by Bill Schutt
An equally disturbing revelation is found in the source material for the Perrault fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. Unaltered from Perrault’s story is the setup, in which the wolf gets to Granny’s house before Red. But in the original story (a French peasant tale that may date from the 10th century) as translated by Paul Larue and reported by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, instead of gobbling down the old woman whole (so that she can later emerge, Jonah-like, from the wolf’s bisected belly), the werewolf murders the old woman and cuts her up—storing pieces of Granny meat 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 (“You won’t be needing those anymore,” he tells her). She then gets into bed with the hirsute granny, and after a famous bit of dialogue, Red escapes after convincing the creature that she needs to go outside for a pee (I’m not making this up).
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 (luckily he knocks before entering his own house), 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,” especially since “they would be delicate eating, when [my wife] made a good sauce.”
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 not only manages to steal the ogre’s magic boots but also cheats Mrs. Ogre out of all of their money. The tiny lad then returns home “where he was received with an abundance of joy” from his father who quickly realizes that he can probably retire from a career spent tying together bundles of twigs. 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 will not 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 Grimms’ 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 witchy 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 the cannibalism angle, most notably Englishman Benjamin Tabart (1767–1833) in his 1807 story The History of Jack and the Beanstalk. According to Maria Tatar, a leading authority on children’s literature, Tabart, like Perrault and the brothers Grimm, based his tale on older tellings of the story. Although Jack existed in many versions, it is Tabart’s that would become the model for subsequent adaptations, notably that of Joseph Jacobs, who compiled and edited five popular books of fairy tales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Tabart’s story, 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 in hyper-bamboo fashion just outside their cottage. Climbing the ladderlike super 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 Big Guy bursts in, reciting the most famous lines in all of ogredom:
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 by the ogresse, promptly steals not only the couple’s gold and a harp that plays itself but, because you can never have enough gold, he filches a goose that lays golden eggs. Next, after somehow hauling all of this loot down to the ground, Jack shows off his logging skills by cutting down the beanstalk just in time to send the ogre plummeting to his death.
In Joseph Jacobs’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.”29
In story after story, the Grimms, Perrault, and other fairy tale writers piled on scenes of cannibalism or, at the very least, its threat. In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Marina Warner describes these collections as “the foundation stones of nursery literature in the West.” As such, these stories served to reinforce 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 what became our culturally ingrained ideas about cannibalism. Three of the most influential were the writer Daniel Defoe, Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, and the Father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660–1731) was a prolific author and perhaps the founding father of the English novel. Born in London as Daniel Foe, he eventually changed his name in an effort to construct an aristocratic origin from what had actually been a lower-class upbringing. It was a childhood during which young Daniel survived not only London’s Great Plague in 1665 but also its Great Fire the following year. After abandoning an up-and-down career as a businessman, Defoe began writing books, pamphlets, and poems—many of them with a political bent. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, was his most famous work, and by the end of the 19th century it had become a worldwide phenomenon. Running through nearly 200 editions and translated into 110 languages, Robinson Crusoe has been abridged, pirated, spun off, and turned into an array of children’s books, an opera, and several movies.
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 the isle of Tobago. 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 civilized English
man), 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 fantasizes 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 a rare instance of 18th-century clarity regarding Columbus and those who followed him, Crusoe wonders whether killing the cannibals would “justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practiced 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 using a combination of miming and interpretive dance) that he “would never eat man’s flesh anymore.”
Years later, Crusoe and Friday come upon another cannibal banquet, and this time the next course appears to be Bearded White Guy. At this point, all of Crusoe’s previously developed ideas about non-involvement in local customs are put to the test. But after downing a few shots of rum, the castaway and his lethal sidekick (“now a good Christian”) wade in, and “Let fly . . . in the name of God,” slaughtering 17 or 18 of the 21 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 colonization.” 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 practiced man-eating could be enslaved or killed by any method, no matter how cruel or gruesome it might appear.
In 1890, Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) 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 civilization.”
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 southeastern Africa, the Theddora and Ngarigo tribes of southeastern Australia, the Kamilaroi of New South Wales, the Dyaks of Sarawak, the Tolaalki of Central Celebes, the Italones and Efugao of the Philippine Islands, the Kai of German New Guinea, the Kimbunda of Western Africa, and the Zulus of Southern Africa.
During the first half of the 20th 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. As previously mentioned, 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 Fraser’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 colored the mindset of many a fresh-faced anthropologist. As a result, when such groups were encountered, they were assumed to be savages whose behavioral 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 (1901–1978), who 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 Sigmund Freud, the behavior denoted a pre-cultural stage of human development. In his appropriately named 1913 book, 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 organized a totem feast, which Freud described as “mankind’s earliest festival.” This, though, was no ordinary party, since according to Freud, it marked the beginning of social organization, moral restrictions, and religion. Once cannibalism and its partner, incest, were abandoned, the group in question would be firmly on the road to civilization—a mindset that is highly reminiscent of the one espoused by explorers, missionaries, and early anthropologists as they encountered indigenous cultures. As Stony Brook University anthropologist Bill Arens wrote in 1979, “What could be more distinctive than creating a boundary between those who do and those who do not eat human flesh?”
Freud also went on to say that taboos (like cannibalism) 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, and, as such, we still retain bits of an ancient genetic blueprint. We are also, however, of 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 us away from the behavior of spiders, mantises, and fish (though less so from our fellow mammals). Part of that divergence is that humans are cultural creatures, and 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 in which those Western taboos were never established? Would they enact similar prohibitions on such behavior?
* * *
28 An alternative source for Shakespeare’s cannibal scene may have been the Roman poet Ovid (ca. 43 BCE–18 CE) who also lifted Herodotus’s story of Astyages for parts of his own lyric poem, The Metamorphosis.
29 Alfred Hitchcock used a similar technique on many occasions, appearing at the conclusion of his famous TV show to assure viewers (and censors) that the villain didn’t really get away with his or her crime.
14: Eating People Is Good
I think there is
nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practices; for indeed it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of opinions and customs of the country we live in.
— Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals, 1580
Mr. Chambers! Don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book, To Serve Man, it’s—it’s a cookbook!
—Patty, “To Serve Man” (The Twilight Zone), 196230
One way to support a hypothesis that the origin, spread, and persistence of the Western cannibalism taboo can be traced along a line leading back to the Ancient Greeks, would be to find a culture with an extensive historical record that existed for millennia without the significant influences of Homer, Herodotus, and the Western writers who followed them.
Among many of the cultures that definitely weren’t reading the Greek mythology (the Aztecs and Caribs come to mind), there is little if any proof as to their definitive stance on cannibalism. While there is a significant body of evidence regarding the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, which was clearly depicted in both carved inscriptions (glyphs) and bark paper books known as codices, there is no such consensus among historians that the Aztecs ever practiced cannibalism, especially on a large scale. And while a few Spaniards present in Mexico during the Aztec conquest provided written accounts of cannibalism, skeptics might question whether sources like “The Anonymous Conquistador” were reliable witnesses. Other tales of Aztec man-eating are similar to the secondhand reports of Carib cannibalism in that most of them were written by men who weren’t present in Mexico until a decade after the Aztec empire had been destroyed—if they were present at all. Since there is no conclusive evidence the cannibalism was practiced by either the Aztecs or Caribs, we need to look elsewhere for a group not influenced by the Ancient Greeks.
