I
It will be probably a shock to many people to be told that the cannibalistic instinct still is part of our unconscious. It appears in that pathological state known as lycanthropy where the patient often has a craving for human flesh. It is occasionally revived in cases of starvation and shipwreck, when men are driven to eat human flesh. There should be nothing strange about this, for we are descended from people who were cannibals. And we know that men of the old stone age in France were cannibals and it was practised in Greece in earliest times. It has not yet been exterminated in parts of Africa and Polynesia.
Cannibalism figured considerably in ancient literature. It is not my purpose to go into the question of its origin, or the ceremonials connected with it. There are good articles on the subject in the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics by J. A. MacCullouch and in the Encyclopædia Britannica by Northcote W. Thomas. I shall, however, touch on instances where men ate human flesh at sacrifices.
Cannibalism to-day has chiefly a historic and a literary interest. The subject is worth taking up because of the attention paid to it in literature. We have tales about it to-day. Conrad has given us in his Falk a story of cannibalism. Falk was the survivor on a wrecked ship and was driven by hunger to feast on the bodies of sailors, thus saving his life. The memory of the event is of course horrible to him. The young lady he loves marries him despite his experience.
One of Jack London's stories of cannibalism is "The Whale Tooth" in his South Sea Tales. It tells how a missionary who went out to convert some Fiji cannibals was betrayed by Ra Vatu, a heathen about to embrace Christianity. The savage desired the missionary's boots to present to a chief. In spite of his acceptance of the religion of Christ he was willing to have his benefactor made a victim of cannibalism. In the same story London refers to a chief who ate eight hundred and seventy-two bodies.
Cannibalism is to us but a curiosity that we once practised. We find no injunction against cannibalism, or eating one's children, among the crimes on the statute books. It is no crime under the Common Law. A man who would commit cannibalism among us would be sent to an insane institution. There are no laws against a thing when no one has the least inclination to do it. Society recognises that the instinct for cannibalism is dead, but it is nevertheless in our unconscious. Our psyche never forgets the episodes in the lives of our ancestors.
The only places where there are laws against cannibalism are in savage countries where there is a disposition to practise it; and these laws are made by colonists.
It is prevalent to-day in Africa. John H. Weeks in Among Congo Cannibals (1913) tells us he saw savages carrying dismembered parts of human bodies for a feast and that he was offered some cooked human food. He also speaks of a white man who was a dealer in human flesh to a tribe, an example of degradation that finds a parallel in Kurtz's conduct in Conrad's story The Heart of Darkness. Mr. Herbert Ward in his A Voice from Congo (1910) describes how some human victims were hacked to pieces, alive, for feasts; he witnessed organised traffic in human flesh and saw several cannibal feasts.