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Cannibalism in literature

cannibals in legends and works written before World War I

Cannibalism is depicted in literary and other imaginative works across history. Homer's Odyssey, Beowulf, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Flaubert's Salammbo, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Melville's Moby Dick are prominent examples.

These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. ~ Hesiod

Cannibalism is also a recurring theme in more recent popular culture, especially within the horror genre, and has been featured in a range of media: film, television, literature, music and video games.

Quotes

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Early history

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  • Pharaoh is he who eats men and lives on gods ...
    Their big ones are for his morning meal,
    their middle-sized ones are for his evening meal,
    their little ones are for his night meal,
    their old men and their old women are for his incense-burning.
  • But Rhea was subject in love to Cronos and bare splendid children, ... These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. For he learned from Earth and starry Heaven that he was destined to be overcome by his own son, strong though he was, through the contriving of great Zeus. Therefore he kept no blind outlook, but watched and swallowed down his children: and unceasing grief seized Rhea. But when she was about to bear Zeus, the father of gods and men, then she besought her own dear parents, Earth and starry Heaven, to devise some plan with her that the birth of her dear child might be concealed, and that retribution might overtake great, crafty Cronos for his own father and also for the children whom he had swallowed down. And they readily heard and obeyed their dear daughter, and told her all that was destined to happen touching Cronos the king and his stout-hearted son. So they sent her to Lyctus, to the rich land of Crete, when she was ready to bear great Zeus, the youngest of her children. Him did vast Earth receive from Rhea in wide Crete to nourish and to bring up. Thither came Earth carrying him swiftly through the black night to Lyctus first, and took him in her arms and hid him in a remote cave beneath the secret places of the holy earth on thick-wooded Mount Aegeum; but to the mightily ruling son of Heaven, the earlier king of the gods, she gave a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Then he took it in his hands and thrust it down into his belly: wretch! he knew not in his heart that in place of the stone his son was left behind, unconquered and untroubled, and that he was soon to overcome him by force and might and drive him from his honours, himself to reign over the deathless gods.
    • Hesiod, Theogony (c. 730–700 BC); translated by H.G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (1914), p. 113

First millennium

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  • He then cut up the body into pieces, amputated the prominent parts from the shoulder, and the fleshy portions from the arms, from the ligamentous attachments, which connected them with the body, with unshaken nerves! He strips off the flesh from the various limbs, and chops up the different bones,—he keeps back the heads, however, and those very hands, which had once signalized their confidence in him!
  • The father, Thyestes, carves up his own sons, served up on the platter and chews with a relish, in his unfortunate mouth, his own offspring. His appearance is smart, with his locks extravagantly anointed with perfumed grease, but he feels rather oppressed with the wine, with which he has washed down his own flesh and blood! Frequently during the meal, his throat seems to rebel and refuse a passage to the wicked viands, but there was one redeeming feature, one favorable point, connected with all this wickedness, oh! Thyestes! and it was this, thy ignorance of what was being done!
    • Seneca the Younger, Thyestes, 319, 775; translated by Bradshaw (1902), pp. 129–130

Middle Ages

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  • And when morning came with its sheen and shone, we arose and walked about the island to the right and left, till we came in sight of an inhabited house afar off. So we made towards it, and ceased not walking till we reached the door thereof when lo! a number of naked men issued from it and without saluting us or a word said, laid hold of us masterfully and carried us to their king, who signed us to sit. So we sat down and they set food before us such 36as we knew not and whose like we had never seen in all our lives. My companions ate of it, for stress of hunger, but my stomach revolted from it and I would not eat; and my refraining from it was, by Allah’s favour, the cause of my being alive till now: for no sooner had my comrades tasted of it than their reason fled and their condition changed and they began to devour it like madmen possessed of an evil spirit. Then the savages gave them to drink of cocoa-nut oil and anointed them therewith; and straightway after drinking thereof, their eyes turned into their heads and they fell to eating greedily, against their wont. When I saw this, I was confounded and concerned for them, nor was I less anxious about myself, for fear of the naked folk. So I watched them narrowly, and it was not long before I discovered them to be a tribe of Magian cannibals whose King was a Ghul. All who came to their country or whoso they caught in their valleys or on their roads they brought to this King and fed them upon that food and anointed them with that oil, whereupon their stomachs dilated that they might eat largely, whilst their reason fled and they lost the power of thought and became idiots. Then they stuffed them with cocoa-nut oil and the aforesaid food, till they became fat and gross, when they slaughtered them by cutting their throats and roasted them for the King’s eating; but, as for the savages themselves, they ate human flesh raw.
  • One day they [Liu Pei and Yüan-tê] sought shelter at a house whence a youth came out and made a low obeisance. They asked his name and he gave it as Liu An, of a well known family of hunters. Hearing who the visitor was the hunter wished to lay before him a dish of game, but though he sought for a long time nothing could be found for the table. So he came home, killed his wife and prepared a portion for his guest. While eating Liu Pei asked what flesh it was and the hunter told him "wolf." Yüan-tê knew no better and ate his fill. Next day at daylight, just as he was leaving, he went to the stables in the rear to get his horse and passing through the kitchen he saw the dead body of a woman lying on the table. The flesh of one arm had been cut away. Quite startled he asked what this meant, and then he knew what he had eaten the night before. He was deeply affected at this proof of his host's regard and the tears rained down as he mounted his steed at the gate.

16th and 17th centuries

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  • Why, there they are, both bakèd in that pie,
    Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
    Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
  • I think there is more barbarism in eating men alive, then to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, and to make dogs and swine to gnaw and tear him ... (as we have not only read, but seen very lately ..., not amongst ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fellow-citizens; and which is worse, under pretence of piety and religion) then to roast and tear him after he is dead.
  • The Cannibals and savage people do not so much offend me with roasting and eating of dead bodies, as those which torment and persecute the living.
    • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, translated by John Florio, book 2, ch. 11: Of Crueltie
  • And of the cannibals that each other eat,
    The anthropophagi, ...
    • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), act 1, sc. 3
  • ... The barbarous Scythian,
    Or he that makes his generation messes
    To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
    Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd,
    As thou my sometime daughter.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 1, sc. 1
  • If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
    Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
    It will come:
    Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
    Like monsters of the deep.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 4, sc. 2

18th century

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  • I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
  • A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
  • As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.
  • Pigs, too frequent at our table ... are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast, or any other publick entertainment.
  • Je ne me nourris que de chair humaine; j'espère que vous serez contens du régal que je compte vous en faire, et l'on a tué pour notre souper un jeune garçon de quinze ans, que je foutis hier, et qui doit être délicieux.
  • Comme je mange ce que je fouts, cela m'évite la peine d'avoir un boucher.
    • I eat no other sort of meat [except human]; I trust you shall enjoy tonight's feast, there will be a fifteen-year-old boy on the table. I fucked him yesterday, he should be delicious.
    • As I eat what I fuck, that spares me the wages of a butcher.
    • Minski, a Muscovite with a giant stature and deadly tastes in Sade's novel Juliette (1797)
    • Translated by Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), part 3
  • And when we have had enough of our little darling, we roast him alive on the spit and eat him with relish.
    "Oh, how mistaken they are", the Hungarian observed, "to disdain this meat, there's nothing more delicate nor better flavored in all the world, as the wise savages understand who have such a predilection for it."
    "That", said Voldomir, "is simply another of your European absurdities: after having erected murder into a crime you cut off your nose to spite your face and banished these dainties from your table; and the same overweening pride brought you to suppose that there was no wrong in butchering a pig for food, while there was nothing worse than performing the same operation upon a human being ..."
    • Brisatesta, another of Sade's protagonists, describing the rape and consumption of a teenage boy
    • Juliette, translated by Austryn Wainhouse, part 5

19th century

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  • He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month.
  • How the waggish young lawyers' clerks laughed as they smacked their lips, and sucked in the golopshious gravy of the pies, which, by the by, appeared to be all delicious veal this time, and Mrs Lovett worked the handle of the machine all the more vigorously, that she was a little angry with the officious stranger. What an unusual trouble it seemed to be to wind up those forthcoming hundred pies! How she toiled, and how the people waited; but at length there came up the savoury steam, and then the tops of the pies were visible.
    They came up upon a large tray, about six feet square, and the moment Mrs Lovett ceased turning the handle, and let a catch fall that prevented the platform receding again, to the astonishment and terror of everyone, away flew all the pies, tray and all, across the counter, and a man, who was lying crouched down in an exceedingly flat state under the tray, sprang to his feet.
    Mrs Lovett shrieked, as well she might, and then she stood trembling, and looking as pale as death itself. It was the doomed cook from the cellars, who had adopted this mode of escape.
    The throngs of persons in the shop looked petrified, and after Mrs Lovett's shriek, there was an awful stillness for about a minute, and then the young man who officiated as cook spoke.
    'Ladies and Gentlemen — I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites; but the truth is beautiful at all times, and I have to state that Mrs Lovett's pies are made of human flesh!'
    How the throng of persons recoiled — what a roar of agony and dismay there was! How frightfully sick about forty lawyers' clerks became all at once, and how they spat out the gelatinous clinging portions of the rich pies they had been devouring. 'Good gracious! — oh, the pies! — confound it!'
  • Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.
  • I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
  • Tararo having thrown away his surf-board, entered into an animated conversation with Bill, pointing frequently during the course of it to me; whereby I concluded he must be telling him about the memorable battle, and the part we had taken in it. When he paused, I begged of Bill to ask him about the woman Avatea, for I had some hope that she might have come with Tararo on this visit. "And ask him", said I, "who she is, for I am persuaded she is of a different race from the Feejeeans." On the mention of her name the chief frowned darkly, and seemed to speak with much anger.
    "You're right, Ralph", said Bill, when the chief had ceased to talk; "she's not a Feejee girl, but a Samoan. How she ever came to this place the chief does not very clearly explain, but he says she was taken in war, and that he got her three years ago, an' kept her as his daughter ever since. Lucky for her, poor girl, else she'd have been roasted and eaten like the rest."
    "But why does Tararo frown and look so angry?" said I.
    "Because the girl's somewhat obstinate, like most o' the sex, an' won't marry the man he wants her to. It seems that a chief of some other island came on a visit to Tararo and took a fancy to her, but she wouldn't have him on no account, bein' already in love, and engaged to a young chief whom Tararo hates, and she kicked up a desperate shindy; so, as he was going on a war expedition in his canoe, he left her to think about it, sayin' he'd be back in six months or so, when he hoped she wouldn't be so obstropolous. This happened just a week ago; an' Tararo says that if she's not ready to go, when the chief returns, as his bride, she'll be sent to him as a long pig."
    "As a long pig!" I exclaimed in surprise; "why what does he mean by that?"
    "He means somethin' very unpleasant", answered Bill with a frown. "You see these blackguards eat men an' women just as readily as they eat pigs; and, as baked pigs and baked men are very like each other in appearance, they call men long pigs. If Avatea goes to this fellow as a long pig, it's all up with her, poor thing."
  • Captain Murderer's mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides. On his marriage morning, he always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with curious flowers; and when his bride said, 'Dear Captain Murderer, I ever saw flowers like these before: what are they called?' he answered, 'They are called Garnish for house-lamb,' and laughed at his ferocious practical joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the minds of the noble bridal company, with a very sharp show of teeth, then displayed for the first time. He made love in a coach and six, and married in a coach and twelve, and all his horses were milk-white horses with one red spot on the back which he caused to be hidden by the harness. For, the spot would come there, though every horse was milk-white when Captain Murderer bought him. And the spot was young bride's blood.
  • The Captain brought out a silver pie-dish of immense capacity, and the Captain brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful, except the inside of the pie; of materials for the staple of the pie itself, the Captain brought out none. Then said the lovely bride, 'Dear Captain Murderer, what pie is this to be?' He replied, 'A meat pie.' Then said the lovely bride, 'Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat.' The Captain humorously retorted, 'Look in the glass.' She looked in the glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the Captain roared with laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing his sword, bade her roll out the crust. So she rolled out the crust, dropping large tears upon it all the time because he was so cross, and when she had lined the dish with crust and had cut the crust all ready to fit the top, the Captain called out, 'I see the meat in the glass!' And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off; and he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones.
    • Charles Dickens, "Captain Murderer", in All the Year Round (8 September 1860), recounting an elaborated version of the Bluebeard story told to him as a child by his nurse

20th century

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  • Tublat, whom he had hated and who had hated him, he had killed in a fair fight, and yet never had the thought of eating Tublat’s flesh entered his head. It would have been as revolting to him as is cannibalism to us.
  • In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: "Virtue and Morality". Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words – "Eat people".
  • "I don’t trust you little swine. You’ve no guts outside your own sties. But for us you’d all have run away. We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man’s-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Uglúk. I have spoken."
    "You have spoken more than enough, Uglúk," sneered the evil voice. ... "Swine is it? How do you folk like being called swine by the muck-rakers of a dirty little wizard? It’s orc-flesh they eat, I’ll warrant."
  • "But if you eat this chap who's God", said Llewelyn stoutly, "how can it be horrible? If it's all right to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?"
    "Because", said Dymphna reasonably, "if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished. You silly clot", she added and then went on cutting holly leaves.
  • "... Now, in my opinion, you can't find a nicer piece of meat, marbled but firm, than a buck [boy] tempered [castrated] not older than six, then hung at twice that age."
    "No one asked your opinion", Memtok answered. "Their Charity's opinion is the only one that counts. They think that sluts [young women] are more tender."
  • Hugh tried to keep his eyes [off] the contents of the meat storage room.
    Most of the meat was beef and fowl. But one long row of hooks down the center held what he knew he would find – human carcasses, gutted and cleaned and frozen, hanging head down, save that the heads were missing. Young sluts and bucks, he could see, but whether the bucks were tempered or not was no longer evident....
    Memtok paused on the way out and patted the loin of a stripling buck carcass. "That's what I would call a nice piece of meat. Eh, Hugh?"
  • "I despised him long before I found out about his having young girls butchered and served for his dinner.... Ponse always ate girls. About one a day for his family table, I gathered. Girls about the age and plumpness of [14-year-old] Kitten."
    "But— But— Hugh, I ate the same thing he did, lots of times. I must have— I must have—"
    "Sure you did. So did I. But not after I knew. Nor did you."
    "Honey... you better stop the car. I'm going to be sick."
    • Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold, ch. 22
  • The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
  • Soylent Green is people!
  • We're gonna be french fries! Human french fries!
  • Mother and father of appetites, I am
    Sagawa, who'll kiss you, for starters.
    • Maggie Hannan, "The Vanishing Point", anthologised in The New Poetry (1993), p. 317
  • The harvest had yielded no grain. Gradually, even tree bark and plant stalks had grown scarce. Soon, markets selling human flesh had begun to appear ...
    The two men were tearing off the little girl's clothes ... The girl looked like she was somewhere around ten years of age ... It soon became evident that most of the customers were interested in the little girl, because many complained that the older woman's flesh was no longer quite so fresh as the girl's ...
    [Stabbed in the chest with a knife, t]he little girl gasped. Her screams gave way to a lingering sigh ... He ... rapidly sliced apart her body with the help of the cashier before handing the pieces one by one to the people waiting outside the shed ...
    The little girl had already been completely dismembered, and the proprietor was leading the woman from the corner of the shack over to the stump. Not daring to watch any more, Willow turned and made his way down an alley. But he was pursued by the dull sound of the proprietor's ax cutting into the woman's flesh, by the woman's lacerating shriek. He shook uncontrollably, and it was only when he had rushed out of the alley and into another part of town that the sounds began to recede behind him. But, try as he might, he was unable to expel the scene he had just witnessed from his mind.
    • Yu Hua, "Classical Love" (1988), a short story set in Imperial China
    • The Past and the Punishments; translated by Andrew F. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996), pp. 35–38

21st century

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  • The boy lay with his head in the man's lap. After a while he said: They're going to kill those people, arent they?
    Yes.
    Why do they have to do that?
    I dont know.
    Are they going to eat them?
    I dont know.
    They're going to eat them, arent they?
    Yes.
    And we couldnt help them because then they'd eat us too.
    Yes.
    And that's why we couldnt help them.
    Yes.
    Okay.
  • They'd taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.
  • He lies down in the hammock and tries to sleep. A commercial plays again and again in his mind. A woman who's beautiful but dressed conservatively is putting dinner on the table for her three children and husband. She looks at the camera and says: "I serve my family special food, it's the same meat as always, but tastier." The whole family smiles and eats their dinner. The government, his government, decided to resignify the product. They gave human meat the name "special meat". Instead of just "meat", now there's "special tenderloin", "special cutlets", "special kidneys".
    He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food.
  • The smell of barbecue is in the air. They go to the rest area, where the farmhands are roasting a rack of meat on a cross. El Gringo explains to Egmont that they've been preparing it since eight in the morning, "So it melts in your mouth", and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. "It's the most tender kind of meat, there's only just a little, because a kid doesn't weigh as much as a calf. We're celebrating because one of them became a father", he explains. "Want a sandwich?"
    • Tender Is the Flesh, part 1, ch. 3
  • Over the years, the shop transformed, gradually but persistently. First it was the packaged hands that Spanel placed off to the side where they were hidden among the milanesas à la provençale, the cuts of tri-tip and the kidneys. The label read "Special Meat", but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was "Upper Extremity", strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label "Lower Extremity", and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles and a sign that said "Spanel's Delicacies".
    Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror.
    • Tender Is the Flesh, part 1, ch. 6
  • The Ghoul: (while starting to dismember a man he has just killed) Well, Lucy MacLean, it ain't all canned peaches and marmalade left up here, sweetheart. Sometimes a fella's got to eat a fella.
    Lucy: You know, my vault has endured hardship, too. In the Great Plague of '77, everyone had to quarantine, they couldn't work the farms together. People starved. My mother included. My dad dropped to 128 pounds, and he still refused to do anything like this. (The Ghoul laughs) What? What's so funny?
    The Ghoul: Well, there's what people say they did and what they really did. I'll bet your daddy was first in line at the cookout. I bet he had a bib with a drawing of his neighbor's ass on there.
    Lucy: How do you live like this?! Why keep going?!
    The Ghoul: Well, one good question deserves another. Why the fuck am I doing all the work? Now come on, vaultie. Ass jerky don't make itself.
    • Fallout, season 1, episode 4, "The Ghouls" (2024)
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