Every Halloween season, we are inundated with images of monsters and evil beings, the stories about whom we can trace back to history and folklore. In fact, this is something I have endeavored to do during several October episodes of the podcast, such as my series on vampires, a monster that appears to have arisen from the conjunction of sleep paralysis nightmares experienced by mourners and a lack of understanding of the decomposition process by those who dug up corpses, thinking they had been rising from the grave to trouble people at night. I explored the historical basis of folklore surrounding the werewolf as well, which appears to be a monster that took form from language used about violent criminals and accusations of sorcery. Closely connected to the myth of werewolves was the myth of witchcraft, which I explored and demonstrated to be rooted in moral panic and scapegoating, typically caused by a tragic and lethal combination of social, political, and economic factors. And we see a parallel between the phantom threat of witchcraft and the specter of devil worship generally, which throughout history has been a baseless accusation leveled by the religious against those outside their communities, against personal enemies, or against the Other. The concept of the Other is important to understand here in an anthropological sense. In this field, Otherness is defined as the state of being excluded by a dominant group or culture. Othering is the act by a dominant group, of excluding another group and stigmatizing them because of differences, whether real or imagined. Witchcraft and devil worship were common forms of Othering, perpetrated often against outsider women who may not have conformed to local norms, and in the case of the European witch persecutions of the early modern period, specifically the witch trials of the Inquisition, against entire Christian communities whose doctrines were deemed unorthodox. One accusation commonly made against the Other, which sprang entirely from the fevered imaginations of the accusers, was that of cannibalism. The devil worshipper, it was thought, sacrificed and consumed people, the witch was said to eat babies. We see this too claimed as the habit of all the monsters we fear. The werewolves, who were so closely related to witches in their folklore, were said to be man-eaters. And even the legend of vampires or revenants, who in some cases too were thought to have been witches or cursed by witches, depicts an inhuman creature that feasts on the living, drinking their blood and even devouring their flesh. We might conclude that at the heart of all our monster stories is the notion of cannibalism, or anthropophagy. This does not, however, suggest any basis in reality of these legends, for among modern scholars, the idea of cannibalism has come to be viewed more and more as a myth, a baseless imputation, like that of sorcery, frequently leveled against the Other but perhaps reflective more of the fantasies and fears of the accuser.

Claims about monsters being man-eaters did not appear when we started calling people witches, werewolves, and revenants. No, there is a long history in mythology of man-eating monsters. Of course, we might presume that this can be traced back into the distant, benighted past, when humanity struggled for survival against predators that would literally devour them. Indeed, even in medieval and Early Modern Europe, the threat of man-eating wolves was very real and clearly influenced our notions about monsters, like the wolf man. We see this also in folklore about ogres, the man-eating monsters of many a legend that were depicted as hairy beasts, not unlike a werewolf themselves. Ogres were also enormous, which connects them to perhaps the earliest of mythical man-eating beasts, the giants of ancient Greek mythology. In the works of Homer, we see the idea of a man-eating, humanoid monster going far back into antiquity. Aside from the less than human looking sea monsters that might devour sailors, like Scylla, there was the Cyclops who ate men, and the Laestrygonians, a whole tribe of giants that were said to be man-eaters. In a poem attributed to mythological bard Orpheus, he speaks more generally of a time when all men were cannibals, “When men devour’d each other like the beasts, / Gorging on human flesh,” and thus the myth of a primitive human people who customarily dined on the flesh of other human beings seems to have been born. And even before the common era, it was already being used to Other those in distant lands, with Herodotus, The Father of History and perpetuator of myth, speaking of distant and mysterious peoples like the Scythians north and east of Greece, and of the mystery lands beyond, about which he must only have heard rumors and folktales. “Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance,” he explained confidently, “and beyond the desert the Andropophagi dwell.” The very word means “man-eaters,” just as the more modern version, “anthropophagi” means “human-eaters,” but in case it wasn’t clear, Herodotus clarifies: “The Andropophagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads, …they speak a peculiar language; and of these nations, are the only people that eat human flesh.” Here we see the cannibalism of a certain foreign tribe connected with their Otherness, the peculiarity of their customs and strangeness of their language, and their supposed savagery. This notion of faraway and savage peoples engaging in cannibalism would develop through the Middle Ages and come of age during the Age of Exploration, when Europeans traveled the world and came into contact with foreign tribes that they assumed practiced cannibalism. The investigations of explorers and conquistadors convinced the world that, indeed, these distant people were savages and did practice cannibalism as a habit of everyday life. Even modern ethnographers and anthropologists, having never questioned it, subscribed to this idea. It was not until the 1970s that a skeptical view of this belief began to gain currency in the field.

A depiction of Odysseus’s ships being attacked by the giant cannibals, the Laestrygonians.

Skepticism of the very existence of customary cannibalism among any group of people simmered for some time in the academic community. It began rather logically. Specifically, as belief in cannibalism had grown through the centuries, many had come to believe in what is called gastronomic cannibalism, that is the eating of human flesh for culinary reasons, as a preferred dish, rather than for any other cultural or religious reason. To go along with this understanding of cannibalism was the notion that, if some people just loved eating other people for the taste of it, then they would not limit themselves to eating the dish only when they managed to vanquish some enemy or encounter some outlander; rather, they would seek their favored meat within their own community, which is called endocannibalism. It made little sense that any people would thus diminish their own numbers by killing those within their own community just to sate some hunger for human flesh, especially when other sources of food existed,. Therefore, gastronomic endocannibalism appeared to be unlikely, except in cases of mortuary cannibalism, or eating of the dead. But this then meant that cannibalism could not have been a customary, everyday practice, as had long been thought, and tales of tribal kitchens being always full of body parts, of their frequent “cannibal feasts,” seemed less and less believable based on the simple fact that, logically, opportunities for cannibalism must have been rare, limited only to sacrificial rituals or warfare. Then in 1979, cultural anthropologist William Arens dropped the bombshell book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, which actually examined the evidence for the existence of such practices and found it wanting. Specifically, he demonstrated that in almost every encounter thought to provide proof of cannibal practices, there had been no direct witnessing of cannibalism, there had been language barriers to clear communication, and there had been preconceptions on the part of European colonizers that influenced their reports of cannibalistic practices. Arens blames not just colonialism but also anthropologists for perpetuating the myth, and this, of course, led to backlash, with many a colleague and peer attacking his conclusions, comparing him to a flat-earther because there was simply, in their estimation, too much evidence of cannibalism to deny it. However, Arens’s view of cannibalism as little more than a racist presumption of savagery that has led to centuries of slander and defamation, especially of Pacific Islanders, has only gained credence during the last 50 years. Though there are still academics who treat it as a kind of denialism, they often do so by misrepresenting Arens and those who picked up his torch. For example, those who view cannibalism as a myth perpetuated by European explorers do not claim that the act of cannibalism has never taken place. There is no sense in denying the act of cannibalism among murderers and the mentally ill, for example. Pathological cannibalism, then, is conceded as real. Nor is there any denial of the fact that individuals, or even entire peoples, may resort to cannibalism, despite taboos, when facing starvation. This too is conceded. Even ritual cannibalism is conceded by some of these academics, as human sacrifice is known to have been practiced in some cultures and it is not impossible that some such rituals contained the symbolic consumption of small portions of the sacrificial victim. What is denied, and what Arens and other academics, like Gananath Obeyesekere, a principal source for this episode, have convincingly proven, is that widespread customary cannibalism, as a typical practice among native islanders, was wildly exaggerated and largely inaccurate.

Before the Age of Exploration, which brought with it stories of distant people who had actually been encountered, there were medieval travel narratives and legends of faraway places that fired the imaginations of explorers. Before trans-oceanic contact, tales of exploration focused on the far east, and many were absolute fiction. In the Alexander Romance, a fictional account of Alexander the Great’s exploits, the biblical names Gog and Magog are reinvented as kings of so-called “Unclean Nations” deep within Asia who practice cannibalism—essentially the equivalent of the faraway Andropophagi imagined by Herodotus. Hundreds of years later, the Letter of Prester John appeared, a fictional description of a Christian kingdom in the far-off and fantastical East about which you can hear a great deal more in my episode on the topic. In this letter and its later embellishments, we find mention again of the cannibalistic Gog and Magog nations, as well as strange monstrous people like unto the man-eating myths of preceding mythology, including one-eyed creatures like the cyclops but also beings with big floppy ears, hopalong folk with one giant foot, beings with their faces in their chests and no heads, and dog-headed people—oddities who had centuries before been recorded in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, but whom, of course, no one had ever actually encountered. Several of these monsters would be further described in other fictions masquerading as genuine travel narratives, such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which described an Englishman encountering them during his journey across India and China, depicting dog-headed men specifically as cannibals. During these years another travel narrative often considered more genuine appeared, that of Marco Polo, which was a clear influence on Mandeville’s Travels, and which omitted any such monstrous creatures but still described cannibalistic customs in India, China, and Japan. Lacking strong evidence for the cannibalism Marco Polo claimed to have observed, and considering other major omissions from his narratives, some have come to suspect that Marco Polo’s entire narrative might be pieced together from hearsay rather than any actual travels he undertook, but that is a topic for another episode. For now, what’s germane is that, by the time of Christopher Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic, the myths and legends of faraway places being peopled by monsters and cannibals were so ingrained into the European imagination that Columbus and his men fully expected to encounter them.

A depiction of the monstrous races thought to inhabit distant places, from *The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville*

Columbus owned a copy of Mandeville’s Travels and seems to have believed he would find such creatures as were described in it when he crossed the Ocean Sea. In his journals, he acknowledges that this was not the case, stating, “I have not found any monstrous men in these islands, as many had thought.” Nevertheless, the people he did find there he tended to view as still being monstrous and savage in their customs. He expected to find dog-headed cannibals, and finding instead people with normal heads, he still did not think that perhaps then they were not eaters of men. Indeed, we owe the English word “cannibal” to Columbus, who popularized it as a synonym for the awkward anthropophagus, or man-eater. The word derived from the name of the native tribe Carib. Columbus encountered first the Arawak people, with whom he attempted to communicate, which meant only miming through gesture. I will speak more on the problem of miscommunication through gesture later. What’s important now is that he returned claiming that to the south of these Arawak there dwelled monstrous people with dog noses and only one eye, called Caribales, who were known to eat human flesh. The simple fact that Arawaks seemed to have confirmed the existence of cyclopean dog-headed monsters reveals that there was obvious miscommunication, that Columbus was trying to ask about the monsters he’d expected to find, and that the Arawak, only vaguely understanding, had indicated that he must mean the Carib, their enemies, whom they viewed as warlike. Since Columbus’s reports resulted in a widespread identification of the Carib people with cannibalism, even skeptics sometimes suggest that the Arawak themselves may have suspected the Carib of man-eating, or that the Carib purposely tried to scare their enemies by encouraging the thought that they might devour them, but the simple fact is that we do not know whether the Arawak held this belief about their enemies prior to European contact, when through crude gestures, white men came around asking where the evil man-eating people might be. According to Columbus, through these uncertain communications they learned not only that the Carib people were one-eyed and dog-faced (which was not true), and not only that they ate the flesh of people, but also that they did so as a matter of course, not in a religious context but simply as regular meal preparation. And where did they get their meat? Supposedly they raised children like livestock, fattening them for the slaughter. Here we see the myth of cannibalism in its final and lasting form—the notion that an uncivilized culture just decided they love eating people and built their whole food cycle on it. It is not clear whether the Arawak were saying the Carib ate their own children or the children of their enemies, and this clarification was unnecessary because the purpose of the story, if indeed it was actually conveyed to the Spanish in the way that they understood it, was likely only to demonize the other tribe. Columbus actually did show some skepticism, acknowledging that the Arawak may have been slandering their enemies or telling the explorers what they wanted to hear, but he nevertheless happily spread the stories in Europe, and when the first accounts of his voyage were published, they were illustrated with pictures of those same old man-eating monsters Pliny had long ago described.

Today, it is recognized that the Carib that Columbus claimed were cannibal monsters. who actually called themselves the Kalinago, never practiced cannibalism in the way described, fattening children for slaughter for their own everyday nutrition. Even so, some historians will still insist that they did practice cannibalism of a ritualistic kind during warfare, a ceremonial consumption of small portions of their enemies. First, it must be recognized that this is far different from the kind of gastronomic cannibalism first attributed to them, and second, this too relies on only secondhand hearsay evidence; no skeletal evidence of cannibalism among the Kalinago has ever been produced. During Columbus’s second voyage, a captain under his command sailed into a certain island harbor, scaring the natives away, and he reported that, inside one of their dwellings, he found “four or five bones of the arms and legs of men.” This was accepted as evidence of cannibalism among the Kalinago for a long time, even though the captain actually didn’t know what tribe’s village he had invaded, saying only, “we suspected that the islands were those of the Caribe, which are inhabited by people who eat human flesh.” In later years, French missionaries would make direct contact with the Kalinago and report that they were not cannibals, and that they kept the bones of their ancestors in their homes in accordance with their beliefs that ancestral spirits acted as guardians. These reports did little to halt the already widespread view of the Carib cannibal. After this initial claim that some among the native peoples of the New World practiced cannibalism, the myth appears to have spread based purely on prejudice, that is, the pre-judgment that cannibals would be found there, and the repetition of claims that had been previously made. For example, during the next century, a popular narrative was published by a soldier who claimed to have lived in native captivity in colonial Brazil, describing the cannibalistic practices of the Tupinamba natives there. Afterward, some French explorers and writers also published works that describe the same tribe’s cannibalism, and these works were drawn on by one of the most influential works on the topic, an essay called “On Cannibalism” by Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. As scholars since have revealed, however, there is no independent evidence of that soldier’s captivity among the Tupinamba, his narrative appears not to have been written by him, its contents seem to have been plagiarized from preceding accounts of cannibalism elsewhere, and the works of the French explorers who followed appear to have cribbed liberally from his narrative in describing their own encounters with the Tupinamba. The simple fact behind all of this rehashing of claims and narratives is that lurid accounts of cannibalism sold well, so there was always the temptation for travelers to make up such experiences in order to reap financial rewards. Indeed, one of those French writers who has since been shown to be plagiarizing a plagiarism, Jean de Léry, in his 1578 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America, acknowledges this tendency to deceive, referring to “the fabulous tales found in the books of certain people who, trusting to hearsay, have written things that are completely false,” and conceding “that since … travelers to distant lands cannot be contradicted, they give themselves license to lie.” Nevertheless, he insists that his narrative is true, though he also is sure to remark that “if there are some who are unwilling to give credence to … this history, let them be advised, whoever they may be, that I have no intention of taking them to see those places.” So what we find, again and again in the stories of cannibalism in the New World published by supposed travelers during the Age of Exploration, is that they borrow liberally from each other, cannibalizing each other’s work, if you will, and without any concrete evidence for their recycled claims, each is essentially just saying, “Trust me, bro.”

A late 16th century depiction of cannibalism in Brazil.

Another major vector for the spread of claims about cannibalism comes from encounters with Pacific Islanders, especially among the sailors of Captain James Cook’s expeditions. As his were scientific expeditions on behalf of the Royal Society, who tasked him with finding the mythical southern continent of Terra Australis, he and his officers documented their journey extensively and conducted what then passed for ethnographic studies when encountering native islanders, such that it would seem their records are reliable and that, when they recorded their encounters with cannibals, their claims were credible. The problem was, these men of science, voyaging almost 300 years after the myth of cannibalism had taken root in Europe and become standard belief, arrived at every island expecting to find cannibals, and this is evidenced in their journals and reports, which describe their efforts to communicate with islanders and, invariably, to determine whether each new group of islanders were cannibals. To be entirely fair to Cook, they may have had some reason for expecting to encounter cannibals, as prior to his return to the area in his second voyage, a French expedition preceded them, also searching for Terra Australis, and also collecting ethnographic information around New Zealand and Tasmania, and its captain, and others sailors, had been massacred by a Maori tribe’s attack on their camp. Months later, after French reprisals on the tribe, a grisly discovery was made at one Maori settlement: bones near a fire and what appeared to be a Frenchman’s cooked head on a spike. Word spread quickly then that the Maori were barbarous cannibals, and the next year, some of Cook’s men seemed to witness such evidence of their cannibalism for themselves when a boat they’d sent out at Grass Cove did not return. On investigating, they found the boat and some articles of clothing, and nearby, they found some baskets with cooked meat, which they took to be human flesh because also nearby, they discovered one of their sailors’ heads and two white hands. What must be emphasized here, however, is that in neither of these incidents was actual cannibalism witnessed. At the very least, we only see evidence for the killing of the sailors—and it must be remembered that many Maori viewed the Europeans as strange alien invaders—and at most, it’s proof of the placing of their corpses into fire, which was often described by the Europeans in culinary terms as “roasting” or “cooking.” But just as valid an explanation can be found in the known regional practices of human sacrifice, typically of enemies slain in battle. Captain Cook, who became somewhat obsessed with being invited to one of these “cannibal feasts” he imagined, would eventually be allowed to witness such a sacrifice in Tahiti, years after the Grass Cove incident, and what he described offers a plausible explanation for both previous massacres. With much ceremonial ritual, they prepared the sacrifice’s body, and the skulls that surrounded the ceremonial site indicated its head would be removed, but Cook saw them bury the body, and the closest to cannibalism they came was when the victim’s eyeball was removed and ceremoniously shown to the tribal chieftain, who merely nodded his approval. Then a dog, which were commonly eaten by Maori, was butchered and cooked on the fire, and it was the dog meat that was consumed in the ritual. Cook imagined that in the distant past they may have consumed the sacrificial victim and that by his time, the dog meat served as a surrogate, but this was speculation. Wartime human sacrifice rituals likely varied across Polynesia, but the fact is that the dismembered heads and hands found after both of the previous massacres very well could have been evidence of a known ritual that did not involve the consumption of human flesh at all, and the baskets of cooked meat at Grass Cove may not have even been human flesh. Indeed, the sailors who reported discovering it even said that they “supos’d it was Dog’s flesh,” and they admitted to skepticism, saying they, “still doubted their being Cannibals.”

While some aboard Cook’s scientific expedition may have been skeptics about native cannibalism, that cannot be said of sailors generally in that era. Cannibalism had essentially become a part of shipboard life for many British sailors. Numerous were the incidents, famous and not, of shipwrecked or starving sailors resorting to cannibalism for survival, such that, when they returned to England, they often stood trial for their actions and were invariably acquitted, to the point that many a sailor came to recognize the practice as acceptable in such circumstances. Indeed, the phenomenon of shipboard cannibalism was so common that sailors returning from long voyages often found themselves put in a position of confirming or denying whether it had occurred. It became a favorite topic of ballads and broadsheets, and it was here, in the context of British shipboard cannibalism, that the myth of human flesh tasting delicious was spread among sailors. Add to this the preoccupation with finding evidence of cannibalism among the more scientifically minded on Cook’s voyage, who at every stop hoped to find bones or skulls that would provide evidence of the Polynesian cannibalism they had heard so much about, and we begin to get a sense of how strange encounters with them must have seemed to Pacific islanders: ragged white men disembarking from their ships, half starved and making signs and gestures about cannibalism, such as biting their own arms and pointing at the natives. On more than one occasion, it appears very clear that this inquiry through gesture was mistaken as the British telling the natives that they themselves desired to eat human flesh. At one point, Captain Cook and his men attempted an experiment with a couple of Maori who had come aboard their ship. Having discovered a decapitated human head, they cooked it themselves and cut off a morsel of its flesh, offering it to the Maori, urging them to eat it through gesture. These Maori obliged, and they made a big show of how delicious it was. This grotesque “experiment,” which he actually conducted twice, seems to have finally convinced Cook that all Maori were indeed cannibals, even though, when we read accounts of the incident, it sounds an awful lot like the Maori visitors, surrounded by strange and formidable men that they believed to be man-eaters who wanted them to be man-eaters as well, simply went along with what they thought was expected of them, pretending to relish the taste just to appease them and so as not to offend them. Indeed, on many occasions, even when the islanders appeared to understand that the British were inquiring about their own native customs, they still understood it as meaning that the British themselves practiced cannibalism. Take the case of Captain Cook’s death, during his third voyage. At Hawaii in 1779, his men watched through a spyglass as he was clubbed and carried away. His men made demands that they he be returned or that they would make war on the native Hawaiians. Two terrified priests then came to Cook’s lieutenant and showed him a piece of cooked meat, indicating that it was all that remained of the captain. Through carefully questioning, the Hawaiian priests confirmed that Cook was indeed dead, that the priests had cut his flesh off, and that they had burned it in a fire. Cook’s lieutenant then asked if they had eaten the flesh, for that was the only purpose he could think of for removing flesh and cooking it, but according to him, “They immediately shewed as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us?” What the priests had actually performed on Cook’s corpse were the funerary rites that their culture typically reserved only for their most respected elders and leaders. While Cook’s men thought they had savagely dined on their captain, they had actually accorded him their highest honors.

A depiction of Captain Cook’s witnessing of a human sacrifice ritual.

These are the kinds of stories we find as we examine the “evidence” of cannibalism more and more closely, as William Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere have done. We find that, among indigenous peoples portrayed as cannibals by colonizers, there was as much of a taboo on eating human flesh as there is in any Western culture—and perhaps even stronger taboos. Take the example of the Aztec people during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlán. Though they were suspected of being cannibals by the Spaniards, to the point that they became notorious for it and are even remembered as cannibals in 20th century scholarship, when they were starving to death in their besieged city, they never resorted to cannibalism and instead surrendered to the Spanish genocide. Elsewhere in the Americas, more recent discoveries of massive amounts of bones with scrape marks on them have led archaeologists to assert that cannibalism was a regular part of Pueblo Native American culture, but others have cautioned that there may be different explanations, such as ritual “witch curing” practices. Certainly in examining the Polynesian human sacrifice and funerary rituals, which also involved cutting the flesh from bones but as far as we can prove did not involve the consumption of that flesh, we find further alternative explanations that could account for these archaeological findings. And considering all the misunderstandings and false accusations of cannibalism that we know have occurred throughout history, we really must err on the side of caution. Reports from the Roman empire that inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland were savage cannibals persisted through the 19th century and into the 20th, but that doesn’t make them true. And we all recognize that the Blood Libel, claiming Jews were kidnapping and consuming Christian Children, was nothing but baseless conspiracism that fueled moral panic, much like the claims of cultists eating children in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Because of this history of getting it wrong, we must require only the most incontrovertible evidence to conclude that any peoples ever engaged in cannibalism. It must be acknowledged, though, that the skeptical view of cannibalism spearheaded by Arens has not yet become the scholarly consensus. Nevertheless, it has led to a reevaluation of the evidence, and to a more nuanced and convincing understanding of the practice as being more rare, mostly small scale, in a ritual or ceremonial context, engaged in largely symbolically when and if it did occur. So despite the objections of anthropologists to the scope of some skeptics’ denial of cannibalism, they have nevertheless mostly relegated the old idea of institutional, commonplace, gastronomic cannibalism among the Other to the realm of mythology, acknowledging that such claims were mostly the propaganda of colonizers who used it to justify their “pacification” (aka conquest) of “savages” (aka the indigenous), as well as the cultural erasure that they termed “civilizing.”

Until next time, remember, when you see a cartoon native putting your favorite Looney Tunes character in a cauldron, when you see Cap’n Jack Sparrow tied to a spit over open flames by Caribbean islanders, as you might well suspect, that kind of scenario may be entirely fiction and more than a little racist.

Anthropophagi: The Myth of Cannibalism

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