Cannibalism, or ANTHROPOPHAGY, the act of eating human flesh as food, a practice widely spread at the present moment among many of the lower races, but which has not infrequently held its place even among peoples at a comparatively high level of culture. There is perhaps no quarter of the globe which has been free from what appears to our eyes a practice essentially so degrading to human nature, but one hardly so repellent to minds that hold no very exalted notions of the inherent superiority of the human animal. The emotional and religious attributes of man that have become current in civilisation have created the widespread horror that prevails against such disrespect to the temple of the soul; and the elemental idea of the spirit-life's survival in disembodied form, but with all its old or even added power, has perpetuated the idea of its being an imperative necessity to conciliate the good-will of such powerful forces by reverencing such symbols of them as are accessible. Exalted ideas of the value and dignity of the human soul must needs be accompanied by a corresponding increase in the respect due to the sensible envelope from which it cannot be separated without disruption; and thus the fleshly body would simultaneously gain the benefit of the reverence that was recognised as due to the sentient mind and animating soul. Such we might expect to be the uniform evolution of the reverence paid to the body as an indissoluble part of the complex nature of the living man; but when we turn to the actual ascertained facts, we find that the movement has been by no means so normal throughout as our theory would seem to require. In fact, other and novel considerations have come in to complicate the problem, and the result as it actually presents itself before our eyes is so puzzling and uncertain that we are not yet able to lay down sound foundations for an absolute philosophy of cannibalism.
According to our theory, primitive man would eat human flesh from mere famine or necessity—as has often been done in extreme cases even in the higher races under the pressure of the same forces—but would leave off the practice as he climbed successively to higher steps in culture. But this is by no means always the case, and it is enough to name the ancient Mexicans as a people of exceptionally high native culture who were yet excessively addicted to cannibalism. And even at the present day the Monbuttus, Zandehs, Fans, and other tribes in the large central zone of anthropophagy that crosses Africa along the equator from east to west, who habitually practice cannibalism in its most repulsive forms, even to the length of buying and selling human flesh for ordinary diet, include some of the most advanced and advancing of negro races. Again, the New Guineans are fine men physically and intellectually, and the same is true of the Battas of Sumatra, and still more of the Maoris of New Zealand, who were cannibals but half a century since. Nowhere was the practice more widespread than in Polynesia, especially in the Fiji, New Hebrides, and New Caledonian groups; but here it has been almost completely eradicated by the efforts of the mission- aries and the spread of European ideas. The absence of wild or domestic animals in the Polynesian islands may account to some extent for the wide prevalence of cannibalism, if it be true that the primitive reason for the practice is sheer hunger, or at least the desire to eat flesh. The habit, once contracted, would naturally enough become persistent and be indulged in afterwards for its own sake, for much of the evidence goes to show that the relish for human flesh once acquired tends to grow into a confirmed appetite. Upon cannibalism from necessity or mere gluttony follows easily enough cannibalism from warlike fury, as was very common with the North American Indians, among whom eating the flesh and drinking the blood of an enemy meant something more than metaphor. Cannibalism from a kind of morbid filial affection, as customary among the Battas, is a moral refinement of the same feeling. This has not been uncommon in the social history of mankind elsewhere—the locus classicus of this particular form of anthropophagy is the description in Herodotus (iv. 26) of the funeral feasts of the Issedones of Central Asia. The pious desire to preserve the spirits of dead friends from passing into the power of those who might wreak vengeance upon them may even have suggested the idea of giving the dead relative the safety of a friendly grave in the stomachs of his living relatives. Aged relations and newborn children, as well as friends or children who had died by mischance or mere accident, have been eaten by many primitive peoples, notably in Australia—a practice intelligible enough on the principle that 'the life is not allowed to go out of the family.' Indeed, ideas akin to the philosophy that underlies this notion seem to mark an almost universal elementary stage in cannibalism, originating, no doubt, in the primitive idea that any property characterising an aggregate inheres in all parts of it, and that the eater of anything animate became endowed with the qualities of the thing eaten—thus a savage would desire to eat the flesh of a valiant enemy in order that his courage might pass into himself. A belief in the transmigration of spirits of course underlies this notion, but we know that this is almost universally a commonplace of primitive animism. This magical or religious cannibalism, as a kind of eucharistic rite, marks the highest development of the practice, and we find it not only among the Maoris and Australians and North American Indians, but also maintained with what would otherwise be a completely unintelligible persistence in the semi-civilisation of the Aztecs. The notion of presenting food to the gods is almost universal among savage peoples, and this would naturally be human flesh among a people to whom cannibalism was customary. Of this, again, the best evidence is that from Mexico, but Mr Lang has proved conclusively that human sacrifices with no other origin than cannibalism survived even in cultured Greece. At least where the victim offered was a captive enemy or stranger, the human sacrifice may be safely regarded as a survival of cannibalism, for the disinclination to eat one's own kindred is after all a very widespread feeling among primitive men. Just as they do not eat their own totem, so savage men commonly observe the same restriction in preferring not to eat members of their own stock. Indeed, we often find raids made with no other object than to procure supplies of human flesh as food, while some South American tribes actually bred from captive women, in order to provide constant supplies of such flesh as could be eaten.
But the puzzling question of exophagy and endophagy has not yet been at all well worked out, and in the meantime it is impossible to establish any hard and fast generalisations that will account for all the contradictory facts. For example, we find, as has been said above, North Australian tribes who eat their slain friends but not their enemies, while others eat their newborn children, or in some cases only the eldest. In the case of one tribe, the Dieri, as Mr Frazer points out (Totemism, p. 80), a mother eats her own children, and the children their mother; while the father does not eat of his offspring, nor the offspring of their father—an undoubted survival of female kinship, when the father, as a member of a different tribe, had no right to eat the flesh of his own child. Our folklore, European as well as savage, is full of cannibalism. Our children from their cradles are familiar with at least the notion of giants and ogres—mere magnified men—capable of devouring them with delight at any moment, and seem to find nothing at all unnatural in the idea. Montaigne in a well-known essay finds apologies for the practice with characteristically grave whimsicality, and some modern travellers have done their best to mitigate our abhorrence by detailing the due decorum with which it is practised. Dr Robertson Smith (Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, p. 204) tells us that the Arabs practised it at a comparatively recent date, and points out that the prejudices against eating certain animals—prejudices amounting to absolute disgust, and based on the theory that these animals are men in disguise—cannot all have sprung up after cannibalism ceased, and must therefore have been in the first instance prejudices confined to certain stocks which objected to eat animals of one blood with themselves. Our own Celtic ancestors were dainty in their cannibalism, on the excellent authority of St Jerome, and indeed we find traces of the practice in the pre-history of almost every people. Not only were the early Christians supposed capable by their pagan neighbours of eating children—a belief no doubt due to a misunderstanding of the words, often anthropomorphic enough, in which the Eucharist was spoken of by an impressionable and imaginative people; but even so late as 1782 in Hungary it was possible to execute as many as forty-five gypsies on a charge of cannibalism. The origin of the word itself conveys not a little information on the subject. The Spanish canibal is merely a corruption of the native caribal, 'a Carib,' or 'Caribbean,' synonymous with 'brave;' but an early confusion in meaning with the Spanish word canino, 'like a dog,' 'voracious,' undoubtedly implies a reproach to the man-eating habits of these islanders.
A question that remains to be answered is the very interesting and much-contested one, whether in prehistoric times anthropophagy was a general habit of the human race. Those who assert that it was, base their arguments mainly on the fact that the human bones discovered in ancient sepulchral graves are not in their natural position, but are often disposed in the most irregular manner; further, that the bones are occasionally found broken, evidently for the sake of the marrow within them; and besides, that many of them bear marks of the action of fire. The opponents of this theory explain that the confusion of the bones is due to the fact that these sepulchral graves and mounds were common burying-places, usually too contracted in space to permit of the bodies being laid aside permanently separate from each other, and that the bones of the earlier bodies were from necessity pushed aside to make room for the new-comers. Again, they assert that those human bones that contain no marrow are quite as frequently found broken as those that do, while the fractures that are found made from whatever cause, bear no resemblance to the fractures that appear on the bones of other animals presumably cracked for their marrow. The explanation of the charred bones is that it was the custom of early men, for their own protection, to light fires to purify the sepulchral caves of noxious gases. It is perhaps still stronger proof that these caves were too small to serve as places for cannibal feasts, while in all have been found objects that pertain merely to burials. The balance of proof is in favour of the conclusion that cannibalism was not a condition of the life of primitive man, whose dentition and digestive organs of themselves point rather to a diet of fruits; but that originally it was no more than an occasional practice, exactly as in historic times. Its real origin then was actual hunger; the religious and magical side of it was a later development. The whole question of prehistoric anthropophagy was thoroughly discussed in the sessions of the International Congress of Anthropology and Archaeology at Paris in 1867, Brussels in 1872, and Lisbon in 1880.
See an admirable monograph by Richard Andree, Die Anthropophagie (Leip. 1887), and eight papers, containing many valuable supplementary facts, by Henri Gaidoz, in vol. iii. of Mélusine (1886-87); also the articles by E. B. Tylor in vol. iv. (1876) of the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and by Ch. Letourneau and G. de Mortillet in vol. i. (1884) of the Dictionnaire des Sciences Anthropologiques; and the Introduction (pp. xli. and civ.-cxi.) to Lang's edition of Perrault's Popular Tales (Oxford, 1888).