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.
II
Let us mark the part played by cannibalism in ancient Greek literature. We will see that the cannibalistic instinct was part of the psychic life of the earliest Greeks. There was a reaction to it as there was to incest of the son with the mother as shown in Sophocles's Œdipus. Enforced cannibalism, where a man was made to eat his own children unknowingly, is the revenge motive of the famous Greek play—Agamemnon; this play depicts the reaction to cannibalism.
In the Atreus legend which Æschylus used in Agamemnon, Thyestes eats the flesh of his children, offered up to him by his brother Atreus, in revenge for having seduced Atreus's wife. In expiation of Atreus's crime his future descendants suffer. The unfortunate Thyestes had a son, Ægisthus, as the offspring of the connection with Atreus's wife—(Pelopia, Thyestes's own daughter, by the way). Atreus and his son Agamemnon were later killed by Ægisthus, who had besides seduced Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, avenges the murder by killing his mother and her paramour. Orestes is shown as expiating his matricide in the Oresteia trilogy of which Agamemnon is the first play.
In Æschylus's Agamemnon, we have the expiation of the crime of Atreus for enforcing cannibalism on his brother. There are several passages dealing with the crime. Ægisthus describes in detail how his father Thyestes ate the flesh of his own children and how he vomited when he was told what he had done. When Cassandra, who returns with Agamemnon, in her insane ravings is telling of the punishment to befall Clytemnestra she has a vision of the old feast of the children. The Chorus also tells about the story.
All this shows the horror which was inspired by a deed, the eating of one's children, and this must mean that way back in antiquity this act was practised and that the Greeks were now describing the act as revolting.
There are several other stories of enforced cannibalism in ancient literature with revenge as the motive. Herodotus tells us how the King of the Medes punished Harpagus for not killing Cyrus by making Harpagus dine on the flesh of his own son. This was in the sixth century B. C. Tereus, King of the Thracians, was served up his son by the latter's own mother, because Tereus dishonoured his sister-in-law, Philomela, and deprived her of her tongue. In one of Grimm's fairy tales, The Juniper Tree, we have the story of a man who is given the flesh of his own child by his wife, the child's step-mother.