Subversive Pessimist
15th July 2004, 06:42
There are so many, many bad things in the world, but for some reason, cannibalism is considered just about the worst. Depending on your point of view, it rises above even such criminal abominations as pedophilia, rape and genocide.
Based on what we know of recent tribal practices, it's generally thought that cannibalism was not treated like a night out at "Red Lobster," at least not within the time frame of the last 4,000 to 6,000 years. Instead, it usually was a spiritual ritual. In some cases, the bodies of enemies were consumed in order to absorb the enemies' strength; in other cases, the bodies of ancestors and relatives were consumed so that they would live on in the diners.
Then again, we live in a culture in which people would run vomiting to the bathroom if they saw what went into making their McDonald's hamburgers, in which a cow is brutally killed with blunt-force trauma, its innards are outered, and then the whole thing is ground up into a mealy paste, intestines, feces, bones and all.
With McDonald's, you can mentally blank out the process in favor of focusing on the tasty fat-and-gristle laden product. With cannibalism, there is a nearly unavoidable tendency to linger on the details of the process -- removing the limbs, peeling the skin, roasting it over an open flame, etc., etc. And do we really taste like chicken?
The word cannibalism comes from the Arawakan language name for the Carib Indians of the West Indies (Arawakan was a major South American Indian language group). The Caribs were well known for their practice of cannibalism. The word cannibalism is also used in a zoological sense to refer to the eating of any animal species by another member of the same species. Wolves, for instance, will devour each other when desperately hungry.
Among humans cannibalism has been widespread in prehistoric and primitive societies on all continents. It is still believed to be practiced in remote areas of the island of New Guinea. It existed until recently in parts of West and Central Africa, Sumatra, Melanesia, and Polynesia; among various Indian tribes of North and South America; and among the aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand.
The reasons for cannibalism have varied. Sometimes there was simply limited food. Some groups liked the taste of human flesh. But mostly the reasons had to do with revenge or punishment for crimes, ceremony and ritual, or magic. Some victorious tribes ate their dead enemies. In some rituals the deceased body was eaten by relatives, as a manner of reverence for their ancestors, or in a pious desire for the soul of the dead to be reborn in the body of the consumer. This is called endocannibalism. In primitive rites that involved human sacrifice, parts of the body were often eaten. Headhunters, for example, often consumed certain parts of a body to gain powers of the dead person. Also, in Mexico, men representing the gods were periodically sacrificed and eaten to identify the participant with the deity.
Civilized people have to resort to cannibalism from time to time, as a mean of survival, under desperate circumstances. The story of the Donner party is one of the more tragic incidents in American frontier history. A group of about 90 immigrants led by George Donner was caught in a blinding snowstorm high in the Sierra Nevada range of California in October 1846. Survivors, who made their way out early in 1847, had been forced to resort to eating the flesh of their dead comrades to survive.
Survival cannibalism was made famous by the film Alive, based on the 1972 air crash in the Andes, when surviving members of the Uruguayan rugby team ate the dead to stay alive.
While modern societies have proven largely sympathetic to "survival cannibalism" - eating others on the grounds of nutritional necessity - many remain uncomfortable with the notion of the ritualistic consumption of human flesh - however consensual the act may be.
For cannibalism has frequently been used as a means to demonise others: Medieval Christian culture frequently depicted the Jew who had a taste for the blood of Christian babies. The allied against the Germans, and the Western against the communists during the Cold War.
Earlier this year the United Nations accused rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo of cannibalising their enemies, and of forcing families of the victims to eat the organs of their relatives.
The Aztecs are believed to have practised cannibalism on a large scale as part of the ritual religious sacrifice of war captives and other victims in a practice known as exocannibalism - the eating of strangers or enemies.
Aboriginal Australians are meanwhile believed to have taken part in what is seen as a more benevolent form of cannibalism - endocannibalism - the consumption of friends and relatives, who are usually dead.
In this case, the body of a dead person was ritually eaten by his relatives as a means of allowing his spirit to live on.
And somewhere between ritual and survival lies the case of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, who engaged in cannibalistic practices from the end of the 19th century until the 1950s.
While the men of the Fore tribe supplemented their bean-and-sweet-potato diets with small game, women and children made up for their lack of protein by eating the brains of tribal members who had recently died.
Some scientists hold the practice responsible for incidences of a fatal brain disease, the symptoms of which are similar to the human form of mad cow disease, although other experts have disputed the link.
In 15th century Scotland, a highlander named Sawney Beane and his wife lived in a remote mountain pass, where they subsisted on a steady diet of unfortunate travelers, which they also fed to their 14 children, and a number of incestuous grandchildren. Needless to say, when the civilized world found out about this, their outrage was so great that they executed the entire family, amputating the limbs of the men so that they bled to death, and burning the women and children at the stake.
Breaking a taboo
In many countries, the consumption of human flesh is not itself a crime.
Perpetrators tend to be convicted on the basis of accompanying acts: Mr Meiwes, for example, was not charged with cannibalism, but with murder for "sexual satisfaction".
A number of high-profile cannibal cases have involved the eating of flesh in a sexual context.
Albert Fish, who has been called America's Bogeyman, raped, murdered and ate a number of children during the 1920s. He claimed to have experienced immense sexual pleasure as a result.
Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered at least 53 people between 1978 and 1990, also indulged in cannibalism. His crimes were linked to sexual problems.
But what distinguishes Mr Meiwes' self-confessed sexual cannibalism from killers such as Fish and Chikatilo, or acts committed by peoples such as the Aztecs or the Congolese rebels, is the ostensibly consensual nature of his act.
Mr Meiwes met the man he was ultimately to eat, 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, in early 2001, after advertising on websites for "young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter".
Mr Meiwes told investigators he took Mr Brandes back to his home, where Mr Brandes agreed to have his penis cut off, which Mr Meiwes then flambeed and served up to eat together.
Mr Meiwes says he then killed Mr Brandes with his consent.
But the allegedly consensual nature of the act has done nothing to pacify German disgust.
Whether Mr Meiwes' victim was willing or not, eating another for anything less than necessity remains a taboo in the modern world.
Based on what we know of recent tribal practices, it's generally thought that cannibalism was not treated like a night out at "Red Lobster," at least not within the time frame of the last 4,000 to 6,000 years. Instead, it usually was a spiritual ritual. In some cases, the bodies of enemies were consumed in order to absorb the enemies' strength; in other cases, the bodies of ancestors and relatives were consumed so that they would live on in the diners.
Then again, we live in a culture in which people would run vomiting to the bathroom if they saw what went into making their McDonald's hamburgers, in which a cow is brutally killed with blunt-force trauma, its innards are outered, and then the whole thing is ground up into a mealy paste, intestines, feces, bones and all.
With McDonald's, you can mentally blank out the process in favor of focusing on the tasty fat-and-gristle laden product. With cannibalism, there is a nearly unavoidable tendency to linger on the details of the process -- removing the limbs, peeling the skin, roasting it over an open flame, etc., etc. And do we really taste like chicken?
The word cannibalism comes from the Arawakan language name for the Carib Indians of the West Indies (Arawakan was a major South American Indian language group). The Caribs were well known for their practice of cannibalism. The word cannibalism is also used in a zoological sense to refer to the eating of any animal species by another member of the same species. Wolves, for instance, will devour each other when desperately hungry.
Among humans cannibalism has been widespread in prehistoric and primitive societies on all continents. It is still believed to be practiced in remote areas of the island of New Guinea. It existed until recently in parts of West and Central Africa, Sumatra, Melanesia, and Polynesia; among various Indian tribes of North and South America; and among the aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand.
The reasons for cannibalism have varied. Sometimes there was simply limited food. Some groups liked the taste of human flesh. But mostly the reasons had to do with revenge or punishment for crimes, ceremony and ritual, or magic. Some victorious tribes ate their dead enemies. In some rituals the deceased body was eaten by relatives, as a manner of reverence for their ancestors, or in a pious desire for the soul of the dead to be reborn in the body of the consumer. This is called endocannibalism. In primitive rites that involved human sacrifice, parts of the body were often eaten. Headhunters, for example, often consumed certain parts of a body to gain powers of the dead person. Also, in Mexico, men representing the gods were periodically sacrificed and eaten to identify the participant with the deity.
Civilized people have to resort to cannibalism from time to time, as a mean of survival, under desperate circumstances. The story of the Donner party is one of the more tragic incidents in American frontier history. A group of about 90 immigrants led by George Donner was caught in a blinding snowstorm high in the Sierra Nevada range of California in October 1846. Survivors, who made their way out early in 1847, had been forced to resort to eating the flesh of their dead comrades to survive.
Survival cannibalism was made famous by the film Alive, based on the 1972 air crash in the Andes, when surviving members of the Uruguayan rugby team ate the dead to stay alive.
While modern societies have proven largely sympathetic to "survival cannibalism" - eating others on the grounds of nutritional necessity - many remain uncomfortable with the notion of the ritualistic consumption of human flesh - however consensual the act may be.
For cannibalism has frequently been used as a means to demonise others: Medieval Christian culture frequently depicted the Jew who had a taste for the blood of Christian babies. The allied against the Germans, and the Western against the communists during the Cold War.
Earlier this year the United Nations accused rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo of cannibalising their enemies, and of forcing families of the victims to eat the organs of their relatives.
The Aztecs are believed to have practised cannibalism on a large scale as part of the ritual religious sacrifice of war captives and other victims in a practice known as exocannibalism - the eating of strangers or enemies.
Aboriginal Australians are meanwhile believed to have taken part in what is seen as a more benevolent form of cannibalism - endocannibalism - the consumption of friends and relatives, who are usually dead.
In this case, the body of a dead person was ritually eaten by his relatives as a means of allowing his spirit to live on.
And somewhere between ritual and survival lies the case of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, who engaged in cannibalistic practices from the end of the 19th century until the 1950s.
While the men of the Fore tribe supplemented their bean-and-sweet-potato diets with small game, women and children made up for their lack of protein by eating the brains of tribal members who had recently died.
Some scientists hold the practice responsible for incidences of a fatal brain disease, the symptoms of which are similar to the human form of mad cow disease, although other experts have disputed the link.
In 15th century Scotland, a highlander named Sawney Beane and his wife lived in a remote mountain pass, where they subsisted on a steady diet of unfortunate travelers, which they also fed to their 14 children, and a number of incestuous grandchildren. Needless to say, when the civilized world found out about this, their outrage was so great that they executed the entire family, amputating the limbs of the men so that they bled to death, and burning the women and children at the stake.
Breaking a taboo
In many countries, the consumption of human flesh is not itself a crime.
Perpetrators tend to be convicted on the basis of accompanying acts: Mr Meiwes, for example, was not charged with cannibalism, but with murder for "sexual satisfaction".
A number of high-profile cannibal cases have involved the eating of flesh in a sexual context.
Albert Fish, who has been called America's Bogeyman, raped, murdered and ate a number of children during the 1920s. He claimed to have experienced immense sexual pleasure as a result.
Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered at least 53 people between 1978 and 1990, also indulged in cannibalism. His crimes were linked to sexual problems.
But what distinguishes Mr Meiwes' self-confessed sexual cannibalism from killers such as Fish and Chikatilo, or acts committed by peoples such as the Aztecs or the Congolese rebels, is the ostensibly consensual nature of his act.
Mr Meiwes met the man he was ultimately to eat, 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, in early 2001, after advertising on websites for "young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter".
Mr Meiwes told investigators he took Mr Brandes back to his home, where Mr Brandes agreed to have his penis cut off, which Mr Meiwes then flambeed and served up to eat together.
Mr Meiwes says he then killed Mr Brandes with his consent.
But the allegedly consensual nature of the act has done nothing to pacify German disgust.
Whether Mr Meiwes' victim was willing or not, eating another for anything less than necessity remains a taboo in the modern world.