[80] de Groot, op. cit. (vol. iv. book) ii. 377.
[81] Rennie, quoted by Yule, in his translation of Marco Polo, i. 275, n. 7.
[82] Tertullian, Apologeticus, 9 (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, i. 321 sq.).
[83] Strack, Der Blutaberglaube in der Menschheit, p. 27 sqq. Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, § 189 sqq., p. 137 sq. Jahn, ‘Ueber den Zauber mit Menschenblut,’ in Verhandl. d. Berliner Gesellsch. f. Anthrop. 1888, p. 134 sqq. Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, p. 284. Peacock, ‘Executed Criminals and Folk-Medicine,’ in Folk-Lore, vii. 270 sq.
In other instances, again, the belief in the wonderful effects of cannibal practices may have originated in the notion that, if a person or the essential part of him is eaten, he ceases to exist even as a spirit, or at all events loses his power of doing mischief. Among the Indians of British Guiana, when a man is pointed out as the secret murderer of a relative who has died, the avenger will shoot him through the back; and if he happens to fall dead to the ground, his corpse is dragged aside and buried in a shallow grave. The third night the avenger goes to the grave and presses a pointed stick through the corpse; and if on withdrawing the stick he finds blood on the end of it, he tastes the blood in order to ward off any evil effects that might follow from the murder, returning home appeased and apparently at ease. But if it happens that the wounded individual is able to escape, he charges his relatives to bury him after his death in some place where he cannot be found. This is to punish the murderer for his deed, “inasmuch as the belief prevails that if he taste not the blood he must perish by madness.”[84] In Prussia it was a popular superstition that if a murderer cut off, roasted, and ate a piece of his victim’s body, he would never after think of his deed.[85] But by eating a part of the corpse a homicide may also protect himself against the vengeance of the survivors, presumably because he has now absorbed their relative into his own system.[86] The natives of New Britain eat their enemies and fix the leg and arm bones of the victims at the butt end of their spears, believing that this not only gives them the strength of the man whose bones they carry but also makes them invulnerable by his relatives.[87] The Botocudos thought that by devouring their fallen enemies they both protected themselves from the hatred of the dead and at the same time prevented the arrows of the hostile tribe from hitting them.[88] In Greenland the relatives of a murdered person, when highly enraged, will cut to pieces the body of the murderer and devour part of the heart or liver, “thinking thereby to disarm his relatives of all courage to attack them.”[89] In the South of Italy there is a popular belief that a murderer will not be able to escape unless he taste or bedaub himself with his victim’s blood.[90] Sometimes, we are told, cannibalism is even supposed to have a positively injurious effect upon the victim’s relatives, in accordance, as it seems, with the principle of sympathetic magic. Among the Chukchi, in the case of revenge for blood, the slayers eat a little bit of the enemy’s heart or liver, supposing that they in this way cause the hearts of his kinsfolk to sicken.[91]
[84] Bernau, Missionary Labours in British Guiana, p. 57 sq.
[85] von Tettau and Temme, Die Volkssagen Ostpreussens, p. 267.
[86] Cf. Hartland, op. cit. ii. 245 sq.
[87] Powell, Wanderings in a Wild Country, p. 92.
[88] Castelnau, Expédition dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud, iv. 382.