Human cannibalism

practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings

Human cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings. A person who practices cannibalism is called a cannibal. The meaning of "cannibalism" has been extended into zoology to describe animals consuming parts of individuals of the same species as food.

Gastronomes of the old school
The pre-pork period

Quotes

edit

Early history

edit
  • 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.

First millennium

edit
  • 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 J. W. Bradshaw, The Ten Tragedies of Seneca (1902), pp. 129–130
  • Why should I speak of other nations when I myself, a youth on a visit to Gaul, heard that the Atticoti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and that although they find herds of swine, and droves of large or small cattle in the woods, it is their custom to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women, and to regard them as the greatest delicacies?
  • Cannibalism was another last resort for surviving famines. In the win­ter of 618–619 the army of a warlord, some 200,000 troops in all, sur­rounded a district south of Luoyang and exhausted all the stores of millet there ... Famine broke out, so the natives began to devour each other. The rebel soldiers were also starving, so they took to abducting children, whom they steamed and ate. That led the warlord to conclude, "Of all the delicious things to eat, none surpasses human flesh. As long as there are people in neighboring districts we have nothing to fear from famine." He had a large bronze bell with a capacity of 200 bushels [7 cubic metres] inverted, stewed the flesh of children and women in it, divided the meat, and gave it to his officers.
    • Benn, Charles (2004). China's Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 123–124. ISBN 0-19-517665-0. 

Middle Ages

edit
 
A page of The Travels of Marco Polo
  • They went further, and reached the stage of eating little children. It was not unusual to find people [selling] little children, roasted or boiled.
  • When the poor first began to eat human flesh, the horror and astonishment that such extraordinary meals aroused were such that these crimes formed the topic of every conversation ... But eventually people grew accustomed, and some conceived such a taste for these detestable meats that they made them their ordinary provender, eating them for enjoyment and ... [thinking] up a variety of preparation methods ... The horror people had felt at first vanished entirely; one spoke of it, and heard it spoken of, as a matter of everyday indifference.
  • Nothing was more common than this kind of thing, and it would be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Egypt ... anyone who has not been eye-witness to such atrocities.
  • A merchant friend of mine ... had seen five children's heads in a single cauldron, cooked with the choicest spices.
  • You should know that they eat all manner of foul things and any kind of meat, including human flesh, which they devour with great relish. They will not touch someone who has died of natural causes, but if he has been stabbed to death or otherwise killed they eat him all up and consider it a great delicacy.
  • I presented to the king of this place ... a quantity of salt which he accepted and he sent to me two most comely slave girls. A few days later I was in his presence and he said to me: 'I sent those girls to you, so slaughter and eat them! Their flesh is the best thing we have to eat. For what reason have you not slaughtered them?' I replied: 'This is not lawful for us.'
    • Report by a 14th-century Syrian visitor to today's Mali
    • Cited in Levtzion, N.; Hopkins, J. F. P., eds (1981). Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 273. 

16th and 17th centuries

edit
  • The inhabitants of Hispaniola, who are a mild people, complained that they were exposed to frequent attacks from the cannibals who landed amongst them and pursued them through the forests like hunters chasing wild beasts. The cannibals captured children, whom they castrated, just as we do chickens and pigs we wish to fatten for the table, and when they were grown and become fat they ate them. Older persons, who fell into their power, were killed and cut into pieces for food; they also ate the intestines and the extremities, which they salted, just as we do hams. They did not eat women, as this would be considered a crime and an infamy. If they captured any women, they kept them and cared for them, in order that they might produce children; just as we do with hens, sheep, mares, and other animals. Old women, when captured, were made slaves.
  • Birds were boiling in their pots, also geese mixed with bits of human flesh, while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits, ready for roasting. Upon searching another house the Spaniards found arm and leg bones, which the cannibals carefully preserve for pointing their arrows; for they have no iron. All other bones, after the flesh is eaten, they throw aside.
  • Most ferocious are those new anthropophagi, who live on human flesh, Caribs or cannibals as they are called.
    • Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, The Third Decade, book 3
  • 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
  • Nay, so great was our famine, that a Salvage we slew and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him, and so did divers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbes; and one amongst the rest did kill his wife, and powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved: now, whether she was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado'd, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.

18th century

edit
  • 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.
  • Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
  • 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, first published in 1797–1801
    • 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

edit
  • 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.
  • You foreigners have salt beef to eat when you sail about; we have no beef, and therefore make use of human flesh.
  • 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.
  • Cannibalism is a luxury, not an ordinary practice; but Buckley mentions a tribe called the Pallidurgbarrans, who eat human flesh whenever they get a chance, and employ human kidney fat, not as a charmed unguent for the increase of their valour, but as a sort of Dundee marmalade, viz., "an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast." These gentlemen are the colour of "light copper, their bodies having tremendously large and protruding bellies." They ate so many natives at last that war was declared, and some inglorious Pelissier drove a few hundred of them into a cave, and setting fire to the surrounding bush, suffocated them with great success.
  • Many's the poor devil I've killed, at one time or another – and the time has been that I've been obliged to feed on some of 'em.
  • The Shanxi poet Wang Xilun ... describ[ed] in an essay how children whose starving parents had abandoned them in ditches were slaughtered and eaten by other famine victims as though they were sheep or pigs.
  • Killing people is as easy as killing pigs. Children cry out for help but no one answers them. They are killed with a knife since meat has become more valuable than human life.
    • Another contemporary author describing the situation during the famine, cited in Edgerton-Tarpley (2008), p. 219.
  • I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke ..., but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old at the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward, and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell. Until the last moment, I could not believe that they were in earnest ... that it was anything save a ruse to get money out of me ... When I went home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory, not that it is ever likely to fade from it. No one here seemed to be in the least astonished at it.
  • A woman [is sold for the price of two goats]. A man [brings the price of three goats], or four if he is plenty large ... If there is as much to eat on a man as on three goats, he brings the price of three goats ... as the point of view of the final purchaser determines the price, and the consumers are cannibals, the price of a man is generally determined by the amount of meat on him.

20th and 21st centuries

edit
 
I can feel the shudder and feeling of horror that came over me as we looked at them, and saw the agonised look of the poor fellow, who seemed dazed with grief, and said they were the hand and foot of his little girl.
  • Mr. Harris has already intimated to you in a letter of his that while he was down at Jikau, ... a horrible case of murder and cannibalism on the part of rubber sentries occurred in this district. It was of a shocking nature, and has greatly distressed us. On Sunday morning, May 15, just after eight o'clock, I had gone across to Mr. Harris's house, ... when two boys rushed breathlessly in, and said that some sentries had killed a number of people, and that two men had gone by to tell the rubber white men, and that they also had some hands to show him, in case he did not believe them ... Shortly afterwards the two men came along the path, and we heard the boys calling to them to come and show us; but they seemed afraid, and so we went out quickly and overtook them, and asked them where the hands were. Thereupon one of them opened a parcel of leaves, and showed us the hand and foot of a small child, who could not have been more than five years old. They were fresh and clean cut. It was an awful sight, and even now, as I write, I can feel the shudder and feeling of horror that came over me as we looked at them, and saw the agonised look of the poor fellow, who seemed dazed with grief, and said they were the hand and foot of his little girl. I can never forget the sight of that horror-stricken father. We asked them to come into the house and tell us about the affair, which they did, and the following is the story they told us—
    'The father of the little girl said his name was Nsala, and he was a native of Wala, which is a section of the Nsongo District ... On the previous day, although it was three days before they were due to take in the rubber, fifteen sentries came from Lifinda, all except two being armed with Albini rifles, and they were accompanied by followers. They began making prisoners and shooting, and killed Bongingangoa, his wife; Boali, his little daughter of about five years of age; and Esanga, a boy of about ten years. These they at once cut up, and afterwards cooked in pots, putting in salt which they had brought with them, and then ate them.'
  • Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: 'In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children.' ... People ate their own relatives – often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet ... Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh.
  • It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.
  • '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.
  • A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had.
  • When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.
    • Géza Róheim, Children of the Desert: The Western Tribes of Central Australia, vol. I (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 71
  • My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire.
  • 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
  • A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.
  • A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. [Slurps] You fly back to school now, little Starling.
  • When people do not respect our [traditions], they become enemies, and we don't consider our enemies to be human any more. They become animals in our eyes. And the Dayaks eat animals.
edit