors must have known. All of a sudden, travellers searching for new realms to plunder, came face to face with the grand taboos of human culture – human sacrifice and cannibalism among them.
Almost every so-called ‘primitive’ society seemed nonchalant about cannibalism. Native peoples just about everywhere were found to be feasting eagerly on human flesh. Indeed, it must have been more a question of who didn’t eat people, than who did. A great many of the European trailblazers themselves disappeared, devoured in distant climes by cheery tribesmen.
It’s easy to imagine the titillation and the horror with which sailors’ tales entertained European society. The more brutal and seemingly depraved, the more delight there must have been. It’s likely that in many cases the cannibalistic stories were hammed up, but I think it’s probable that a great many were recorded as they happened.
We get our word ‘cannibal’ from the Spanish name for the Carib people of the West Indies, who had a long and proud history of consuming enemies slain or captured in battle. This extended of course to early European adventurers, such as the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. He was killed at Guadeloupe in the year 1528, and was eaten in a stew.
It’s difficult to say how much of the legend relating to the Carib Indians is hysterical supposition, and how much is based on cold hard fact. My own thinking is that, however barbaric the Carib people might have been, they were hardly more ruthless than the Spanish Conquistadors who had arrived to slaughter them. Naturally, the Spanish filled many books with the misdeeds of the peoples they had encountered, while hardly making mention of their own extraordinary barbarities (such as feeding their victims with their own testicles).
What is certain is that on the American mainland – north and south – a great many cultures regarded cannibalism as an essential backbone of animistic culture. And, in sheer scale their people-eating endeavours must have far exceeded anything going on over in the Caribbean.
At the time of Columbus, South America was awash with tribes engaging in people-eating. The practice appears to have been so widespread that it was almost ubiquitous.
My favourite reliable account of Latin American cannibalism was recorded in the pages of a sixteenth-century book written by Hans Staden, a German soldier and adventurer. He voyaged into Brazil in 1549, where he was shipwrecked and marched into the jungle by the Tupinambá Indians. The tribe planned to eat him, but kept him in a cage to fatten him up first. But when Staden cured their chief of illness, the tribe spared his life, albeit reluctantly.
After many trials and tribulations, Staden escaped, and made his way back to Europe, where his tale of the cannibalistic traditions of his former captors became an international best-seller of the time. During his long captivity, Staden was fed what he described as a ‘delicious soup’, served up in a cauldron. While helping himself to more, he realized there were human skulls at the bottom of the pot. He recognized the individuals he was eating from their cooked faces. They had been his friends.
To the north, in what’s now Mexico, Aztec society was practising cannibalism on a grand scale as well as that other shameful taboo – human sacrifice. Their elaborate rituals entailed thousands of people being sacrificed each year, offerings that formed part of a strict devotional system. Historians have suggested that the Aztecs were in a constant state of war because of the sheer number of victims needed by their priesthood.
When Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico on his quest for gold, he was dismayed to find cages packed with people who were going to be slaughtered in the name of ritualistic food. He recorded first-hand accounts of them having their hearts cut out while still alive, and their bodies thrown to the populace – once the precious internal organs had been chopped out by the priests.
Recent excavations in Colorado have suggested that the Pueblo Indians engaged in cannibalism too, probably as part of ritualistic sacrifice – I imagine similar in nature to that of the Aztecs.
But the idea of North Americans – past or present – eating each other is a touchy subject. I can’t quite understand why.
After all, it seems likely that more human societies through history have dabbled in cannibalism than have not. But we’re still all appalled by the thought of it.
As the Age of Exploration pushed the boundaries of discovery ever farther, cannibals were discovered across the Pacific and in the distant reaches of the Antipodes. And with all the voyages there were plenty of shipwrecks.
In such cases there was sometimes no choice but to draw straws and serve up one of the crew. This form of cannibalism – in the name of survival – is in a class of its own. I’d argue that in normal circumstances the shock-horror value would be rather minimal. But it was somehow amplified by the fact that those eaten, and those doing the eating, were usually ordinary people just like us. The question is always – ‘In the same circumstances what would you do?’
The most famous case of murder to provide meat for survivors came to court in 1884. It involved four survivors of an English yacht, the Mignonette, being stranded in a lifeboat 1,600 miles from the Cape of Good Hope. Having fallen unconscious, the cabin boy was killed by the others, who then ate part of his body. They were picked up a few days later, and two of the men were eventually found guilty of murder.
Another case that caused great shock more recently was the fate of the Uruguayan rugby team, whose small aircraft crashed in the Andes during the winter of 1972. Of the initial forty-five passengers and crew, only sixteen survived – and most of those only did so by consuming the meat cut from their dead friends. They cooked strips of it in the sun, then forced it down. The story based on Piers Paul Read’s book, Alive, went on to become a Hollywood film staring Ethan Hawke.
Inspired by Hans Staden’s account, I have myself always been intrigued by the idea of how human meat would taste. An experience a few years ago introduced me, I think, to a flavour very similar if not precisely the same.
I had travelled to the headwaters of the Upper Amazon in Peru, researching a book about the flora-based hallucinogen ayahuasca, and the tribe of the Shuar who take it. Until a century ago the Shuar were infamous for the way they would shrink the heads of their foes to about the size of a grapefruit, by crushing the skull and then reducing the envelope of skin with hot sand.
For many weeks I pushed upriver in a derelict boat that I had hired downstream in Iquitos. She was rather like the African Queen, and I was her wayward skipper, with a crew of degenerates. The most reprobate of all was a Vietnam vet who had promised to keep me alive in the jungle. He spent most of his time lying stoned on the decks.
From the moment we approached the Shuar’s hunting grounds, the crew began trembling with fear. They had all heard the stories, the tales of the savage tribe who gorged themselves on intruders.
Night after night we feasted on giant capybara rodents and on tapir. Their meat was tough, very gamy, and was usually barbecued over termite nests. It was the only way to kill the worms.
Finally, early one evening, we reached a Shuar village. One of the tribesmen came down to the boat and brought an offering. In the half-light of dusk it looked curiously human.
It was a large roasted monkey.
The Vietnam vet, who lived in the Peruvian jungle (he could never bring himself to leave), ripped off the left arm and presented it to me.
‘Eat it,’ he said coldly, ‘or the tribe will be unhappy.’
Not wanting to make anyone sad, I ate the whole thing – the biceps and the triceps, the meat of the forearm and the wrist. I remember my teeth reaching the hand. It was small and curled up, the fingers ending in prim little nails. There wasn’t much flesh on it, not like the arm. As for the taste, it was delicious, succulent and strangely aromatic.
During my own travels in Africa, I have time and again struggled to pick up a trail that would bring me face to face with real-life cannibals. I was inspired by the late eighteenth century explorer Mungo Park, who was in search of the distant kingdom of Timbuctoo. In his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, he described coming across slaves being prepared for shipment to plantations in the New World. Park noted that they were absolutely petrified because they believed they were destined for their captors’ cooking pot.
The thought of cannibals dancing around a proverbial cauldron has fascinated me since childhood. In my late teens I was preoccupied with East Africa and used to visit Uganda during the civil war of the mid-1980s. Up in the so-called ‘Luwero Triangle’, I was shown far too many human skulls to count, each of them with a bullet hole in its rear. And, I was told stories about Idi Amin, the former President, who was said by all to have indulged in plenty of cannibalism during his reign.
For decades I have tried to get to the bottom of the Idi Amin myth. I even wrote a book once for a man who was acquainted with him. The fee I negotiated was to have breakfast with the disgraced dictator in Saudi Arabia, where he was seeking refuge. Alas, though, the Last King of Scotland died of natural causes before we could share a meal together. It was a pity because I had always wondered what he’d have served.
The reports of Idi Amin’s years as leader make for gruesome reading. There’s an account that at State House he kept the heads of his enemies in his fridges, and that he garnished the platters at a banquet with human body parts. My favourite is a quote that I understand is reliable. When asked if he ate human flesh, Amin retorted curtly,
‘No, I don’t like it. I find it too salty.’
At the same time that Amin was subjecting his countrymen to terror, Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa was doing the same, over in the Central African Republic.
Bokassa hit new heights on the ‘deranged African dictator’ scale. He thought he was a reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte – that is, Bonaparte with a cannibalistic edge. By all accounts he had a taste for the tender meat of human babies, and would have them served up at dinners – satisfying his taste-buds, and horrifying his guests. When he was toppled in 1979, his freezers were supposedly found to be overflowing with gutted babies, their little bodies frozen hard as rock.
Whatever the truth of Amin or Bokassa, I am sure the cannibalism that would have appealed to them was a kind of shock-horror form – it certainly wasn’t done as a solution to a shortage of food. My own experiences in the Dark Continent have borne out the idea of cannibalism as a kind of method of control, rather than as a source of nourishment. I have travelled in Ethiopia a great deal during famines, and have never once heard of a case of cannibalism there. Even though ordinary people were wasting away – dying in front of me – they didn’t seem to be at all tempted by the thought of eating a fellow human’s flesh.
But cannibalism certainly does continue in Africa today. Trawl the wire services and there are reports every so often, filtering through from local news sources. Almost without exception, they revolve around a kind of magico-spiritualism. It’s all about expunging the memory of the deceased or, more importantly, about gaining something intangible from them – not protein, but power.
In the West African land of Sierra Leone, I once met a member of a fraternity who supposedly killed children and ate them. He was incarcerated in a small prison outside Freetown, having been caught with a human leg in his home. The jail was a ramshackle concrete hellhole, which stank of sewage and death. There must have been hundreds of men locked up there – charged with everything from petty theft to cannibalism.
The moment the gate was opened for me, I wished I had never had the bright idea of paying a visit. The prisoner I had come to see was called Milton and he had been sentenced to life. By the time I arrived, he had spent four years in solitary. There was such fear of him, that he was permitted his own concrete box – in a jail where most of the inmates were crammed by the dozen into tiny cells.
Milton must have been in his fifties. He had unremarkable features, but a composure that instilled real fear into everyone around him. Even the jailer confessed he was terrified of him. When I asked if he had ever eaten human meat, Milton looked right through me. Then, very slowly, his mouth opened, and he said:
‘And what is wrong with that?’
Call me old-fashioned, but the way I see it, it’s surely far worse to actually kill someone than to eat them. But our society doesn’t seem to agree with me. Every year there are so many homicides world-wide that only the grizzliest ones – or those involving celebrities – make a big splash. Yet any case involving cannibalism is instantly swept up by the press, with acres of column space devoted to it.
The crème de la crème of such a line in stories are those involving serial cannibals. That’s where Hannibal Lecter fitted in. Real-life studies of cannibalistic serial killers are rare needless to say, but they do crop up. And, oh, how the public devours them when they come along. Serial cases differ from other forms of cannibalism in that they’re usually performed for as a kind of psychotic perversion.
The most celebrated case in recent times was the American serial killer and all-round sex-offender Jeffrey Dahmer. His other crimes involved homosexual necrophilia and a catalogue of other peculiar atrocities. Eventually found guilty of seventeen murders in the Milwaukee area, Dahmer was thought to have been murdering about one victim a week at his peak. It was only in the months after his apprehension that the true story of his orgy of death and cannibalism emerged.
Preying on gay men, he would pick out lonely individuals, invite them home for a beer, and have sex with them before killing them. At first he buried the bodies in the back yard, but, as he began to enjoy the process of killing all the more, there were too many bodies. And so, he changed tack.
He would photograph the naked corpses, have sex with them, then cut them open and sense the warmth emanating from them. Little by little he dismembered them, removing key organs or prime cuts of flesh, wrapping them in plastic, and freezing them. He boiled down the skulls and bleached them, before spray-painting them for his macabre collection. He chopped off the sexual organs, too, and pickled them in formaldehyde. The odds and ends of bone, sinew and meat were thrown in an oil drum filled with acid, and reduced to an unctuous sludge that could be flushed away with the household sewage.
Jeffrey Dahmer shocked America, but delighted it in a strange way as well. After all, he was the real-life incarnation of Hannibal the Cannibal. As for Dahmer himself, he didn’t manage to serve his fifteen life sentences. He was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate in November 1994.
In terms of pure weirdness, Dahmer has only been eclipsed by Armin Meiwes, a German from the small town of Rotenburg.
Meiwes placed an advert online on a site called the Cannibal Café. He said he was looking for ‘a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed’. A surprisingly large number of people contacted him, showing an interest in his request, before turning him down once they realized what he had in store for them. Meiwes selected a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes, and outlined his plan at their first meeting in March 2001.
Brandes agreed, and they repaired to Meiwes’s little home in Rotenburg. The next thing Brandes knew was that his penis was cooking in garlic and a dash of wine on the stove. He had asked Meiwes to bite the organ off, a feat that proved too tricky, and so it was cut off with a knife. Brandes attempted to eat some of it himself but found it too tough and chewy.
Having videoed the ordeal, Meiwes went off to read a Star Trek book for some three hours, while his victim – plied with painkillers and schnapps – was left to bleed in the bath. Brandes having been weakened by the tremendous blood loss, Meiwes killed him and began the process of dismemberment.
In the months that followed, he is said to have consumed about twenty kilos of Brandes’s flesh, keeping specific organs and cuts in the freezer until he was ready for them. He had even planned to grind his bones into flour as well.
Towards the end of the following year Meiwes was arrested, having placed advertisements online in the hope of attracting another victim. His initial sentence of manslaughter was extended to life imprisonment. While in prison, Meiwes has apparently repented his sins and become a vegetarian. He’s even followed Hannibal Lecter’s example and assisted German police in the analysis of two other suspected cannibal cases.
As for the protagonist in my novel, Eye Spy, the one that so horrified my wife, he shares Dahmer’s and Meiwes’s delight in eating people. I have heard it said that some firefighters find it hard to stomach bacon because it reminds them of the smell of roasting human flesh. I often turn that thought around in my head. You see, the monkey’s arm I ate in the Amazon tasted of flame-grilled bacon. I sometimes wonder if my fascination for the subject would make me a good cannibal.
But I’m hoping that I’ll never find out.
The End