by Bill Schutt
I should mention that in 1998 Arens had previously acknowledged that the existence of rituals involving “the ingestion of culturally processed human body parts is open to further consideration.” Referring to a reported instance of bone ash cannibalism by the Amahuaca of the Peruvian-Brazilian border, Arens admitted that he had been “unreasonable” in denying its occurrence.
“But you don’t consider that cannibalism, do you?”
“I do. I do consider that cannibalism,” Arens said (and I’m sure he was taking some satisfaction at my shocked expression). “I think if people in South America grind up bones and ingest them and people in America grind up organs and ingest them, then it’s cannibalism. But I think you either have to say that this is not cannibalism or they’re both cannibals. You can’t choose between them. And so if you accept that [this type of behavior] is cannibalism, then that would be the most difficult to reject because it takes place—it has taken place. Some things you call ‘ritual cannibalism’ are impossible to deny or reject.”
I left the interview with a new respect for Arens, who’d taken major heat from his colleagues for claiming that there was no firsthand evidence that ritualized cannibalism ever had existed in any society. But rather than trumpeting a belief that ritual cannibalism never occurred, what Arens had actually done was to knock down a hornet’s nest and then give it a kick, in order to make some extremely relevant points.
One of these concerned the racism inherent in applying the “cannibal” tag to a cultural group—a practice undertaken by a long list of flag-planting invaders and those who accompanied and followed them. Keenly aware that the Western cannibal taboo had reduced these indigenous inhabitants to subhuman status, the invaders were able to justify the use of any form of behavior (no matter how inhumane) in order to subjugate and, in many instances, utterly destroy cultural groups of every size, wherever they were encountered. Arens and others like him have forced us to revise our views on the Age of Discovery as well as the explorers we have, perhaps, too long regarded as heroes. One needs only to look at the growing push to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day to see this revision in action.
Arens was also at least partially responsible for an increase in the scientific rigor with which fellow researchers explored cannibalism-related topics: “although the theoretical possibility of customary [i.e., ritual] cannibalism cannot be dismissed,” he wrote in The Man-Eating Myth, “the available evidence does not permit the facile assumption that the act was or ever has been a prevalent cultural feature.” It’s probably no coincidence that since the publication of his book in 1979, anthropologists have developed and adhere to a clear-cut set of criteria when attempting to validate claims of cannibalism in their study groups, whether those groups are extinct or extant. The overall effect has been that the majority of anthropologists now believe that ritual cannibalism was practiced by fewer cultural groups throughout history than was previously thought. In all likelihood, this has resulted from an increased degree of scrutiny being applied to any proposed evidence of cannibal-related behavior.
I am convinced that these two outcomes were Arens’s true goals. As for those who might wonder why he had ruined his reputation—in reality, he hadn’t. He has plenty of 21st-century supporters who now agree with the “read-between-the-lines” contributions he made in 1979. And even his detractors can’t help plastering his name all over their own papers. I’m certain Dr. Arens is amused.
Arens’s examples of consuming pulverized human bones or organs in order to treat some malady fall under the general heading of medicinal cannibalism, which is, once you consider it, a form of ritual cannibalism. But however it’s classified, the practice is as interesting as it is little known. It turns out that medicinal cannibalism was once widespread throughout Western culture, although reference to it has essentially disappeared from the historical record. The same, however, cannot be said for the Chinese, whose literature, medical texts, and historical accounts span over 2,000 years and contain detailed descriptions of the preparation and use of body parts as curatives.
Scholar Key Ray Chong wrote that the first documented use of organs and human flesh to cure diseases in China took place during the Later Han period (25–220 CE) and that medicinal cannibalism became increasingly popular beginning in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), when it became associated with filial piety. By the end of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), Western missionary doctors were reporting that the Chinese medical treatments included the consumption of “the gall bladder, bones, hair, toes and fingernails, heart and liver.” Thomas Chen, a pathology professor at the New Jersey Medical School, tells us that “nail, hair, skin, milk, urine, urine sediments, gall, placenta and even flesh” were used in China for a variety of medicinal purposes.
But what about the reports of medicinal cannibalism in Europe, some of it taking place into the 20th century? Considering how outraged the Spanish were upon learning about the man-eating behavior of the indigenous people of the Caribbean, one might assume that cannibalism of any kind would have been frowned upon. But that was certainly not the case. As it turns out, many Renaissance-enlightened Christians from Spain, England, France, Germany, and elsewhere turned to medicinal cannibalism to treat a long list of problems. From kings to commoners, Europeans routinely consumed human blood, bones, skin, guts, and body parts. They did it without guilt, though it often entailed a healthy dose of gore. They did it for hundreds of years. Then they made believe that it never happened.
Perhaps the most commonly consumed human tissue is blood—a substance that has, until fairly recently, been misunderstood. Until the 20th century, most of what we knew (or thought we knew) about blood could be traced to the 2nd century Greek physician Claudius Galenus, known as Galen. Physician to the Roman gladiators, Galen stressed the importance of four bodily humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and the smoker’s favorite, phlegm. According to Galen, keeping the body’s humors in balance was the key to good health, both mental and physical. Unfortunately, this doctrine would become the party line for medical practitioners for well over a thousand years, with Galen’s followers routinely involved in serious bouts of bleeding, gorging, and purging (the latter from both ends).
Since Galen believed that blood was the most important of the humors, bloodletting, usually initiated with a blade called a lancet, was prescribed to treat everything from fever and headaches to menstruation. Some of this blood, though, ended up back in the patient, where it was consumed to treat epilepsy. So popular was this practice that public executions routinely found epileptics standing close by, cup in hand, ready to quaff their share of the red stuff.
But drinking down blood while it was hot and fresh was not the only way to take one’s medicine. It was also dried and made into powder or mixed into an elixir with other ingredients. Most interesting to me was that consuming blood turned out to be far more than a medieval folk remedy, as evidenced by the fact that English physicians were still prescribing it as late as the mid-18th century.
Although Galen’s mistaken views would dominate the field of medicine for 1,500 years, the continued popularity of medicinal cannibalism can be primarily attributed to the rise of an alternative medical doctrine initiated by Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Better known as Paracelsus (1493–1541), the Swiss physician is considered by some to be the Father of Chemical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, due to his pioneering use of substances like mercury, sulfur, and opium. He has also been called the world’s first toxicologist. Still, many of Paracelsus’s beliefs were founded on bizarre magic like alchemy, often infused with astrological mumbo-jumbo. Long after his death, his followers touted a medical philosophy that stressed the healing powers of the human body, but not in the manner we’re familiar with. Rather, Paracelsian physicians often prescribed medications made from human body parts. For example, they might give epileptics a potion containing powdered human skull, a substance that they believed did double duty as a cure for dysent
ery.
Richard Sugg, author of the 2011 book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorian, writes that every imaginable body part was used, including “human liver . . . oil distilled from human brains, pulverized heart, bladder stones, warm blood, breast milk, and extract of gall.” Also popular in medicinal concoctions were bones, flesh, and fat, the latter applied to wounds or taken internally to treat rheumatism.
During the European Renaissance, the popularity of medicinal cannibalism may have begun within the great unwashed masses, but it was soon adopted as de rigueur by the enlightened, pious, and well-heeled. Upper-class types and even members of the British Royalty “applied, drank or wore” concoctions prepared from human body parts, and they continued to do so until the end of the 18th century. According to Sugg, “One thing we are rarely taught at school yet is evidenced in literary and historic texts of the time is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.”
Additional high-profile advocates of medicinal cannibalism included Francis I (King of France), Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (Italian anatomist), John Donne (poet and priest), Francis Bacon (pioneer of the scientific method), John Banister (surgeon to Elizabeth I), John Hall (physician and Shakespeare’s son-in-law), and Robert Boyle (natural philosopher, chemist, and inventor).
With an ever-increasing demand for human body parts, the popularity of public executions rose dramatically in the 17th century. The already-gruesome events became even gorier as the choicest cuts were harvested from prisoners, often while they were still alive. In what was described as a typical account from 1660 London, a prisoner has his “privy members cut off before his eyes” and “his bowels burned.” He was then decapitated and his head set on a pole. Finally his body was cut into quarters, perhaps to maximize its value when divvied up for medicinal purposes or displayed “upon some of the city gates.”
Human skulls not ground into powder were often left out in the air, where they served as the substrate for “skull moss”—a curative applied topically to stem bleeding and to treat disorders of the head. Researcher Paolo Modenesi believes that the term actually refers to a taxonomic assemblage of mosses and lichens.35 Renowned for their ability to thrive on bare rock, these organisms had little difficulty growing on the calcium-rich crania. Ideally, the moss from the skulls of hanged men was preferred but, according to naturalist and philosopher Robert James (1703–1776), Paracelsus believed that moss grown on the bodies of the unburied dead was quite acceptable. One set of directions showed just how easy it was to transform a skull into the medieval equivalent of a Chia Pet. The recipe called for the moss collected from a meadow in April to be dried and ground into a powder. This was sprinkled with a strong, sweet wine to form a paste, which was spread over “the cranium of a carcass that had been broken on the wheel.” Gardeners were advised to place their Chia skulls in the sun and warned to take them indoors when it rained.
The lichen Usnea humana, was also the main ingredient in a preparation called unguentum armarium, or “weapon ointment.” This preparation, which also contained human blood and fat, was employed in a bizarre medical treatment known as hoplochrisma (oplon = weapon, chrisma = salve). Those administering this procedure might bandage a wound, but would otherwise leave it untreated. They would use the ointment itself on either the weapon that had caused the injury (if available) or a wooden facsimile of it. Given the fact that hoplochrisma had no side effects, it might be classified as one of the most effective treatments available at the time, even if the benefits were simply a result of the placebo effect.
Perhaps the most famous example of European medicinal cannibalism was the curious custom of pulverizing mummies to produce a substance known as mumia. This was either consumed (often as a drink ingredient) or applied topically as a salve or in a cloth compress. Mumia was used in the treatment of ailments ranging from epilepsy and bruising to hemorrhaging and upset stomachs. The problem was that there were only a limited number of Egyptian mummies being sent to Europe, leading to shortages and legions of grumpy mummy fans. In response, a thriving cottage industry popped up to supply ersatz mumia. Reportedly, by the end of the 17th century the quality of bootleg mummy had gotten so bad that buyers were advised to “choose what is of a shining black, not full of bones and dirt, and of a good smell.”
There were, however, some high quality “artificial mummies” to be had (or at least a recipe for their production), as anthropologist Karen Gordon-Grube uncovered in the official London Pharmacopoeias of the 17th century:
[The Paracelist Oswald] Croll recommended that mummy be made of the cadaver of a redheaded man, age 24, who had been hanged. The corpse was to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours, after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of myrrh and aloes. This was soaked in spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, again soaked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry.
In an interesting turn of fate, the popularity of grinding up mummies for medicinal purposes may have started because of a mistranslation. Apparently Arabs often used the petroleum-based substance we call tar or bitumen as an adhesive and to staunch wounds. Their word for this material was mumia but it also became their word for the mummified human remains they discovered after taking over Egypt in the 6th century CE. The Arabs mistakenly believed the mummies to have been prepared with bitumen during the preservation process. Centuries later, Europeans heard about the medical benefits of mumia. Unfortunately, they wound up hoarding mumia—the dried-up dead guys, rather than mumia—the tarry stuff. Either the locals never figured out the screw-up (which seems highly unlikely) or they simply never bothered to tell the Europeans about it. As a consequence, mummy powder was available at the Merck Pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany, until 1908. Listed as mumia vera aegyptica, it sold for 17.50 marks/kg.
Essentially, then, as European adventurers, missionaries, and colonists were condemning the indigenous people they encountered for practicing cannibalism, their own rulers and countrymen in Europe were consuming human body parts to a degree and at a rate that would have made Hannibal Lecter proud. Until, that is, they stopped.
Richard Sugg, the foremost expert on the topic, believes that the practice of medicinal cannibalism was abandoned because of “the rise of Enlightenment attitudes to science, superstition, and the general backwardness of the past; a desire to create a newly respectable medical profession; a changing attitude towards hygiene, the body and disgust; and the radically changed nature of the human body itself.” The latter development Sugg described as “a more mechanized model of the human body: an entity now drained (at least for the educated) of its animistic, essentially cosmic vitality.” In short, its spirit and soul were gone. Although not in every case.
In 2002, stories began circulating that Keith Richards had mixed his dad’s ashes with some cocaine and snorted them shortly after Bert Richards’s death that year. Not so, replied “Keef,” “after having Dad’s ashes in a black box for six years, because I really couldn’t bring myself to scatter him to the winds, I finally planted a sturdy English oak to spread him around. And as I took the lid off the box, a fine spray of his ashes blew out onto the table. I couldn’t just brush him off, so I wiped my finger over it and snorted the residue. Ashes to ashes, father to son.”
In a more widespread, though no less personal example, another form of medicinal cannibalism was experiencing an American revival in the 21st century.
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35 Lichens are the results of a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and either an algae or a cyanobacterium. The fungi reap the energy benefits of photosynthesis while providing protection to the photosynthetic algae or bacterium.
16: Placenta Helper
It gave me the wildest rush.
—“The Placenta Cookbook,” New York magazine, 2011
Thumbing through an issue of New York magazine
several years ago, I stopped at what appeared to be a recipe-related article by the alliteratively named Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Across a two-page spread was a photo of what looked to be an über-veiny roast beef, bobbing in a black enameled stew pot. Floating alongside the softball-sized blob of meat was a sliced jalapeño, a walnut-sized chunk of ginger, and a halved lemon. I read the title of the article, “The Placenta Cookbook,” realizing that the main ingredient in this particular dish wasn’t beef at all.
Of course I kept on reading.
Throughout the article there were quotes from several women, each of whom was enthusiastic about having consumed her own placenta. “Perfect,” “beautiful,” “precious,” gushed one woman who had tried it. I also learned that while some moms preferred their placenta raw, others favored placenta-flavored smoothies, placenta jerky, and even a particularly apt version of a Bloody Mary. For those turned off by the idea of turning their placentas into a food item, or even handling the organ themselves, there were professional placenta-preparers who could be hired to procure the placenta from the hospital or accept its delivery by mail. These folks would then transform it into a bottle of encapsulated nutritional supplements, thus placing the whole placentophagy experience on a par with popping a Flintstones vitamin (that is, of course, assuming the character-shaped pills were actually made out of Pebbles or Bamm-Bamm). On that note, the article included a handy section (more color photography) for those readers wondering how these “happy pills” were made.
STEP 1: DRAIN BLOOD AND BLOT DRY . . .
STEP 5: GRIND IN BLENDER AND POUR PLACENTA POWDER INTO PILL CAPSULES.
