When Christopher Columbus first landed on the Bahamas, he was apparently shocked to discover that the native Carib Indians ate all their male prisoners of war. The admiral himself ventured no farther than into one of the Carib houses, where he saw a number of skulls hung from the ceiling, and some baskets full of what he presumed to be men's bones. He called them caribales, which came to be pronounced canibales, thus giving their name both to the Caribbean Sea and to the custom of eating human flesh.
In 1865 a burglar in East Prussia killed a maidservant and cut flesh from her body in order to make a candle for use in later acts of theft. After being caught in another burglary, he confessed that he ate a part of the corpse of his first victim "in order to appease his conscience".
One twenty-year-old survivor [of the Andes plane crash] wrote: "One thing which will seem incredible to you - it seems unbelievable to me - is that today we started to cut up the dead in order to eat them. There is nothing else to do. I prayed to God from the bottom of my heart that the day would never come, but it has and we have to face it with courage and faith".
Cannibalism (or anthropophagy), defined as "the eating of human flesh by human beings" has often been called the last taboo. The very word "cannibalism" conjures up images of savages stewing missionaries in pots or shipwrecked sailors doomed to devour the bodies of their dead mates. However, the true picture is not that extreme - or that simple.
In Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival, psychologist Hans Askenasy has put together the first comprehensive history of a subject combining violence, horror and exotic customs. In Part One of his study, Dr. Askenasy gives a historical and geographic overview of humankind's practice of and attitudes toward cannibalism. Here he cites several examples of cultural anthropophagy - from Homo erectus, to the Aztecs, to possible cannibalistic practices among certain primitive tribes of New Guinea, East Africa and Brazil - and also points to documented examples of simian cannibalism among East African chimpanzees.
Part Two discusses motivational factors for cannibalism, including famines (natural and man-made), survival in extreme situations, magic, ritual and madness. Among the people and events covered are the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis; the wreckage of the frigate Medusa; the Donner Party; the notorious nineteenth-century "Colorado Man-Eater", Alfred Packer; the Andes plane crash of 1972; Elizabeth Báthory (b. 1560), the "Vampire Lady of the Carpathians"; and Georg Haarmann, who ground up his victims and sold them as potted meat.
In Part Three, "Cannibalism in Culture and Society", Askenasy addresses our continuing fascination with cannibals, man-eating witches, werewolves and vampires in literature, myth and the media, ranging from Francis Ford Coppola's film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles to the bizarre, blood-curdling events surrounding the cases of Issei Sagawa, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Russian schoolteacher-turned-torturer, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. Askenasy suggests that cannibalism's allure may be partly atavistic; that is, it may be a primitive instinct reaching back to our earliest ancestors, thus making it of primal emotional and intellectual interest. Moreover, in a society increasingly preoccupied with violence and lurid exposés of celebrities' private lives, cannibalism may indeed be one of the last taboos left to explore.
Written in a lucid, accessible style, Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival is an absorbing examination of an aspect of human behavior that has been too often shrouded in mystery.
Hans Askenasy, Ph.D. (Laguna Beach, California), is a forensic clinical psychologist. He has authored many articles and books, including Are We All Nazis? and the critically acclaimed Hitler's Secrets.